"Obama's speech was a cliched dud" or "he invites us to compliment"

[schmevil]

Obama's speech was a cliched dud

Put him on a platform and Barack Obama can take any string of words and make them sing. He's the best speech performer of our day.

His voice has charm and power. He has an instinctive sense of the lyric and rhythmic underpinning of language, those surplus properties that impart a power beyond sense, beyond just what the words say. He has mastered the timing of public address, when to pause, when to rush a phrase, how to link gesture and stance to moments of emphasis. This is the full package.

Barack Obama could read a string of fortune cookie messages and some people would come away thinking they'd heard the Gettysburg address.

He gave a great performance Tuesday. The speech itself, however, was a dud. So much skill operating on so lifeless a text. It was Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopsticks. A speech that has hardly begun gives us clouds that are "gathering," storms that are "raging," a fear that is "nagging," grievances that are "petty," interests that are "narrow" and decisions that are "unpleasant" displays an alarming hospitality to cliché. Is there a dull-adjective shop in the new White House?

If they carve this one in marble, the appropriate subscript will read: Bring me your poor, your tired, your hackneyed phrases - your obvious descriptors yearning to be twee.

Rex Murphy for The Globe and Mail
January 24, 2009

Aside from the somewhat alarming suggestion that Obama failed to fulfill the Dr. King shoutout requirement, I find myself agreeing. The speech was impressive because of the man giving it, not because the speech itself was impressively written. Sort of the inverse of Elizabeth Alexander's performance of Praise Song for the Day, which I posted here, for those of you who haven't given the text a second chance. Separated from Alexander's halting, amateurish delivery, it comes off as a much better poem. I hardly recognized it! Still, some of Murphy's criticisms could apply here too. Like the speech it leans to much on cliche, and could stand to lose a word here or there.

Inauguration day in general, was rife with cliche. I had hoped to see a little more risk taking, but I suppose you can't blame them for playing it safe, at least when it comes to the symbolic stuff. It's a shortcut to some kind of shared understanding, which is sorely needed.

Unlike Rex Murphy, Stanley Fish writes about the speech here, with appreciation for its style.

Obama's Prose Style

Of course, as something heard rather than viewed, the speech provides no spaces for contemplation. We have barely taken in a small rhetorical flourish like “All this we can do. All this we will do” before it disappears in the rear-view mirror. But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.

Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.

The comparison to Biblical prose is a helpful one, for me at least, because it helps to clarify exactly what I didn't like about the speech. There was a sense of invoking the imagined character of America, and thereby reasserting its truth. Sort of the form of prayer, or a creation story, but with such hackneyed phrasing that it failed to fly. There was no imaginative spark, just a tired call and response. America is great! America will be great again. I do want to read and reread the text of the speech, because there were some awesome bits of rhetoric in it, but that's a project for another day.

Comments

[deralte.livejournal.com]

While reading the speech (I have no attention span for watching speeches even at the best of times) I could clearly pick out the parts written to appease the Republicans, etc. In short, I thought the speech was a pretty good compromise between all the disparate factions, which is what inauguration speeches are supposed to be. They have a few good phrases to be repeated ad nauseum later, lay out a general plan of office, and go for the "pleasing all of the people, some of the time" part of government. It has to be bland because it's aimed at everyone. I totally agree with the fact that Obama is such a good speaker he can make anything sound good, but an inauguration is not where you deliver a gettysburg address. *shrugs*

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it yet but listening, it was obvious that some parts of it were meant to reach out to the Republicans. Actually, I think that so far he's doing a good job of appeasing without compromising himself. I hope the administration is able to keep that up. :)

In short, I thought the speech was a pretty good compromise between all the disparate factions, which is what inauguration speeches are supposed to be.

Oh, for sure. I was really pleased with the performance of the speech, and I'm a fan of political speech-giving. I think its a case of our expectations being too high, based on some of his previous, really stirring speeches.

But I totally agree with this:

Barack Obama could read a string of fortune cookie messages and some people would come away thinking they'd heard the Gettysburg address.

Because in the moment, that speech felt better than it was, you know?

(Btw, I love that icon. I'm always fangirling your icons *g*)