There has been a lot of virtual ink deployed in commenting on President Obama’s Iraq-War-U.S.-Economy speech. My unofficial Tomatometer reports that viewers and pundits alike have judged about 43 percent fresh. Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post thought that the President “Brought Gravitas to Speech.” But most of the commentary I saw gave it a barely passing grade. Karl Rove, as usual, was both judicious and percipient, quietly comparing what the President had to say about foreign policy to George McGovern’s “Come home, America” hustings speech in 1972.
Not a few commentators were even darker in their assessment, concluding that the speech was a muddle wrapped in mendacity inside a cipher. It is to that last group that my own brief commentary belongs. An erudite reader, responding to my judgment that it was “one of the worst speeches in modern memory,” sent along a bit of tonic abuse from H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s performance as a speaker: “It reminds me,” wrote Mencken:
“of a string of wet sponges, it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm (I was about to write abcess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble, it is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
I thought it worth sharing Mencken’s little detonation with you. I have a feeling it will come in handy in the months ahead.
You (and Mencken) say it much better; I just call it gobbledygook.
Mencken was certainly on form there. The definitive comment on Harding’s speeches, though, came from his Democratic opponent William Gibbs McAdoo, who referred to one of them as “An army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”
Lordy Bess, but Mencken knew American politics. (Wonderful, how his style is never dated.)
I’ve gained a renewed appreciation for Mencken over the last few years.
How revealing:
Kimball so yearns to “detonate” Obama, yet requires Mencken’s words – culled from Bartlett’s, no doubt – to do it.
It’s amazing how much of Mencken’s commentary
and observation can be applied, mostly as-is,
to the current scene, at a remove of nearly a century.
Which gives me a small, bright hope that we will stagger through, somehow.
How revealing—KOKO, helpless to defend Obama’s oratorical dog’s mess—sneers at Roger’s quote, one of the finest bits of rhetorical criticism ever penned. Roger, like most well-educated men, knows Mencken’s writings well. KOKO, not being of that class, can only assume that he must have found the quote in Bartlett’s.
Ambrose Bierce’s “an army of words escorting a corporal of thought” also requires citation.
Although my copy of the anthology which printed this piece has long since disappeared, I am fairly certain that Mencken went on to add that Dr. Harding’s speech, as awful as it was, had a splendid effect upon those who heard it from Hardings own lips. I think Obama’s speeches are similar in effect. When one reads the text, one finds it filled with non sequiturs, circular reasoning, jarring justapositions. Here, from my files, are some examples of his oratory, delivered in August of 2007 at the Woodrow Wilson center. The comments are my own, written at that time.
A blunt threat to use diplomacy against nations that go nuclear and/or sponsor terror
“And I won’t hesitate to use the power of American diplomacy to stop countries from obtaining these weapons or sponsoring terror. The lesson of the Bush years is that not talking does not work. Go down the list of countries we’ve ignored and see how successful that strategy has been. We haven’t talked to Iran, and they continue to build their nuclear program. We haven’t talked to Syria, and they continue support for terror. We tried not talking to North Korea, and they now have enough material for 6 to 8 more nuclear weapons.”
And if diplomacy should fail, I will not hesitate to deploy literary devices such as simile and metaphor—and, in the last resort, Irony.
Quoting JFK, quoting Ted Sorenson:
“President Kennedy said it best: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” Only by knowing your adversary can you defeat them or drive wedges between them. As President, I will work with our friend and allies, but I won’t outsource our diplomacy in Tehran to the Europeans, or our diplomacy in Pyongyang to the Chinese. I will do the careful preparation needed, and let these countries know where America stands. They will no longer have the excuse of American intransigence. They will have our terms: no support for terror and no nuclear weapons.”
He will undertake the “careful preparation” necessary to formulate an ultimatum, “no support for terror and no nuclear weapons”, which ultimatum will deprive our enemies of the excuse of American intransigence. I don’t believe that one man, acting alone, could have produced a passage of such stupifying inanity. It must have been vetted by a clutch of foreign policy advisors. I would like to know who they are.
These two examples nicely illustrate the vacuity of Obama’s thinking. But imagine them delivered with the characteristic precise enunciation, and the decisive cocks of the head. Very impressive indeed.