House of Eratosthenes

Had an epiphany while I was out driving & bike-riding around the seashore yesterday. My epiphany was…I’ve been hearing for the last four years about how this speech or that speech — from a certain person who is our President right now — is so wonderful that it is going to be studied in law schools for generations or whatever. This would imply, to someone who thinks about it lazily as I have been doing, that the text will be excerpted and then that will be put in a book somewhere. Is this not, after all, what “study a speech” has meant historically?

But no. You can’t “study” these speeches that way. True, if you could, you could then pick the speeches apart, identify sections, themes, tropes, passive/active voice statements, targets of praise/criticism being called out…and that would be healthy. But no. These are purely video speeches. You watch the speeches or you don’t absorb anything about ’em at all, and you might as well not know about them.

“Wonderful speech” doesn’t even mean wonderful-speech anymore. It is a reference to the audience’s reaction.

For example, would a transcript of Jennifer Granholm’s speech (hat tip to Rick) capture the “wonderfulness”? I think not…

Frequent readers & lurkers of these parts know that about a month ago, we had a gadfly challenging us to come up with a definition for “left wing” and pronouncing as inadequate any response that failed to live up to encyclopedic standards. We ended up in an endless cyclonic “this exchange ain’t over until it’s over the way I say” badminton match, disagreeing over whether left-wing-ism, being so thoroughly grounded in deceit as it is, can be defined in such a way. And whether a series of “Jeff Foxworthy” type of you-might-be-one-if tests would be an acceptable alternative…or could be taken seriously…or if that’s about as good as it gets.

Granholm’s speech offers me another epiphany: Left-wing-ism, in this day and age, could be defined as a resentment. Let’s give it a try: Left-wing politics appeal to a target audience within a selected economic class, blaming everyday-life pains and sufferings and exigencies on the next-higher economic class. That works pretty well, in that it carries the bonus advantage that it was just as true during the storming of the Bastille as it is today. If it works any better today than it did back then, it is because all the other attributes of leftism have been in a relative recession. This core-attribute of it, regardless of whatever prominence it had or had not achieved at any given time relative to the other attributes, has been a constant. If it has not been eminent every single year, it might as well have been.

It does require some tweaking in isolated cases. Homosexuals, I’ve read, are statistically better educated on average, and therefore higher earners. I don’t know how you go about verifying that, but it seems provable that the left-wing appeal there, and in other situations, is non-economic. So let us broaden it: Left-wing politics feed on, and are driven by, feelings of resentment festering within one class toward another. The definition of left-wing politics would be a pursuit of action, vis a vis public policy, based on those resentments. We’ve seen this in Sandra Fluke, and other such “gifted speakers,” as they have molded and shaped ShouldBeForcedTo into a single, almost monosyllabic, word. My goodness, how easily they say “should be forced to.” It’s like they muttered it as the doctor whacked their little butts right after they were born…when mom’s contraceptives weren’t available, or didn’t work.

Right-wing politics would, therefore, be defined as a rebuke of “um, let’s not” when the time comes to propose the change in public policy.

Questions outstanding: Is it possible to look at your own political movement as “unifying,” or deny that it is divisive in nature, when about the only way it can be functionally defined is as a desire for action based on resentments? When it is inherently divisive? When the only workable way to identify your opposition is in terms of “um, let’s not” in response to the changes proposed based on these resentments?

And, am I the only one who’s sick of these “wonderful” speeches that are wonderful only in video form? I’m sure there are others who agree with my ideological leanings who are similarly fed up with it; it would make me feel a lot better if I could perceive some similar fatigue up & down the spectrum. How about the libs? I can truthfully say that if I caught up with a speech in Granholm format, delivered by a politician who thought my way about things, I wouldn’t be any happier with it.

Perhaps not.

Here we come to a second candidate for definition of left-wing-ism…or rather, definition of the weaknesses in thinking and in character that lead to sympathy for, and eventual recruitment into, left-wing visions and schemes. It seems to be a consistency that the greatness of people, speeches, ideas and things, are entirely validated by something external to those people, speeches, ideas and things. And that is something I find truly fascinating — it’s like we’re having an ideological disagreement about the classic timeless riddle, “If a tree falls down in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Granholm, or Clinton, or Obama, tells the crowd what the crowd is ready to hear and the crowd goes wild, that makes the “speech” a great speech even though, if you were to transcribe what was said, the result wouldn’t be all-that. The right-winger, on the other hand, looks at something accomplished that doesn’t exactly set the world on fire, thinks on it a little bit, and comes away with “imagine what it takes to be able to…” A perfect example of this is a soldier sent stateside because he lost his limb, or his face, in a roadside bomb, and the first thing he wants to do after his prosthetic is fitted is go back. Or, if he doesn’t make it stateside, his parents moving his wife and baby son in and helping to raise the child. To a lefty, as the video aptly demonstrates, it is the approving roar of the crowd that makes these things great, in fact it is the approval that is the greatness. They may appreciate the stuffing out of an abandoned single-mother raising her child alone, or even better, going back to school to get a better education. But the truth is that they like these stories because they associate them with crowd-approval and inter-class resentment. The proof? Try to get a lefty feminist excited about a single dad, in exactly the same situation doing exactly the same thing.

To a right-winger, the greatness lives in the deed itself, as well as in the internal gifts that made it possible. The capability and the will, as well as the ultimate effect, the greatness lives in all three, regardless of whether someone steps forward to express their approval of it. And regardless of the class membership of the person who does the deed.

Anyway, about the speeches. I’m at the Popeye Stage with the Clinton/Obama era of dazzling super-mega-awesome speeches. I’ve had all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more.

I’m with you on this one. Let’s think of the historic speeches one may have encountered in school. We can start with terribly unphotogenic Lincoln and his under 3 minute Gettysburg address. Can you imagine any politician these days giving a speech so short that the cameramen didn’t even get set up in time to shoot pictures? Then there’s William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech. It’s definitely a speech that you can read. FDR’s “Day of Infamy” is another. Hell, even Nixon gave speeches that work when re-read (Checkers, anyone?)

At some point (probably around the Kennedy era), it became more fashionable to look good on tv than to have anything interesting to say. I think Clinton is amazing as a politician, but I can’t think of anything memorable that he’s said other than “I didn’t have sex with that woman.” It will be interesting to see how that Paul Ryan speech looks in the future. That line about the 20 somethings living at home and looking at a faded Obama picture is pretty powerful stuff.
- teripittman | 09/09/2012 @ 17:47
Hmmm…
Left wing:
irrational projection of denial and delusion

I think the APA had a special term encapsulating the condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, before the PC revised edition.

Besides, any REAL left winger will simply accept a casual referance to Wikipedia as
“the arbitor of record”, and then just go away.(IF they figure out the peril of questioning Wiki’s authority-on a LOT of OTHER things.)
- CaptDMO | 09/09/2012 @ 19:14
One of your commenters (Nightfly? Cylarz? Philmon?) came up with the best definition I’ve heard: Liberalism is the lifelong attempt to make high school come out right.

The only word lefties use more than shouldbeforcedto (and I agree, it is one single word in their mouths) is “deserve.”

You didn’t build that, so you don’t deserve to keep the money you make from it.

You were born white and middle class and American, i.e. privileged; you certainly didn’t earn this; therefore you don’t deserve to keep the benefits of these inherited advantages while others, less privileged, go without.

And certainly the starting quarterback doesn’t deserve to be dating the head cheerleader. He was born tall and handsome — inherently unfair! — and the only thing he can do is chuck a ball at some other pituitary freaks, which is only valuable because society — i.e. the system of inherited privilege designed and perpetuated by those self-same undeserving elites — says it is. What rational culture spends every weekend watching maladjusted steroid abusers in plastic armor crash into each other? If we just spent that money on public radio, we could…..

&c.

And the thought that all of their self-declared good qualities — intelligence, perception, exquisitely honed sensibilities to the sufferings of others — are also accidents of birth or products of society and therefore inherently unfair never even enters their heads, because to fifteen year olds it’s only other people who ever catch breaks; everything they have is theirs by divine right.

Society favors looks and the ability to hurl a ball more than sensitivity and the ability to write free-verse poetry; therefore society is broken and must be repaired by legislation until all inherent advantages are eliminated. And if that society just happens to have us on top, well, fair’s fair….
- Severian | 09/10/2012 @ 08:04

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Sunday, September 9th, 2012