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Candor, Anyone?
 I
write today as I wait, like a condemned man, for tonight’s
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 Lincoln’s
1862 State of the Union message. It was
written, not spoken. And it’s 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.
That’s startling enough.
But what is really startling is that Lincoln wrote the message himself, and he
meant it. It wasn’t 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 we’ve 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. It’s a proposal I don’t expect
him to repeat; in light of recent polls, it’s 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.
![[Breaker quote for Candor, Anyone?: Not tonight, dear]](2006breakers/060131.gif) Bush’s
abuse of language isn’t 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
can’t 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. That’s 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 can’t 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. That’s 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
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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