Rhetoric and reality
October 27, 2003 | 12:00am
Well-writen" and "inspiring" were not exactly the words I wanted to use to describe the Batasan 7speech of George W. Bush, whose politics – as longtime Penman readers know – I abhor, especially as they relate to issues like the war in Iraq, the Kyoto protocols on global warming, and the resurgence of conservatism in America. (If you believe otherwise, let’s leave it at that.) But much as I hate to admit it, I did find Bush’s speech predictably well written, and even inspiring in some odd way. What’s worse was, I wasn’t alone in this reaction; many friends – some of whom shared a background in the Left – said the same thing.
As an occasional speechwriter myself, I have a professional interest in what politicians say and how they say them – and "professional" means often having to set my own beliefs and prejudices aside to appreciate the substance and style of the speeches of people I don’t particularly like.
I happened to be on the Senate floor, for example, the first two times Sen. Ping Lacson let go of his salvos against "Jose Pidal." There was nothing Lincolnian or Kennedyesque about Lacson’s privilege speech, which accompanied his Keynote (not Powerpoint – Lacson was using state-of-the-art Apple software, much to the surprise and dismay of this Mac addict) presentation. It was a quick-and-dirty speech, something people might even call jologs or pang-jologs, an appeal to the gut of the Great Unwashed rather than to the intellect of a Harvard PhD. But it worked, with such pedestrian but mordant refrains as "Alam ba ni Misis toh?"
I don’t know who put that speech together, but I have to hand it to him (or her): the speech was meant to astound and to annoy, and it did – the paucity of legally tenable proof notwithstanding. Cleverly, Lacson realized that his audience wasn’t the Supreme Court, but the telenovela-addled multitudes. Even his laidback delivery proved more effective than the obviously manufactured intensity and sincerity we so often get from pols at the rostrum. And it’s scary, because demagoguery can take people to places they shouldn’t be; on the other hand, it does remind the administration that it can’t take people and their allegiance for granted. We deserve a response as persuasive as Lacson’s barrage of innuendoes – not necessarily on the same level of gutter rhetoric, but something that will reassure and convince the skeptical listener, in the very least, not to believe him.
It’s easy to tell people things, to cram data down their throats, like our Presidents do in their SONAs, which have always tended to inform rather than to inspire, and often sound like verbalized spreadsheets. Our politicians like to rattle statistics off like mantras: XXX housing units built, XXX kilometers of road paved, XXX percent of GNP accounted for by agricultural exports. Certainly, figures have a place in speechifying, especially in a largely innumerate society where anything above a million sounds impressive, but which can’t understand the implications of an annual population growth rate of 2.3 percent.
It’s a lot harder to comfort and to inspire people, to lift up their spirits with little more than ideas, with words chosen and strung together in the best possible way. One of the most effective strategies that politicians and their writers have employed has been the use of plain, familiar, straightforward language – the Anglo-Saxon rather than the Latinate element of English, my favorite example of which is Churchill’s famous exhortation for his people to give of their "blood, sweat, tears, and toil" during the Battle of Britain, rather than something like their "lachrymal effusions." American speechwriters are very good at this. In this age of sound bites, speechmakers have to leave their listeners with at least a couple of memorable phrases – or at least keep them listening from one minute to the next. This requires distilling complex ideas on which doctoral dissertations could be and have been written into digestible, everyday language – which, in the hands of a skillful writer, can acquire an elegance and a resonance of its own.
Political rhetoric is, of course, a minefield of clichés, platitudes, and outright lies, as George Orwell wryly observed at the end of what remains the best treatise on the subject, "Politics and the English Language," from 1946:
"Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse–into the dustbin, where it belongs."
I grew up, I must confess, in a family flooded by US propaganda, courtesy of the USIS, which sent us regular mailings of Horizons, Dialogue, and printed copies of major presidential speeches.
What was there to like in Bush’s speech? Here are a few lines that caught my ear, with my annotations:
"The Pacific is wide, but it does not divide us." [Brief but easy to grasp; turns possible difference or division into a point of unity. Writers often forget how effective a short, punchy line can be, say at the beginning of a long, more complicated paragraph.]
"We believe in free enterprise, disciplined by humanity and compassion. We believe in the importance of religious faith, protected by religious liberty. We believe in the rule of law, made legitimate by the will of the people." [Note the use of repetition or "anaphora," in classical rhetoric – it gives the listener a verbal marker, and sets off similarities and differences in consecutive ideas.]
"In this region of the world and in every other, let no one doubt the power of democracy, because freedom is the desire of every human heart." [Note shift from the hard tone of "the power of democracy" to the softness of "every human heart."]
"Members of the Philippine Armed Forces are commissioned to fight for freedom, not to contend for power." [A not too subtle warning, plainly put; something his hosts and many listeners wanted to hear.]
"In this city, on a January morning in 1995, Pope John Paul II addressed millions of faithful…. He said, ‘May your light spread out from Manila to the farthest corners of the world, like the great light which shone in the night at Bethlehem.’" [Bush gets a free ride on the words of someone even more distinguished and truly loved by many Filipinos; quoting the Pope lends him some of latter’s piety, and allows him to say something that would sound patently fake if attributed to him directly. How else can Bush get away with mentioning "Bethlehem"?]
My professional respect for Bush’s speechwriter – again, setting the politics aside – probably comes from knowing how difficult it is not only to capture and present an idea so that ordinary people can understand it, but also to convince Bush himself (or the client-politico) to adopt the idea and its expression. I’ve worked on quite a few speeches that I thought would have served their speakers well because of this quality of forceful simplicity I strive to achieve, but which I had to toss into the trash because my principal (as we call the client) wanted something more flowery.
The plain fact is, we don’t know our political leaders by their speeches. Writers like Teddy Boy Locsin have made an art of writing presidential speeches, but even at their best they haven’t really registered in the common Filipino mind – to which our most important presidential speeches are rarely addressed in the first place, being meant for something like the US Congress or the United Nations.
In the United States, most people get to know their candidates (and next president) through the acceptance speeches these people give – JFK introduced his "New Frontier" in 1960; Barry Goldwater came out swinging in defense of conservatism in 1964, claiming that "I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice"; in 1968, Richard Nixon waxed poetic, referring to himself in the third person, remembering the boy who "hears the train go by at night and… dreams of faraway places where he’d like to go"; 20 years later, George Bush the Father would speak of spreading "a thousand points of light," a line that made speechwriter Peggy Noonan almost as famous as her boss. Dubya’s acceptance speech reportedly went through more than 15 drafts between the candidate and writer Mark Gerson. (Another Bush speechwriter, David Frum, found himself in the doghouse after his wife bragged to friends that he had thought up the phrase "axis of evil.")
You’d think that we could begin to sort out the mess of choices facing us in next year’s presidential election by listening to what these people had to say. The depressing fact is that there’s not one stirring, memorable line you can associate with GMA, Roco, Ping, Danding, or FPJ. And just as depressing is the fact that it took a visiting American president (who has a website devoted to his less eloquent moments, so don’t think for a minute that he spouts forth nuggets of wisdom every day) to tell us things we would have wanted to hear from our own.
Bush – and as if to remind us just how different reality is from the rosy rhetoric of Filipino-American friendship and all that – let me tell you about the son of a friend of mine whose application for a US visa was denied. (So? Nothing special about that, right? See my column of August 25, where I told of the experience of Prof. Thelma Arambulo – chair of the UP English Department, treasurer of the American Studies Association of the Philippines, American literature specialist, graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and frequent exchange visitor to the US – whose recent visa application was, and remains, inexplicably denied.)
This fellow I’m talking about just happened to graduate from Stanford with a PhD, and was working on a project in collaboration with a US government agency. His visa expired while he was on a trip home – he still had to vacate his US apartment, bag his things, and finish his research project – but when he tried to apply for a fresh visa, the consular officer seemed unwilling to believe that he was a Stanford grad working in a field as exotic as geochemistry. Only a strident appeal from the US agency he was working with secured him a second chance. They finally gave him a visa, all right – good for two weeks.
Now, what was it Dubya said? "We stand for liberty, and we stand together"? Hmmm, somehow that doesn’t sound as good as it did the first time.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
As an occasional speechwriter myself, I have a professional interest in what politicians say and how they say them – and "professional" means often having to set my own beliefs and prejudices aside to appreciate the substance and style of the speeches of people I don’t particularly like.
I happened to be on the Senate floor, for example, the first two times Sen. Ping Lacson let go of his salvos against "Jose Pidal." There was nothing Lincolnian or Kennedyesque about Lacson’s privilege speech, which accompanied his Keynote (not Powerpoint – Lacson was using state-of-the-art Apple software, much to the surprise and dismay of this Mac addict) presentation. It was a quick-and-dirty speech, something people might even call jologs or pang-jologs, an appeal to the gut of the Great Unwashed rather than to the intellect of a Harvard PhD. But it worked, with such pedestrian but mordant refrains as "Alam ba ni Misis toh?"
I don’t know who put that speech together, but I have to hand it to him (or her): the speech was meant to astound and to annoy, and it did – the paucity of legally tenable proof notwithstanding. Cleverly, Lacson realized that his audience wasn’t the Supreme Court, but the telenovela-addled multitudes. Even his laidback delivery proved more effective than the obviously manufactured intensity and sincerity we so often get from pols at the rostrum. And it’s scary, because demagoguery can take people to places they shouldn’t be; on the other hand, it does remind the administration that it can’t take people and their allegiance for granted. We deserve a response as persuasive as Lacson’s barrage of innuendoes – not necessarily on the same level of gutter rhetoric, but something that will reassure and convince the skeptical listener, in the very least, not to believe him.
It’s easy to tell people things, to cram data down their throats, like our Presidents do in their SONAs, which have always tended to inform rather than to inspire, and often sound like verbalized spreadsheets. Our politicians like to rattle statistics off like mantras: XXX housing units built, XXX kilometers of road paved, XXX percent of GNP accounted for by agricultural exports. Certainly, figures have a place in speechifying, especially in a largely innumerate society where anything above a million sounds impressive, but which can’t understand the implications of an annual population growth rate of 2.3 percent.
It’s a lot harder to comfort and to inspire people, to lift up their spirits with little more than ideas, with words chosen and strung together in the best possible way. One of the most effective strategies that politicians and their writers have employed has been the use of plain, familiar, straightforward language – the Anglo-Saxon rather than the Latinate element of English, my favorite example of which is Churchill’s famous exhortation for his people to give of their "blood, sweat, tears, and toil" during the Battle of Britain, rather than something like their "lachrymal effusions." American speechwriters are very good at this. In this age of sound bites, speechmakers have to leave their listeners with at least a couple of memorable phrases – or at least keep them listening from one minute to the next. This requires distilling complex ideas on which doctoral dissertations could be and have been written into digestible, everyday language – which, in the hands of a skillful writer, can acquire an elegance and a resonance of its own.
Political rhetoric is, of course, a minefield of clichés, platitudes, and outright lies, as George Orwell wryly observed at the end of what remains the best treatise on the subject, "Politics and the English Language," from 1946:
"Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse–into the dustbin, where it belongs."
I grew up, I must confess, in a family flooded by US propaganda, courtesy of the USIS, which sent us regular mailings of Horizons, Dialogue, and printed copies of major presidential speeches.
What was there to like in Bush’s speech? Here are a few lines that caught my ear, with my annotations:
"The Pacific is wide, but it does not divide us." [Brief but easy to grasp; turns possible difference or division into a point of unity. Writers often forget how effective a short, punchy line can be, say at the beginning of a long, more complicated paragraph.]
"We believe in free enterprise, disciplined by humanity and compassion. We believe in the importance of religious faith, protected by religious liberty. We believe in the rule of law, made legitimate by the will of the people." [Note the use of repetition or "anaphora," in classical rhetoric – it gives the listener a verbal marker, and sets off similarities and differences in consecutive ideas.]
"In this region of the world and in every other, let no one doubt the power of democracy, because freedom is the desire of every human heart." [Note shift from the hard tone of "the power of democracy" to the softness of "every human heart."]
"Members of the Philippine Armed Forces are commissioned to fight for freedom, not to contend for power." [A not too subtle warning, plainly put; something his hosts and many listeners wanted to hear.]
"In this city, on a January morning in 1995, Pope John Paul II addressed millions of faithful…. He said, ‘May your light spread out from Manila to the farthest corners of the world, like the great light which shone in the night at Bethlehem.’" [Bush gets a free ride on the words of someone even more distinguished and truly loved by many Filipinos; quoting the Pope lends him some of latter’s piety, and allows him to say something that would sound patently fake if attributed to him directly. How else can Bush get away with mentioning "Bethlehem"?]
My professional respect for Bush’s speechwriter – again, setting the politics aside – probably comes from knowing how difficult it is not only to capture and present an idea so that ordinary people can understand it, but also to convince Bush himself (or the client-politico) to adopt the idea and its expression. I’ve worked on quite a few speeches that I thought would have served their speakers well because of this quality of forceful simplicity I strive to achieve, but which I had to toss into the trash because my principal (as we call the client) wanted something more flowery.
The plain fact is, we don’t know our political leaders by their speeches. Writers like Teddy Boy Locsin have made an art of writing presidential speeches, but even at their best they haven’t really registered in the common Filipino mind – to which our most important presidential speeches are rarely addressed in the first place, being meant for something like the US Congress or the United Nations.
In the United States, most people get to know their candidates (and next president) through the acceptance speeches these people give – JFK introduced his "New Frontier" in 1960; Barry Goldwater came out swinging in defense of conservatism in 1964, claiming that "I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice"; in 1968, Richard Nixon waxed poetic, referring to himself in the third person, remembering the boy who "hears the train go by at night and… dreams of faraway places where he’d like to go"; 20 years later, George Bush the Father would speak of spreading "a thousand points of light," a line that made speechwriter Peggy Noonan almost as famous as her boss. Dubya’s acceptance speech reportedly went through more than 15 drafts between the candidate and writer Mark Gerson. (Another Bush speechwriter, David Frum, found himself in the doghouse after his wife bragged to friends that he had thought up the phrase "axis of evil.")
You’d think that we could begin to sort out the mess of choices facing us in next year’s presidential election by listening to what these people had to say. The depressing fact is that there’s not one stirring, memorable line you can associate with GMA, Roco, Ping, Danding, or FPJ. And just as depressing is the fact that it took a visiting American president (who has a website devoted to his less eloquent moments, so don’t think for a minute that he spouts forth nuggets of wisdom every day) to tell us things we would have wanted to hear from our own.
This fellow I’m talking about just happened to graduate from Stanford with a PhD, and was working on a project in collaboration with a US government agency. His visa expired while he was on a trip home – he still had to vacate his US apartment, bag his things, and finish his research project – but when he tried to apply for a fresh visa, the consular officer seemed unwilling to believe that he was a Stanford grad working in a field as exotic as geochemistry. Only a strident appeal from the US agency he was working with secured him a second chance. They finally gave him a visa, all right – good for two weeks.
Now, what was it Dubya said? "We stand for liberty, and we stand together"? Hmmm, somehow that doesn’t sound as good as it did the first time.
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