In politics, poetry is an inferior form of justice, but with
this administration, you take it
– poetry or justice – where you can find it. So let us note that
President Bush’s State of the Union address, in which he will lay
out his plans for the future, will be delivered on January 31 –
known also as Backwards Day.
It’s fitting, both for the direction he’s taking the country and
the format of the speech. The State of the Union is stuck in an
oratorical rut, each year hewing to convention with grinding
predictability: Good news will be hyped and bad news ignored; a
common person will be positioned in the gallery near the First Lady
and recognized for dramatic effect; a legislative laundry list will
be presented; and the president who once said
”
the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for
entrepreneur
”
will proclaim the importance of education.
In politics, poetry is an inferior form of justice, but with this administration, you take it – poetry or justice – where you can find it. So let us note that President Bush’s State of the Union address, in which he will lay out his plans for the future, will be delivered on January 31 – known also as Backwards Day.
It’s fitting, both for the direction he’s taking the country and the format of the speech. The State of the Union is stuck in an oratorical rut, each year hewing to convention with grinding predictability: Good news will be hyped and bad news ignored; a common person will be positioned in the gallery near the First Lady and recognized for dramatic effect; a legislative laundry list will be presented; and the president who once said “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur” will proclaim the importance of education.
What you will hear Tuesday will not, in short, have anything to do with the state of the nation, which in the first place is anything but united. It will be a concoction, a ruse, sound bites wrapped in ideology inside an illusion. It will be a Potemkin speech about a Potemkin presidency.
The State of the Union message has evolved over the years, but the changes have for the most part been cosmetic. George Washington spoke the first one, all 833 words of it. For over a century is was delivered as a written report. Then, in 1913, it was delivered again as a speech. It has adapted to radio and TV in turn. But with the possible exception of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech in 1941, the message has rarely been memorable.
It’s not like I expect real poetry, although the late great Sen. Eugene McCarthy would have treated us to that had he become president. But I do long for a new approach, a new paradigm. If I could make it so, á là Captain Picard, here’s what I would like to see: Ditch the teleprompter. Take a few note cards to the podium and deliver the speech extemporaneously. What better way to demonstrate that the president was actually thinking about what he (or she?) was saying.
Clearly, this would be a problem for George Bush. The train wreck of his unscripted speech lays bare the “misunderestimated” mind of a man who once called himself “the master of low expectations.” It would be a performance worthy of Prof. Irwin Corey, the scatter-brained comic who bills himself as the World’s Foremost Authority, and might sound something like this (here follows an amalgam of verbatim GWB quotes):
Iraq has, have got people there that are willing to kill, and they’re hard-nosed killers. It’s in our country’s interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm’s way. Free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat. The vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. We will find these people and we will bring them to justice. We will work with the Iraqis to secure their future of people running for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don’t know if that will be their platform or not. Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. We are fully committed to working with both sides to bring the level of terror down to an acceptable level for both. It’ll take time to restore chaos.
So great is the fear of committing such gaffes (defined by Michael Kinsley as when a politician inadvertently tells the truth), so tightly scripted has the political world become, that a spontaneous approach like this is now unthinkable.
Bush is just the most obvious symbol of our failure as a people to demand a higher level of discourse from elected officials. We treat oratory as a fragile antique, an artifact recovered from a bygone era such as the Lincoln/Douglas debates, instead of as a living reflection of a mind worthy, or not, of public office. Until we demand better we won’t deserve better. Until then, politics will be all handlers and speechwriters and advisers – people for whom I don’t ever recall voting.
