I remember having to sit in a required course taught by an English professor, on the theory and history of Empire. As a first reading, he assigned a post-911 State of the Union speech by Bush, and then had us listen to the most recent one for comparison, since it was right about that time in January. He was right to note that these kinds of inauguration and SOTU speeches for a sort of genre unto themselves that historians and scholars of rhetoric like to review and appreciate the nuances of. Genres are funny things--over time and by weight of example they gather sets of conventional rules that each instance variously obeys and flouts, thereby growing and redefining the genre itself.
However, as he was asking us what we thought about the most recent one, I kept my comments to myself for fear I'd have to defend them publicly (which I wasn't fully prepared for a the time). I've always suffered from Voltaire's famous "esprit d'escalier" where the steaming retort or the brilliant rejoinder doesn't occur to me until I'm halfway down the stairs on my way out of the party--I should have blurted out "It was a great speech, if you believed it." That way, everyone could have had a good laugh thinking I was speaking in solidarity with their critical stance on the speech's content, because the hypothetical framing would have broadcast an ironic tone, even though, on the face of the words themselves, the word "if" could lend support to either interpretation. In truth, I was leaving them to their own assumptions, and carefully concealing my own opinion on the matter--I, in fact, believed the speech and therefore found it quite compelling.
The problem is that to "believe" the speech, you had to take the words in context for what they actually meant, and not assume everything was code for something else. This is a dangerous position to take, both in academic and in conspiracy-theory circles (which, in my experience, are very often very hard to distinguish!), because if you publicly call for it, everyone in the room immediately mistakes your call for a surface literalism, and you wind up cast as the dummy unable to see the deep structure underneath the surface, like they all can. There's something psychologically satisfying about thinking of yourself as more informed/smarter than someone else, I suppose, since pride is such a pervasive part of the human condition. However, it's not superficial literalism at all to insist that words mean things, and that their context is important. It's not uncritical to suspend judgment until AFTER you've made an honest attempt at objectivity. In fact, it's the ONLY interpretive move that actually uncovers truth--you have to temporarily disable your value judgment faculties DURING a time of study so that your own biases don't distort the truth of the text. Re-engage them after the study is complete, by all means, but now at least you'll do so in an informed manner.
I get that this principle is difficult to apply, because human beings all come with their own biases. And sometimes those biases are subconscious, and therefore cannot be consciously disengaged before interpreting language (or other signs). What's worse is that with Trump it seems triply hard--his public immorality, brashly personal aggressiveness, and ill-speaking of anyone who paints him in an unflattering light have earned him many personal critics, and the personal forms another layer to penetrate before objectivity can have its sway.
However, truth is still left unserved when opinion columnists pronounce upon his inauguration speech with these prejudicial blinders of personal animus on.
George Will, for example, apparently unaware of his own conceit, declares the speech dreadful. His evidence? Trump referenced the challenges in America that he'd like the people to overcome during his presidency in hyperbolic terms like "American carnage" and "rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape". Never mind that the "American carnage" phrase came in the context of the devastating trap of poverty which prevents too many, despite all the opportunities in this great nation, from benefiting to their potential--to which loss of potential, the word "carnage" seems quite apt, as hyperbolic metaphors go. Never mind that Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dayton, and Indianapolis--just to mention a representative few--have been referring to the steady loss of the steel-related industrial backbone of their broad economic swath as a "rust belt" for at least 30 years--making "rusted out factories" like economic "tombstones" quite apt, as hyperbolic imagery goes.
Will decries the lost chance to "serve national unity and confidence" in a speech whose introductory sentence (directly after the personal thanks to the oath of office administrators) objectively and directly does just that:
We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people.In fact, for one oft criticized as an ego-driven megalomaniac, the speech was remarkably self-effacing, with a much higher ratio of "we" to "I" references than any president in recent memory.
Perhaps Will, in his insufferable elitism (he did win a Pulitzer once, you know), was just disappointed because Trump didn't make the prescribed genuflections Will thought he should. But that's no excuse to distort, or completely mishear the message in the words.
Bender does the same, although with less personal pomposity, essentially claiming the ideas and their framing, which were very much objectively unifying, were the opposite. To bolster his own claim, weakened as it is by his recent adherence to the Bloomberg editorial line, rather than the Wall Street Journal's, where he currently writes, he resorts to trotting out a litany of historians and former presidential speech writers, including some never-Trumpers from conservative camps to give an air of legitimacy. But the critique, no matter its agents, can only do so in the absence of the speech itself, which puts the lie to all of it.
For example, Bender cites historian Dallek complaining that Trump's speech had no "hint" of a "sense of shared purpose and national reconciliation" in the paragraph immediately following this citation from the inaugural itself:
Even if their own bias renders them blind to their own internal contradictions, do these people not have editors able to point this out before they go to print? No hinting required--the sense of shared purpose and reconciliation involved in affirming an oath to represent ALL Americans is the very core of the message.We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny. The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.
But it's only a speech of national unity and shared purpose if you believe it--that is to say, if you turn off your negative assumptions before beginning the process of interpreting the message for what it is.
And look, please criticize, read between the lines, and speak truth to power with all the force of your informed intellect. But don't insult the intelligence of those reading the meaning of the words for what they are with your prejudicial and contradictory claptrap. Will and Bender, and a great many others of the leftist persuasion, are suffering from an ideological ailment that prevents truth from penetrating otherwise brilliantly literate minds. They can read the words, but their understanding refuses delivery.
I coin it: malliteracy
Here's the full text. Read neutrally, it begins and ends with a hopeful tone, labels challenges starkly, but offers hope through them, gives deference to God, and appeals to all Americans to take power back to themselves, to whom it constitutionally belongs in this great experiment in republican rule of law, and to work together, with unity in purpose and shared benefit, toward a brighter future. See for yourself.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump-inaugural-address/index.html
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