Candor, Anyone?
I write today as I wait, like a condemned man, for tonights State of the Union address. Under this president, this has become an annual ordeal even more unbearable than it was under his predecessor a concatenation of empty applause lines that no speaker could possibly intend sincerely and no listener could possibly take seriously. If you find these things as banal as I do, take a few minutes and read Lincolns 1862 State of the Union message. It was written, not spoken. And its shocking. Lincoln proposed, among other things, an amendment to the Constitution authorizing Congress to pay for the voluntary removal of free colored persons from the United States. Thats startling enough. But what is really startling is that Lincoln wrote the message himself, and he meant it. It wasnt the work of some hack speechwriter who had tested the ideas on focus groups and read poll numbers. Though Lincoln might kill people, he seemed unable to insult their intelligence. President Bush seems unable to do much else. Sincerity comes from the head as well as the heart. It takes a mental effort as well as good will; Lincoln measured his words with care and precision. You can refute them because, even now, they still mean definite things, unlike the automatic flow of platitudes weve come to regard as the norm for politicians. Bush may be remembered as the Great Complicator. The big question is how his successors will ever clean up after him. A human Hurricane Katrina, he has already managed to leave both Medicare and the Middle East more insoluble messes than they already were. He courts incalculable consequences, committing us to spending untold trillions in the future. By us, I mean both the existing American public and its posterity. A couple of years ago, Bush proposed sending a man to Mars. Its a proposal I dont expect him to repeat; in light of recent polls, its all too clear exactly whom growing numbers of Americans would like to send to the Red Planet. Eager hordes would travel all the way from Bangor, Boise, Nome, and San Diego to Cape Canaveral to witness the launching; the most severe critic of big government would feel that here at last was a wise investment of Federal dollars. Finally the space program would have paid off. Bushs abuse of language isnt limited to the little gaffes that make English teachers groan. It goes beyond normal stupidity and lying. He is, in some ways, a guileless child of his time. He just cant connect words and things. He speaks with an unfeigned sense of innocence, I think, when he denies breaking any laws by authorizing domestic spying. This is the normal obtuseness of politics in our age. The Democrats are pretty much the same way. Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy talk in the same mode, then are baffled when people regard them as hypocrites for assuming moral authority. All of them lack any sense of irony about themselves as they display what they think of as their virtues. They are all used to delivering their time-tested applause lines to friendly audiences. Which I think is why, on the rare occasions when a politician speaks sincerely from both heart and head we almost invariably call him refreshing. This suggests how unusual it is for public figures to connect words and things. We expect them to do this discreetly, in private, when it may be necessary, but not into microphones, with the cameras watching. Thats when it startles us. A man as candid as Eugene McCarthy could win respect and even love, but he could never become president. He was much too refreshing. No doubt this is partly because of the nature of mass democracy in the age of mass media. The politician has to speak to too many people at the same time, and he soon becomes wary of having his utterances parsed too closely. Criticism and analysis can be scary. So, if he cant escape the public eye, he soon learns to take refuge in a meaningless ritual language that seems immune to parsing. For him the two most dreadful words in the language are not assassination attempt but unguarded candor. A typical State of the Union address is the natural result of this situation: a long, totally vacuous, feel-good utterance, invulnerable to rational attention. Thats what they pay speechwriters for. A president can no more speak without speechwriters than he can go skinny-dipping without the Secret Service. Joseph Sobran |
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Copyright © 2006 by the
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