“One no longer believes the knower. One believes the believer.” Joseph Roth
Category Archives: Rhetoric
Lies, Leaders, Nourishment
Leaders lie.
A perquisite of office.
Freedom’s reach bursts dictates of truth.
Crevices in conscience, sealed with righteousness, seal out remorse.
A perquisite of office.
Knowing nods of shirts and ties gather followers;
Nourished leaders on the prowl.
Rise Up to Better the Best
Vibrations of softly spoken stories of connivance surround us;
In tandem with expanding clouds in descent; as grayness claims proclamations of black and white; and darkness replaces tomorrow and yesterday.
Leaders follow treachery to their own salvations; Prime Ministers and Presidents double-down as the law creeps too close. Closer and closer. Until a snake elects to chew an empty carcass. Signals sent. Talons dipped in darkened blood. No light to darken any more.
Clouds descend; from our left, from our right. Yes, the worst are full of passionate intensity. And if I am among the best, then where is my conviction?
Let hunger’s scream shock daylight’s light; let us call forth youth’s ennobling might.
Let leadership’s mantle come to rest, on those few among us who are better than best.
Masquerades of Mythology; Procrusteans on the Left and Right
Pundits speak today of identity politics and the best among us applaud. Such description – such “de-scribing” – is an act upon a prior act that shoves the shoveling of complexity of an individual into a category that abstracts in service of self-satisfaction and augmentation of power. Masquerades of Mythologies. Procrusteans on the left. Procrusteans on the right. Comforting pieties for the comfortably pious.
Re-assessing the Anna Karenina Principle; Introducing the Friedman Principle; Returning to Basics
Tolstoy writes: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Contrast Tolstoy with the aesthete Nabokov: ‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike….”
A lightbulb went on as I was reflecting on the dire dilemma – Tolstoy or Nabokov or (where is Freud when I need him?) – and the more salient proposition became clear: “all true friends give us energy when they hear our stories. Storytelling to everyone else drains our energies.”
Others have expressed the same sentiment in different ways. Recall Sir Francis Bacon’s observation that a friend is someone with whom one gains greater joy by sharing a joy and reduces sorrow by sharing the sorrow.
Real Life Theatre
The cacophony of media-designated, and self-proclaimed, pundits is amplified as much by empty rhetoric as by disregard and disdain for facts. Philosophical skepticism has come out of the closet and strode off the campus – only to be disowned by its very practitioners . For them: better to be wrong than in doubt, but better yet, better always to be known to be right and never, ever in doubt. For them: to be right, in and of itself, is trivial. To venture through television news is to enter a theatre filled with shrieking voices that would silence timbres of orchestral cymbals. With truth-falsity conjoined and let loose with passionate intensity fueled by greater conviction, elected officials emerge as the distillate of a rhetorical chemistry set purchased at a discount from the Five and Ten Cent Store.
When Eerie Metaphor is Deadened Cliche
In the wake of the “defeat” of Britain’s Conservative party this week, a former senior government official made the following remark:
“Theresa May is a dead woman walking,” George Osborne, whom May fired as chancellor of the exchequer last year and now edits London’s Evening Standard newspaper, told BBC Television on Sunday. “It’s just how long she’s going to remain on death row.”
Clearly my postings have been powerless to instill sensitivity to the power of metaphor. With Trumpian-inspired rhetoric swirling loudly and venomously, the corrosive spread of eerie rhetoric into commonplace discourse is upon us. To call out George Osborne’s rhetoric is to deal with gnats. To call out deadened rhetoric generally is to resist the sustenance that gnats provide to more formidable bugs.
Recognizing Paul Krugman
From a superb piece by Paul Krugman:
“You may recall Trump’s remark during the campaign that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Well, he hasn’t done that, at least so far. He is, however, betting that he can break every promise he made to the working-class voters who put him over the top, and still keep their support. Can he win that bet?
When it comes to phony budget math — remember his claims that he would pay off the national debt? — he probably can. We’re not talking about anything subtle here; we’re talking about a budget that promises to “abolish the death tax,” then counts $330 billion in estate tax receipts in its rosy forecast. But even I don’t expect to see this kind of fraud get much political traction.
The bigger question is whether someone who ran as a populist, who promised not to cut Social Security or Medicaid, who assured voters that everyone would have health insurance, can keep his working-class support while pursuing an agenda so anti-populist it takes your breath away.”
Relevance Revisited – Beware Stagecraft that Leaves the Theatre
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We commonly take relevance as we find it, as presented, as if we and our audience shared a common conception of what counts as relevant, by whom the counting is done, and to whom the counting applies. Yet when we undertake to persuade a critical and open-minded audience of the relevance of a subject, we must resist effortless presumption of a pre-existing consensus as to relevance lest our failure to explain our conception of relevance impairs the credibility of our appeal.
Thus, with art, with drama, with theatre, with stagecraft in particular, we start generally with the proposition that the visual and acoustical context, the settings, the levels, lighting, colors, tapestries, angles, what is revealed, what concealed, what elevated, and when, what moves and what is fixed, what flows from the rhythms and pitch, the tenor and bass, serve to enable the dramatic presentation. Indeed, they are the presentation. We set aside the criteria for identifying the “point” or “intent” – the conventional meaning – of the presentation, and, more fundamentally, the subject of the presentation, for these will vary within the audience and, in any event, are inseparable from the modes or, in our case, the stagecraft. We accept the inevitability of the disparate criteria and points of view and inquire, more generally, how the stagecraft informs and communicates, even as it is part of, the point, intent, meaning. The feelings, moods, the experience.
The lighting, how does it illuminate, or conceal, or gradually reveal, a character’s mood and message or the development of the mood and message, or the inability to give expression to a message? The levels. Do they reinforce the authority or subservience of the character, or place her in the dark or light? Angles, new vistas, where and when we peek into hidden thoughts? And so it goes.
The power of stagecraft. The subtle appeals. Beware when stagecraft leaves the theatre.
Lines that Stay with Us
From W.B. Yeat s:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
But is it true now, as it has been before? Or is the reasoned voice, propelled with conviction, and tempered by reflection, muffled by the shrill of certainty? Masquerades.