Talking Politics:

The Substance of Style

from Abe to “W”

Michael Silverstein

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS

CHICAGO
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No doubt about it. Abraham Lincoln gets the

prize among United States presidents for the sheer
concentrated political power of his rhetoric. When he
set his—actual, own—mind to preparing his text, he
© 2003 Michael Silverstein could come up with gems such as his Second
All rights reserved. Inaugural and, of course, his 272-word “Dedicatory
Remarks” at Gettysburg. Even his extemporaneous
public and private talk, transcribed, shows great verbal
Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC ability. Now Mr. Lincoln had no Yale or Harvard
5629 South University Avenue degree as a credential of his education. But he under-
Chicago, Il 60637 stood the aesthetic—the style, if you will—for sum-
moning to his talk the deeply Christian yet rationalist
www.prickly-paradigm.com aspirations of America’s then four-score-and-seven-
year-old polity. Striving to realize this complex style,
ISBN: 0-9717575-5-0 he polished it and elaborated its contours. He embod-
LCCN: 2002115993 ied the style. So much so, that Lincoln’s great later
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texts, like the late, great man himself, now belong to seemed not quite successfully to be hiding something.
the ages. They form part of the liturgy of what These days his paranoid Oval Office ravings—replete
Robert Bellah has termed America’s “civil religion.” with loads of f- and n-words!—circulate in public,
And Americans ever since have at least offi- transcribed from tapes slowly seeping out of an
cially identified masterly political accomplishment archival sewerful of I-told-you-so conversational
with public stylistic communication in the shadow of sludge (the shit has hit his erstwhile fans, as it were!).
Lincoln: FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan, for example, From Lincoln’s Gettysburg, flash forward
in the twentieth century. Each was memorable for ini- another seven score years. Like language itself, presi-
tiation or mastery of a signature public communica- dential communication styles do change. Here’s
tive style. No matter what went on in private, no mat- George Walker Bush, a.k.a. “Dubya”:
ter what the policy failings and scandals of their
administrations, their genres of address developed this Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemi-
tradition of presidential style in certain ways. And spheric in nature because it is a product that we can
presidential style, as opposed to other things, does find in our neighborhoods.
“trickle down” to influence all the levels of politics
and layers of American government. Dyslexic? Just stupid? Out of his league? His
By contrast, who can be comfortable with the “League” is the Ivy one: this man has both Yale and
notion that a “great” president would not also be a Harvard degrees! (Want a refund, Poppy?) And,
great communicator, especially when speechifying in notwithstanding his actual installation as President in
person and on broadcast media? Political figures like 2000 by a 5-4 vote in the U. S. Supreme Court, he did
this are puzzling; those who rate and rank former manage to garner a certified 47.9% of the popular
presidents have trouble deciding where to put them in vote, all throughout the heartland of America. By
the list. Observe the jitteriness that pop historians 2002, he even managed to develop wartime “presiden-
have about Eisenhower, whose best speech was proba- tial coattails” stumping to win a Republican Congress.
bly his televised farewell address a couple of evenings He must be communicating something attractive to a
before the Kennedy era. (He had had eight years to large fraction of the electorate (besides merely “Being
rehearse this grandfatherly valedictory.) Or Truman, There” in 2000 as a non-Clintongore alternative).
with his reputation for schmoozy, street-smart vulgar- That something is clearly not Lincolnesque, however,
ity displayed right out in the open. And observe the much as our voting contemporaries seem to respond
revulsion that still counteracts what admiration people to his “message.” And if certain folks have reacted
may feel about Richard Nixon’s accomplishments, this with supercilious or nerdy disdain, not to say late-
president who in his public address style always night comical guffaws and doctored jpegs on the net
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(see below), I maintain that the “W” style is fully Communicating the Message
within the culture of political communication the huffy
critics and winking satirists intuitively understand and vs. Inhabiting “Message”
engage.
Rather than getting upset, we ought to pause, The substance of it all, I would contend, is
take an analytic view of the matter, and put this style. The technicians of political communication have
President’s communicative performance into context. I their own term that gestures toward it: “message,” as
think this will make understandable why he just might in “being on message” or “being off message” or
not be a mere aberration but a slight readjustment of “sticking to [no “the”] message.” As an insider’s tech-
the terms of politics the country has operated on all nical term, “message” is moving from what we call a
along! The current President, then, just might be the count noun, that denotes a specific individuable thing,
very cynosure of what now “sells,” pointing in the to one that denotes a locus or place in a containing
direction as well of political communication to come. space, realm, or condition of being. (Think of the dif-
Goodbye Lincoln, hello Dubya! And after “W,” the ference between the [telephone] call you made last
end of the alphabet of politics. evening and [being] on call.) “Message” is inhabitable:
“my message” is like my house. That’s key.
Those not attuned to politicoglossia may at
first think that someone’s “message” is the topic, or
theme, or central proposition he or she is trying to
communicate. You might identify it—in fact, the pro-
fessionals hope reporters and others will misidentify
it—with the “point” of an occurrence of communica-
tion. You could paraphrase someone’s “point” as a kind
of assertion that such-and-such is the case about
something-or-other.
You would be wrong. Professionals want, in
fact, to suggest this to you. (Frequently the profession-
als are just able to rely on the flat-footedness of print-
media reporters; they were focused in journalism
school on finding and paraphrasing actual statements
in an “objective” manner, and so they continue to look
for them.) But media professionals also want you to be
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wrong in your hasty attribution, because that will etc.]. We implicate a description of things whenever
make it harder to figure out the trick to the magic: did we get agreement—or at least do not get disagree-
he say so or didn’t he? (Did he promise not to raise ment—to a claim we’ve communicated about them
taxes or didn’t he? What did he claim—or just lead us that such-and-so is the case (or was the case, or might
to believe—about “that woman?”) “Message,” we can be the case, etc.). (The claim is frequently in relation
discern from the study of political communication, is to something else, already described or presumed to
really much more complicated than that. If successful, be known.) [Examples: (Your horse’s name
a person comes to inhabit “message” in the act of here)…would have been running at The Preakness
communicating. And if “the people”—and their press next week; (Your name here)…will not have a hard
corps—want to think that it is what someone actually time understanding this; etc.]. Understanding each
said, that’s their problem—and it’s our politico’s suc- other in communication is really coming to suffi-
cess at “messag[e]”ing. Let me explain, by way of ciently common focus on what these descriptions,
describing the several ways we communicate using explicit and implicated, are and apply to.
language. So officially we describe things and states-of-
One part of us intuitively feels that the lan- affairs so that others can also identify those things and
guage we use consists of the words and expressions we states-of-affairs. The official message is the complex,
speak, write, or otherwise get across to our addressees identifying description—the information structure—we
along some channel of communication. We recognize achieve over the longer haul of paragraphs and whole
ourselves to be sending and receiving such language disquisition-sized chunks of verbiage by using words
forms. In order to understand “message,” however, we and expressions linked one to another by grammatical
have to think about the several different kinds of and other rules.
meaningfulness always present—though not always Of course we have to know certain grammati-
recognized—when language is used. We have to look cal rules of sentence-formation. That, for example, in
at other principles that organize our communications English descriptions at least, an expression that explic-
to see what is central to “message.” But let’s start with itly describes a thing (John…) precedes an implicated
words and phrases. descriptive expression for it (...went to the store.). We
In our own intellectual tradition of under- know a myriad of such grammatical rules relating to
standing how people use language, the most salient— the structure of sentences, phrases, and the like.
the official—“what” of communication lies in how But additionally, there are principles based in
words and expressions describe, or in technical terms, developing information-structure itself, distinct from
denote. We explicitly describe things by naming them the grammar of sentences, that determine what
in category [Examples: ...table…; …five-cent cigar…; expressions we can and do use at various points in
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communication. As everyone knows, while communi- one another, each interlocutory partner contributing
cation proceeds, sender and receiver can rely more some bit of information to the emerging whole.
and more on what has already been communicated Whether in a single instance of communication or
about a topic, information about it that cumulates over a chain of instances, then, people can use lan-
between them. Based on this growing intersubjective guage to construct collectively reached and collectively
pool of information, fluently deployed descriptions of consequential knowledge, opinion, and belief about all
the very same thing can differ in form, depending on manner of things. In principle descriptive language
where in a text they occur. What earlier in discourse- can be fashioned into a tool or instrument for con-
time one may have described as “a large, brown bear” structing sharable knowledge in the very event of
one describes, a bit later as “it” or “the beast” or even communication.
“the thing I was just writing about”—the large brown But, having mentioned both grammar and
bear I focused you on, that is, even in the absence of information structure, is there anything else to com-
an actual critter to point to! However unconsciously, a municative use of words and expressions? Are there
careful talker monitors the flow of text-in-progress, if other factors that explain why we use one expression
only at the level of knowing that he or she is making rather than another at any given momentary phase of
not only grammatical sense on a sentence-by-sentence communication? For example, why do we characteris-
basis, but also informational sense over the longer tically use one word or expression that might describe
haul. Demanding addressees expect no less of our something and altogether avoid another one that
information-packaging. would, in principle, be equally descriptive? (Did he say
In this way, discourse is always being evaluated “the Democratic proposal”—or was it “democratic?”—or
as description for how it achieves a kind of cumulative did he call it a “Democrat” one?) It turns out that in
coherence as information. Under the umbrella of this every discourse a large number of extra-verbal contex-
kind of meaningfulness, people can actually inform one tual factors leave their determinate traces in the forms
another about the things and states-of-affairs they we use—what are termed in the trade indexical (point-
communicate about. Our talk can cause others to ing) traces. These traces inform us about, they point
reach, with us, an intersubjective identification of to, the who-what-where-when-why of discourse by
things. And not just identification, but identification as subtle loadings of the “how,” the actual forms, of dis-
categorized according to our particular descriptive lan- course. (“Democratic” or “Democrat?” Republican
guage at a particular moment in discourse. We can Party operatives these days teach their politicians to
successfully use language to inform others even if our avoid the first, older and official name that ends with
interlocutors had previously had some other ideas “-ic” and to use the second form, without it. For polit-
about these very matters. We can even mutually inform ical partisans, remember, there is real danger that the
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“-ic” form would simultaneously convey the meaning social arrangements as consequences of using these
of the lower-case d-word, democratic, as what those forms; we bring new social arrangements into being.
other guys are about! So adhering to this rule while In the most smoothly executed cases, all parties just
speaking self-identifies the very speaker of the form as implicitly understand and act upon the consequentiali-
being in one political party category rather than the ties of how we communicate—sometimes even in ways
other.) Indexical values of language forms locate and that violate normative expectation.
identify the parties to the communication where they When we are brought together by communi-
are used the way a good pantomime gives the impres- cation we depend on the fact that we are always
sion of taking place in a comprehensible surround. already socially arranged one with respect to another
These indexical factors in language seem to in an intuitive sociocultural categorization. All of us
crosscut the information structure always emerging via are identifiable as being of one or another kind, to one
grammar and denotational coherence as speakers add or another degree, both enduringly and momentarily.
to the words and expressions in a text. Masters of Even to get communication started with others
political “message,” just like other users of languages, depends on making certain assumptions about
have intuitively known all along about the indexical whom—i.e., what kind of person—we’re communicat-
power of the words they use, and especially about the ing with. (Think of identities constructed and imag-
cumulative indexical poetry of properly arranged ined on the internet.) We expect certain kinds of com-
words. Such masters have had a knack for indexical municative forms to emerge, certain kinds of uses of
design that has shaped each era’s political communica- language and such. But—importantly—the act of com-
tion—at least as much as the descriptive content of it munication itself, that is, the emergence of certain
(if any)—thus creating a true rhetorician’s art form. indexically potent message forms, can always trans-
Even the great “message” master, Lincoln. form the intuitive classifications we apply to one
In this way the actual forms of language in use another, new ones suddenly pointed to as now opera-
concretize both the momentary and the more endur- tive and consequential for an interaction.
ing arrangements of us people engaged in communi- What indicative signs or signals, for example,
cating, the ways we arrange ourselves in space-time were you relying on in your aunt’s talk when you con-
and categorize each other in social life. And doubly so. cluded, the other day, that she was “stressed?” After
In communicating we certainly rely on social arrange- all, she didn’t describe herself that way by actually say-
ments already in place, and the expectations we can ing something like “I’m working under a lot of stress
then have about what form talk should take between these days!” or “I feel under a lot of pressure.” Yet you
two socially locatable individuals. But as well, each gave her uncharacteristic latitude in your conversation.
time we deploy specific forms of language we create Again, how did I come to know that the prospective
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student in my office last week was gay? He did not bled together with what we recognize as the descrip-
announce this to me as a self-description, explicit or tive structuring of language. A recurrent sighing tim-
implicit. He just talked about—described, in the sense I bre of the voice. (Do we have a special sign in the way
discussed earlier—why he was interested in a particu- we would write this down?) A particular pronunciation
lar educational degree program. These kinds of infer- pattern of certain consonants and vowels. (All we write
ential processes go on constantly in interaction, as we with an alphabet is a sign for the identity of the conso-
all know, on the basis of indexical signals that work nant or vowel.) So we tend not to recognize these as
like gestures in pantomime. central to communication—until, perhaps, they are
In essence we continuously point to our own— removed, as in much early computer-generated
and, relationally, then, to our interlocutor’s—transient robotic speech, and we realize that the message we’re
and more enduring identities. Interactions as events hearing no longer sounds human!
develop these relational identities as consequences of Second, all of the institutionalized technolo-
communicative behavior. The clarity of identities gies of language have cumulatively reinforced this
comes in phases, punctuated by shifts over interac- intuitive difficulty of explicit recognition by concen-
tional time: what-you-and-I-are in a moment of inter- trating on its descriptive functions. Grudgingly, the
action strives to become what-you-and-I-will-be. We other stuff may be “added on”—as “art!” By institu-
effortlessly factor all this in to the conversational tionalized technologies I mean everything from the
import and impact of talk we engage in, just as we try writing and printing conventions to the personnel and
to do so for talk we observe and analyze as social sci- paraphernalia of enforcing standard languages: dictio-
entists or students of rhetoric, or for talk we create naries, thesauruses, grammars, manuals of style, and
and represent as novelists or playwrights. We have the people who create them and insist that they are
always operated with these effects as unremarkable but authoritative. Such official biases about language have
essential truisms of talk, yet linguists have only a kind of feedback effect on how we view what is the
recently brought them into sharp and analytic view. “real” language and what is unimportant or periph-
Why? eral—good for art, perhaps, as it tries to imitate life,
These demonstrations of and inferences about but hardly the stuff of life’s serious communication!
identities are very much the usual and “other” busi- The biases, built into our institutional forms across
ness of communication. Yet they have been largely out the board, keep telling us to discount what is actually
of the aware consciousness of communicators, for two indispensable to normal and effective human commu-
related reasons. One is that the most obvious signals nication.
of inhabitable identity seem to be un-language-like, Indeed, official views of communication center
even though in actual communication they are jum- on “book larnin’” (as it is ridiculed). They hyper-
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emphasize the use of language for descriptive pur- interlocutors. Carefully analyzing this, we can get an
poses, sometimes foolishly and vainly attempting to idea of the ways that identities are being drawn upon
disregard the inevitable, simultaneous use of language and fashioned without ever being explicitly described.
for inhabiting identities. And, of course, just such ways Over multiple indexical channels, then, there
of fashioning inhabitable identities in communication comes into being a kind of poetry of identities-in-
give our messages whatever life-like appeal they may motion as the flow of communicative forms projects
have. around the participants complex patterns—let’s say
There are many ways we go about indexically “images”—not onto Plato’s cave wall, but onto the
defining relevant identities. The register of language potentially inhabitable and then actually inhabited
we use, in respect of words, phrases, sentence length context. So there is image. There is style. There is
and range of grammatical structures. (Did we “empty “message.” Image is not necessarily visual; it is an
the container of its contents” or “get the stuff out?”) abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulat-
The fluency and sheer amount of language we use in a ing patterns of congruence across all manner of index-
turn of communication. The paragraph-sized struc- ical signs—including visual ones—that addressees and
tures of coherence we build up over time, like rhythms audiences can imaginatively experience, like a holo-
of other bodily action. In spoken language, our “tone gram. Style—the way image is communicated—has
of voice,” as people term a range of things from stress degree and depth of organization; it may be consistent
and intonation patterns that depend on phraseology, within an event, or over a series of them, or even
all the way to characteristic pitch range, melodious- across a whole biography. Whole institutions come to
ness and other dynamic qualities of phonation. be embodied in particular communicative styles.
Gesture, movement and stasis of body regions, (Remember The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit?
dynamic face-work, etc., micro-synchronized, as we Remember the late Dave Thomas of Wendy’s
have discovered from film and videotape analysis, with Restaurants?) “Message,” then, strategically deploys
the flow of descriptive language forms. Gestural style to create image in a consequential way.
actions performed while communicating verbally, or, “Message” stylists want good (that is, effective) ones to
sometimes equivalently, simply by communicating be cumulative and lasting among a target set of
nonverbally—like making the Sign of the Cross with addressees. They see “message” as potentially enhanc-
or without a simultaneous blessing of someone or ing somebody’s chances in a “market” that validates
something. A careful student of communication wants that somebody’s worth in a desired and expectable
to record all of these kinds of things, laboriously and way. “Message” projects out from the communica-
in detail. They constitute the additional material along tional here-and-now we’re experiencing as it is being
with which purely descriptive language flows among created. It seeks to connect us with someone’s desired
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futurities in which we and they will play a role. The Dream Machine is a Magnet for “Issues”
So being “on message” contributes to that
consistent, cumulative, and consequential image that a
“Debate the issues! Debate the issues!” some
public person has among his or her addressed audi-
people constantly scream along with the print press—
ence. A really powerful “message” ascribes to me—as
cold type no doubt fancying itself the embodiment of
opposed to describes—my reality. It allows my audi-
steely reason in the media age. Are these cries for
ence to image-ine a whole set of plausible stories in
“issues” reaching the stubbornly deaf ears of the indif-
the fictive universes of the must-have-been, the could-
ferent (i.e., leading or successful) pols and their media
be, and, especially, the sure-as-hell-will-be (“I’ll vote
mavens? Issues are supposed to be the thing, no? Not
for that!”). Votes are such stuff as dreams are made
just a ploy laid on by an invisible, “message”-less
on—and vice versa.
loser? Sure, they are vital matters in which we sever-
ally have stakes, that we can rationally focus upon by
the use of expository communication, language that
lays them out in some denotationally orderly way for
deliberative decision-making—right? Right?
In today’s politics, just as—it turns out—in
past political life, expository communication can play
as large or as little a stylistic role as is required by the
image one’s “message” needs to create. At one
extreme, fringe candidates of both the left and the
right seem to rely too much on civics-book imagery of
The League of Women Voters (no gender affront
intended!). And not only because they are generally
losers in the political process. Taking such manuals
with a bloodless literalism, they always rely on discus-
sion of—as they are called in politics—“the issues.”
Minutely laying out their positions, they treat the vot-
ers to displays of long-winded disquisitions and
debater’s points. They insist on retracing all the steps
of the argument—especially for the convinced faithful,
who get a recharging buzz out of this old-time, from-
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first-principles liturgy. And they hope to appeal as well issues that have that first-principles, wordy-disquisi-
to whoever will listen among outsiders to the faith, tional ring to them. For example, Mr. Clinton’s more-
evangelizing them. It can be a Naderesque (or or-less admitted philandering was an “issue” in the
Chomskian!) argument against documented influence 2000 presidential elections. Republican interests had
of big corporate interests, inexorably moving from sta- long since defined his “bimbo eruptions” in the
tistics to interpretative hypothesis to hortatory plat- Arkansas Democrat[ic] tradition of Governor
form plank. Or it can be an Alan Keyes finding Winthrop Rockefeller and Representative Wilbur
Scriptural bases and other truly first principles to chal- Mills for “message”-relevance. They were offenses
lenge our merely practical patchwork of case-based against traditional marriage (not, for example, matters
legal precedents on abortion—on which he will also of abuse of power crossing gender relations, a left-lib-
demand that other candidates be equally clear and eral—as in “Hey! Their guy!”—issue). It was all but
decisive. declared that that “Women’s Libber”—now Senator—
In both cases, the “message” being conveyed Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed somehow to deserve
is, in actuality, the speaker’s rigidity, narrowness, and her errant husband’s behavior. So Republicans theatri-
myopia. What gets conveyed is a noncompromisable, cally professed moral outrage to all media who would
theory-driven perspective on the world. Its positions listen—as they whispered all the rumored names and
on “the” issues have clear implications for what— dates to all available Special Prosecutors.
purely rationally within that worldview—to do and not It is not surprising then that in the 2000 elec-
to do. In today’s politics, certainly, such issue-con- tion the Democratic presidential candidate sought to
sumed figures can easily be seen as lacking “message” emphasize the self-distancing, countervailing “mes-
entirely, or at least confusing it with the actual set of sage” demanded as much by his own side as by the
“issues” they endlessly discourse about. When the other one. To be sure, when repeatedly asked point
public searches for “message” with these folks—as it blank about the matter, assuming the allegations were
inevitably must, say I—the best it can do is to use the all true, Mr. Gore, then the sitting Vice-President to
label “single-issue candidate,” discerning perhaps Mr. Clinton, had to cast clear, if gentle, aspersions on
some one generalized issue through the interpretative the President’s morality. But that’s merely a somewhat
lens of “message,” no matter how many actual sub- quote-worthy one-liner of judgmental discourse. By
stantive “issues” the candidate may have attempted to contrast, who in the television audience of the
bring up and address. Democratic Convention can forget Mr. Gore’s “sur-
That is not to say that “message” cannot be prise” appearance, violating the tradition of the nomi-
built around “issues”; it always is, or at least must be nee’s seclusion, as he went rushing to the podium to
made to seem so. Just not usually around the kind of give his own actual wife a long, passionate—marital!—
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kiss after she gave a speech? A moment, clearly, to be But how does one get from one of these issues
“on message” in relation to an unspoken (as well as to the next, so that by this form of associative stepping
both unspeakable and unmentionable!) “issue.” from stone to stone, the lot of ’em can be seen to form
Floridly and publicly inhabiting such—as we an available pool of targetable “issues?” If this can be
might term it—zipped fidelity fits into a larger set of achieved, then any one of them, deployed on some
“message”-worthy issues that Mr. Gore and his cam- occasion, summons up the rest, and—read through the
paign were clearly sensitive to as they sought routes to totality—projects into inhabitable image? How does
his own “message” of fundamental personal distinct- what impresses us as the very height of illogic have a
ness, if not radical policy difference, from Mr. Clinton. processual “logic” of its own, such that successful
Republicans, of course, have more generally been mer- politicians’ discourse respects this logic? And where
cilessly beating Democrats with issues of this kind can we see these processes at work, where “issues” get
since the 1960s, as the newly Republican Sunbelt and lumped and turned into “message”-operators available
the Christian right-wing became focal to their electoral for stylistic fashioning of image? How does a politi-
strategy. They have been lump-summed as captioned cian fashion “message” as a kind of magnet for some-
“social issues” for strategic purposes of “message” times randomly assembled “issues,” that clump to it
appeal (and for a systematic and large-scale diversion- like iron filings arrayed in its magnetic field?
ary conspiracy—while S&L’s, Enron, and WorldCom Interestingly, there is in this something of
burn—especially to keep the traditionally Democratic what the great “Russian” (i.e., Soviet and Jewish) psy-
political left permanently occupied in federal court, chologist Lev Vygotskij termed “thinking in com-
burdened with huge legal expenses to litigate before plexes.” A complex, Vygotskij maintained, differs from
increasingly Republican-appointed federal judges). a full rational or scientific concept, though both are
Indeed, to the contemporary Pat-and-Rush segment of discernible in psychological processes of grouping
the politically aware, Bill Clinton’s moral offenses, as things, of classifying them as “the same,” or as
“message”-relevant, were part of a package of issue- instances of some principle of “equivalence.” We
emblems, standing for everything bad from equity fem- might be able to lay out a series of things lumped
inism, Roe v. Wade, and gay liberation, to lack of com- together via thinking-in-complexes so that, taken two-
pulsory school prayer, “government intervention” by by-two, each pair of them will show at least a local
banning (guns) and planning (economies), “socialized “family resemblance” in some respects, but the whole
medicine” (a 1950s AMA expression brought out of lot of things might still be very diverse overall, espe-
mothballs by a desperate George H. W. Bush during cially so for things at distant remove in the process.
the 1992 election campaign!) and thence—of course— (Of course, this is what we find in nature with mem-
to Communism (now perhaps Islam). bers of what are termed “species” in appearance, phys-
22 23
iology, and life-course, the biologists’ “phenotype” and so on, sometimes over very large stretches of talk.
characteristics. And certainly with any examples of At each such jump, the characters and things and situ-
social and cultural phenomena.) ations are, willy-nilly, lined up in a kind of direct or
Psychologically, then, “complex”-thinking is a inverse parallel—a kind of equivalence—to those of
conceptual process that results in classifying things the previous segment of discourse. Trading experi-
together that may be related one to another by analo- ences informally with others, we all engage in this all
gies and other kinds of term-by-term similarity. But the time, the cohesive principle over which is the like-
after the fact, we are sometimes hard-pressed to ness or structured transformation-of-likeness from one
extract what holds this complex together, except that segment to another. “Shooting the breeze” or what-
we have created it by jumping from one thing to the ever one calls it when we dive into conversation with
next. Do you know that game where you start with a “That reminds me of…:” the exemplary people,
spelled-out word and then change one letter at a time things, and situations of such wandering narratives
until you have transformed the original into a word implicitly grow as chained analogues. Such thought-
that makes a striking meaning contrast with the first about but unfocused narrative relations, if seized upon
one? S-I-T > S-I-N > S-U-N > R-U-N. Taken in by a pregnant captioning label or image, suddenly
pairs, the terms in the game looks very, very similar, make the whole analogical series take on a definitive
yet the ones at the two ends of the chain are very, very identity—in fact retrospectively a necessary identity
different. Vygotskij thought that children go through that we now recognize as so many examples of one
more and more stable and encompassing forms of underlying principle, conceptually implicit, even
thinking in complexes, readying the developing mind immanent. “So that’s what it is!”
for true conceptual use of language. He observed that Even the Anglo-American case-law tradition
even for us thinking adults, most of the expressions of operates this way, as the late Attorney-General
our private, fantasy discourses have chain-complex Edward H. Levi long ago noted. The “finding” of
meanings, rather than fully conceptual ones—as does a precedent—as though discovering a set of further
great deal of our own and others’ everyday use of lan- instances of a scientific covering law—for concluding a
guage. case under adjudication is the name of the game. It
Indeed, listen to someone thinking out loud in requires that a brief or a decision create a “deductive”
complexes, sometimes even about very serious matters, argument about analogues across a (historical) chain of
rather than in scientific (i.e., fully rational) conceptual other, already settled cases that, one claims, are to be
terms. One hears, step by step, the way that in the united under a single principle, the one that must be
narrative a particular point begins to morph with applied to this case, here and now—a principle which,
rhetorical liquidity into the plot of another narrative, at the so-called growth edges of law, may have never
24 25
before been explicitly known and labeled as such, Ah! To turn the chance of mere occasion into
note! So chain-complex gives birth to concept. (Given the necessity of my—of our—destiny! (Hence we can
the case-by-case way our legal process operates, it’s no understand Mr. Gore’s attempt to become a magnetic
wonder lawyers on political missions itch to get the “message” for issues of inspiringly, refreshingly clean
proverbial foot-in-the-door case on issues like restrict- living in high places with his stylized impetuous kiss of
ing abortion, or search and seizure, or rights to “still-hot-to-trot-with-you-dear” middle-aged marital
firearms, in order to begin establishing an analogic fidelity.) Success at this has been, is, and will continue
chain complex in which conceptually rationalizable to be the genius of the electorally successful in our
“precedent” can be discovered.) kind of politics. That is the challenge to the fringe
In politics, likewise, it’s chain complexes of kooks who would “issue” us to death (“Hey! You’re
“issues” all the way down. Issues are the raw semiotic not talking about the [my] issues!”) without ever get-
material, the things-in-reality. To give birth to “mes- ting to “message.” Their “message” is the invidious
sage” issues must be brought together—given plot and one pinned on them by others like the proverbial tail
characters, rhyme if not reason—in occasions devoted on the donkey (even a non-Democratic one!), in stark
to the making of image. The best occasions of this contrast to their “message”-savvy opponents.
sort combine the use of verbal discourse situated in Let’s see how “message” emerges at the two
the context of a reinforcing sound-and-light show. In extremes of our political alphabet thus far: Abe and
good political spectacle, whether experienced or “W.”
merely imagined, the verbiage and other recognizable
cultural symbols have to resonate one with another. A
political figure needs to communicate—or to have
been understood to communicate—the analogic
“identity,” the equivalence, of issues that go into “mes-
sage” by fashioning organized, potent displays of
them. The analogic bridge is critical, regardless of
whether or not a linguistic communication “makes
sense,” scientifically or “conceptually”—though, as
we’ll see, until recently a fault of this sort was consid-
ered embarrassing. Success comes to him or her who
can be positioned to embody the very essence, the
principle, the “right stuff” that holds these issues
together—“me.”
26 27

The Dash to “Message” in the Age of Plains and Prairie territories opening up to Euro-
American settlement. How to Americanize and
Telegraphy domesticate the frontier became one of the fronts for
the slavery issue. Year after year, a series of
Of course in the 1860s the media cycles so Congressional tugs-of-war cycled around it. These
essential to “message” worked at a slightly slower pace struggles strained the very fibers binding the country
than ours. No remote-location videocamera broad- together. Religiously inspired, evangelical moralists
casting. Events (even stenographic transcripts of whipped up sentiment for abolition of slavery on the
speeches) could be reported to headquarters via teleg- one side, even as their equally pious counterparts on
raphy, and then circulated by newspapers and maga- the other side scripturally affirmed the justness of per-
zines and such. Editorially shaped, they circulated by petuating it.
print dissemination of news and opinion about them. In his own political self-alignment, first Whig
Lithographic images of events and personalities, and then Republican, Lincoln came out clearly against
broadsides, and cartoons and caricatures were an slavery, but stopped far short of the religious fervor of
essential part of mass print media. (Cartoons really those on the Abolitionist extreme. As a rising Illinois
came into their own, in fact, in the 1860 and especially politician in mid-century, he became very visible on
1864 campaigns.) Adjusting for this, we can learn the national stage by his 1858 senatorial run against
much about the enduring substance of style from how Stephen A. Douglas. Publicly, Lincoln fashioned his
Mr. Lincoln’s only fitfully successful “message” got a pro-Union arguments in the more strictly
new birth at Gettysburg—and defined him just in time Constitutionalist terms that would see and call the
for the impending (“North”-only) 1864 presidential Democratic Party’s—and especially Douglas’—poker-
election cycle! game legislative tactics over the new territories. He
It was no big deal that Mr. Lincoln—a savvy advanced these issues as fronts for the sl-word (utter-
politician from frontier beginning to martyred end— ing which too clearly in the 1858 Illinois race against
did, in fact, shift in the weight he accorded to specific Stephen Douglas—and perhaps sounding too much
“issues” over the course of his political career. like the Abolitionist extremists—may well have been a
Circumstances demanded no less. The biggest issue factor in Lincoln’s loss). Lincoln was clearly on record
was, of course, slavery, which had been driving apart as what we would term today a “white supremacist”;
the sectional interests of the country for several nonetheless, he committed himself at minimum to
decades. (It was the elephant in the Republican Party’s contain slavery territorially as an embarrassment of
tent.) By dominating political parties, sectional inter- long standing, and certainly to sanitize the new
ests competed to capture for themselves the newer Western territories from it. Ultimately, he argued, this
28 29
would attenuate its economic grip everywhere and was de facto about two regionally based economic sys-
thus, in the end, serve the Union to be rid of it. tems, one of them based on slave labor and therefore
The crisis deepened, of course. The various repugnant to the idea of America that Jefferson’s
political maneuvers hardened the determination of the Declaration had argued in 1776 and that Madison’s
two great sectional interests. One side formed the Constitution had formed into “a more perfect union”
Northern and Midwestern manufacturing economy, in 1787. This has certainly become central to
wage-labor-based, with its agricultural and extractive Lincoln’s most enduring “message.”
hinterlands. The other side was the Southern agrarian Of course, he eventually acknowledged the
plantocracy, plantation-centered and based heavily on Abolitionists’ moral argument that condemned slavery
racially marked slave labor and various forms of inden- altogether. He even embraced it de jure—viz., the
ture. Emancipation Proclamation announced in late 1862
After all the decades of thrust and parry in the and other measures. Lincoln was reelected in 1864 as
skirmishes over slavery, at issue ultimately for Lincoln a Union victory was just a matter of time, and his sec-
were the sacred and, for him, transcendent and irrevo- ond Inaugural Address of 4 March 1865, a month
cable Union and its national constitutional processes. before his Good Friday assassination, is a pietistic
To what degree could the several states and territories preachment on this theme of slave labor, strategically
go their separate ways with respect to property rights, downplaying the sectionalism of moral indignation.
rights of seizure, and rights of legal nullification and With profound, biblical phrasing Lincoln sees slavery
even secession? In a noticeably sectional election in and its resulting war as a plague visited on all of
November 1860 Lincoln became, in effect, the American humanity by a classic Old Testament God.
Northern and Pacific Coast President. (He got 2.48% He concluded with his humble Christian call for his
of the votes in Maryland, 1.13% in Virginia, and countrymen’s “malice toward none” and “charity for
0.93% in Kentucky, for example, and otherwise none all” in “achiev[ing] and cherish[ing] a just and lasting
south of the Ohio River.) So, however lawyerly were peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” Amen.
his Daniel Webster-like arguments for maintaining the A prayer come straight out of the liturgy!
Union in response to the crisis—reviewed ever so In such a turn of phrase, we glimpse one of
carefully in his first Inaugural Address on 4 March the hallmarks of Lincoln’s “message.” It was consis-
1861—by the time he was sworn into office the course tent all during his rise to political prominence, even
had been prepared for descent into civil war with the though it became more majestically embellished and
secessionist Confederacy. most widely appreciated only in his martyrdom: he
Only with hostilities under way do his highly was, Christ-like (assassinated on Good Friday!), the
public communications recognize that the Civil War very embodied recapitulation of the narrative—the
30 31
word made flesh—of American civic morality. “Out of Awakenings and the mid-nineteenth century
the very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown,” Evangelical denominationalisms. The sometimes fiery
as Boston Brahmin James Russell Lowell had termed preacherly talk associated with them led ordinary
him, Lincoln the autodidact frontiersman had people into irrationality: merely “feeling” God’s pres-
matured into the plain-speaking, practical Evangelical ence in exuberant manifestations. But this provides to
Christian preacher of and for this special nation’s many a template for the effervescence of participation
indissoluble, transcendent moral unity “under God.” in the civil religion to which Lincoln at his “message”
He, the natural Everyman of American soil, was ulti- best still calls us. A mystical patriotism of feeling,
mately to save America from itself—that is, from the called forth in spectacle by virtuoso deployment of
wicked, unjust ways into which at least some of the verbal and other presentational styles.
brethren had fallen—through his own determined Lincoln’s actual physical voice was not an ora-
self-sacrifice. tor’s; it was apparently somewhat thin, reedy, and rel-
For many people, then, Lincoln embodied in atively high-pitched. He was, if not actually uncom-
his life—as he does more universally in the everlast- fortable in extemporaneous speaking, not at what he
ing civic life that is his death—the true American thought to be his best on such occasions. As
voice. It is a voice that, in his turn, Carl Sandburg President, he demurred from a great many such
was both to characterize and to recapture for a later requests—even on the evening before the Gettysburg
generation: a sacred voice of civic plain-spokenness, triumph—preferring to read aloud from his carefully
inspired with Christian reason and able to articulate composed and reworked written texts or even having
with conviction what is right and what is wrong in the them read out for him. And after a speech was deliv-
world around it. Plainness, that anti-high-church ered, he closely managed its editing and transmission
virtue of so much of American Evangelical in print. In his younger days he was known to hover
Protestantism, means also not being carried away by over telegraph and newspaper desks whence emanated
pomp of occasion or of high office in institutions of the texts to be circulated to his public.
power. In our civic life, later generations have revered It is clear that Lincoln was something of an
Lincoln for these embodied qualities, as they have intellectual, if only self-taught in the craft aspects of
also liked Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan for the the gentlemanly arts of the well-bred still easily mis-
same reason (whatever trouble they have had with taken for deep thought. Even so he managed to con-
“Give-‘em-Hell” Harry’s style of its expression). stitute a “message” of the quintessential American—
The downside of this “message,” at least for the forthrightly plain spoken rail-splitter, honest and
the rational elites, is the kind of anti-intellectualism direct; this voice speaks with a knowledge of the
that Richard Hofstadter traces to the Great sacred texts of both Christian and civil religion. He
32 33
came to inhabit this “message” of America that he Death and Life at Gettysburg
himself, along with the press, was able to fashion.
When spoken, Lincoln’s best prose was the
And of all of the sacred Lincolniana, The
oral poetry of plain style. As “message” its style res-
Gettysburg Address, once memorized by generations
onated with ministerial and liturgical language even
of elementary school children, has become the most
more than with the famous declamations of Daniel
hallowed text in America’s civil religious canon. It
Webster, Henry Clay and other orators that Lincoln,
epitomizes the voice of Lincoln, and hence the voice
among many, studied. The style was the currency of
of America itself. It was a peak moment of Lincoln’s
all the quintessentially American Protestant sects and
“message,” crafted to be such, a kind of apotheosis of
denominations making up the very voting publics in
his political life for which he has been evermore
the northern and border states. Wishfully projecting,
remembered. Professional scholars of rhetoric may
contemporaries marveled at how Lincoln spoke in
revere his second Inaugural; us plain folks have inter-
simple prose—like Shakespeare, it was said, and like
nalized The Gettysburg Address. As it alludes to and
God’s Word in the King James and later, even plainer
quotes the Declaration of Independence, so even the
English-language Bibles. These texts are the emblems
Pledge of Allegiance was altered in turn to quote it
of enduring “Englishness” of culture that the mini-
(“…[one] nation, under God…”); and the three now
mally educated would know of, even if they did not
constitute a recitational triad, an integral series of
know them. Lincoln was appreciated for composing
great moments of the people’s rhetoric.
his texts with what people identified as “Anglo-Saxon”
Why? Let’s look at this text, and at the very
words, rather than in complicated, Greco-Latinate
occasion of its first delivery, the dedication ceremony
words and phrases. Many people of the time were
of the national cemetery on the site of the famous bat-
already jittery about immigrants and newly acquired
tle. In retrospect, myths have grown up around both
Western populations, let alone about African
text and occasion that reveal why this was a magical
Americans. Lincoln’s “message” to them must have
moment in political “message”ing. The Gettysburg
been a soothing racial balm, it is clear, as much as he
Address has become what we might call a “eucharistic”
himself carefully addressed the time-bomb issue of
text of American identity. In the Eucharist of a
race. In crisis, the simpler “Anglo-Saxon” heritage of
Christian church service, our symbolic incorporation
America, welling up from a mythic era even before the
(eating and drinking) of Christ’s transubstantiated
country’s founding moment, rescues—preserves, sus-
“Body and Blood” ritually results, contrariwise, in our
tains, gives new birth to—the nation. Under God.
being incorporated into His body and blood made cor-
porate on earth, the fellowship and institution of the
34 35
church. (Lincoln actually plays upon this Eucharistic that once the larger public could read the transcript in
chiasmus, the figure of the cross, as upon Christ’s—and the next-day’s newspapers, it began to steal Everett’s
all Christian, let alone Hellenic—martyrdom, in his thunder. (How ironic, too! This was for a second time:
speech.) Similarly, for generations Americans have re- in his oration Everett declared that he himself had
read and re-cited The Gettysburg Address like a been misguided in a politics of appeasement before
creed; in this, we reaffirm and transformatively renew the 1860 election—having run against Lincoln as the
and enhance our own incorporation into the American Vice-Presidential candidate of the Constitutional-
nation-state. Union Party, the party advocating any compromise
It is almost embarrassing to speak of this 270- whatsoever to get the Rebels back from the brink!)
odd-word text as an “address,” though Lincoln did, But Lincoln knew a “message” opportunity
indeed, “address” his audience at that sad place on 19 when it presented itself. He had sought to be present
November 1863. It was only a little over four months at the solemn gathering, since he understood more
since the Battle of Gettysburg had concluded on the than anyone how mired he was in political controver-
3rd of July that year. (Note: it was a series of attacks sies relating to the first foundering, then merely stum-
by the Confederate forces that the Union had repulsed bling Union military campaign, to his having sus-
just in time for the 4th of July, whose sacred text is— pended habeas corpus, to the unfair and unpopular mili-
the Declaration of Independence!). The principal ora- tary draft, to widespread war profiteering, and to a
tor of the day was Edward Everett—Senator, runaway economy, among other difficulties. General
Ambassador, Harvard president; Ralph Waldo Meade’s 4th of July non-loss at Gettysburg, and close
Emerson’s role-model—whose spellbinding, classically upon it General Grant’s brilliant success at Vicksburg,
Hellenic funeral oration of two-plus hours the world were, by contrast, important to re-emphasize in late
has little noted nor long remembered. (Everett, the 1863. There was a blistering firestorm of criticism in
main act, took the lead in printing his oration as a the opposition and foreign press, “Honest Abe,”
pamphlet in early 1864, with the President’s remarks “Uncle Abe,” “Father Abraham” images notwithstand-
as part of the additional material. The Everett text is ing on the part of loyal media. Lincoln sensed how
accessibly reprinted as Appendix III.A. in Garry Wills’ precariously perched he was in relation to the upcom-
1992 best-seller, Lincoln at Gettysburg [Simon & ing 1864 elections in which one of his former com-
Schuster].) manding generals, George McClellan, was already
By contrast, the President’s “dedicatory sure to be the Democratic candidate, and his own cab-
remarks” (as the program listed Lincoln’s address) inet member, Salmon P. Chase of Treasury, was vigor-
constitutes a ritual poem so perfectly “on message”— ously angling—only one among many—to supplant
even beyond the ritual space in which it was recited— him as the Republican one. (Neither appeared at
36 37
Gettysburg, though both had been invited by the beyond that time and place. Think of the “text” of a
sponsoring multi-state “Board of Commissioners for ritual like a wedding—the sum total of what is said by
the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg.”) participants, what is played, danced, sung, how it is all
The cemetery dedication was shaping up as a moved through space-and-time, displayed, etc. The
very Republican event, orchestrated by the prominent text gets its transformative effectiveness or “oomph” as
Republican head Commissioner, Judge David Wills of a function of a dense, internal arrangement of mean-
Gettysburg, in a state of a very loyal Republican ingful symbols as they are experienced together and
Governor, Andrew G. Curtin. In fact, sensing that this refract off one another. Ritual texts project an air of
was the equivalent of what today we term a “photo self-sufficiency about themselves, as though emerging
op” in front of a friendly audience, some of the press densely and fully formed from realms not of this usual
criticized it as nothing more than a campaign show, world and context. That’s both necessary to, and part
“Patriotic Gore,” indeed! Still, only a rather offhand of, the “magic.”
invitation came to Lincoln at the beginning of Not that rituals actually are divorced from
November: asking him, as Chief Executive, to make “a their immediate and more remote contexts; quite the
few appropriate remarks” after the main funeral ora- opposite. Rituals are completely creatures of the con-
tion. (For this, to draw a crowd they had first secured text in which they take place. (Rhetoricians speak of
the services of Everett, whose busy schedule—not this “epideictic” quality of ritual speech, for example,
Lincoln’s—set the actual date). Even to secure the but do not seem to know how to explain how it
invitation for Lincoln, the Illinois Commissioner, works—or why in fact all language is “epideictic!”) But
Clark E. Carr, had to argue against widely shared ritual texts manage to draw the context into them-
doubts about “his ability to speak upon such a grave selves, because every symbol in a tightly structured rit-
and solemn occasion as that of the memorial services.” ual gets its specific, “this-ritual” loading for special
That Lincoln used the solemn ritual occasion to effectiveness from the overall structure of the text
advantage for his “message” is, of course, an under- itself. What was externally only wafer and wine are
statement. Even the viciously critical among the press, Body and Blood within the ritual spacetime; and, in
in dismissing it, understood in their negativity that it turn, they constitute “sacrificed” Lamb of God, the
solidified the terms of Lincoln’s political persona— “sacrifice” being instanced in their consumption.
what we would call his “message.” Ritual symbols, then, are—to borrow the sectarian
Now any ritual occasion—not only a cemetery term—“transubstantiated” from merely ordinary stuff,
dedication—is one that participants feel is transforma- be it a word or expression, a color, a melody, a move-
tive. It envelops people in a bounded spacetime where ment of people’s bodies in a laid-out space. Drawn in
something “magical” happens, with effects lasting from everyday experience to be part of an organized
38 39
design, the symbols become design elements in an of the ritual. Both words and spatiality are central to
overall figurative portrait or picture (the technical the original Lincoln text. Let’s look at how they
term is diagram) of what the text is supposed to effec- work.
tuate in its particular context. The verbal text of the Gettysburg Address
In this way a ritual text paints a picture of what operates, not at the level of syllables, as in poetic dog-
it accomplishes in relation to that context and can gerel, but in two other features of composition. (I
change our experience of the context to the degree we attempt to lay this out visually in the accompanying
accept the picture. And we accept it emotionally as structural chart of its poetics.) One is the syntactic
well as otherwise. Recall my earlier discussion of construction of the sentences. Lincoln accomplishes a
Vygotskij here. A ritual symbolically creates contextu- kind of incantation by repeating simple forms. This
ally experienced chain-complexes of ideas; how a ritual results, cumulatively, in long chains of parallelism,
causes this in those who experience it, even at second repetition of key words and sets of words that serve as
hand, is its measure of effectiveness. And it is impor- his operant ritual symbols. A second, cumulative
tant to recall that these are intuited ideas—laden with effect comes from creating a “fractally” repeating
affect or emotion as they hit us—of how people, structure—doing the same thing at level upon level
things, and situations fit together one with another, upon level of textual form. The text breaks in the
how they ought to fit together, and how, mystically middle, at what I have labeled segment [4], “It is alto-
speaking, they are destined to fit together. Ritually gether fitting and proper that we should do this.”
speaking, doesn’t every marriage ceremony in our own This comments, in essence, on the propriety of saying
day turn what began as a chance meeting into predes- and thereby doing what the speaker, Lincoln, if suc-
tined wedded couplehood? cessful, is in fact doing together with the other people
In the ritual medium of words in particular, present: “dedicat[ing] a portion of [the Gettysburg
uttering them over speaking time “paints” the ritual battle]field” as a government military cemetery.
“picture.” It is just as in music, where the measured (Lincoln’s early draft of segment [4] is, “This we may,
(“metrical”) organization of tones, singly and in in all propriety do.” Pretty lame, though it does serve
chords, constitutes a rhythmic poetry over the dura- to break the wonderful repetitive rhythms of [1-3]
tion of a piece. Or, consider the medium of spatial and [5-6]. The rephrased sentence, with its formulaic
arrangement of people and things. Here, a ritual “pic- altogether fitting and proper and its do this empha-
ture” is painted in two ways. First, by the two- or sized in a subordinate clause at the very end, reminds
three-dimensional static relative positions of ritually one of Christ’s injunction to “do this for me.”
relevant people and things. Second, by their dynamic Lincoln takes up, in parallel, what “it is for us” to do
relative movements in space, if any, over the duration in the very complex sixth and final major segment.)
40 41
As I noted, ritual text is, at once, completely challenge and destiny that are the cruces of the text.
dependent for its effectiveness on the context in which Here, the birth/death/re-birth of the political nation
it occurs, which it “pictorially” attaches to and trans- (whose shaky government of/by/for the people
forms in some appropriately experienceable way. At Lincoln happened to head) and the eternal
the same time, principles of dense internal organiza- “endur[ance]” of the nation’s soul (“Liberty” or “free-
tion of its symbolic elements give ritual text a sem- dom” and “equal[ity]”) are the issues Lincoln brings
blance of self-sufficient autonomy from its physical together in parallel at the focal point. Yet there at the
context. At Gettysburg, Lincoln anchored his actual focal point stands the unpronounced “I” at the center
performance first to the immediate and proximate of his enunciated “we:” summoning all the copartici-
context of the cemetery dedication and second to the pants in his text, those named as well as those present,
remoter context of the history and destiny of the to what the speaker, Abraham Lincoln, stands for in
nation—at that time under a cloud of uncertainty (just the way of “unfinished work.” Because of this double
as was his own political future). Seizing on the uncer- contextualization that Lincoln built in to the perfor-
tainty—indeed, making it the overall “to-be-or-not- mance, the printed Gettysburg Address still speaks to
to-be” theme—he incorporates in his verbal text us with a power rarely equaled in American public
America’s “fathers,” its current “honored dead,” veter- rhetoric. As a textually robust ritualization in words,
ans and soldiers of the battle, as well as his (still living) it can even be extracted from its context with its “mes-
audience of (perhaps waveringly loyal) other sage” intact. Certainly Lincoln thought so; he contin-
Americans—together with himself—as a totalized rit- ued to refine the text with minor re-wordings after the
ual “we.” He speaks of “[the] nation” in both historical event—making it even better as a poetic ritual text—as
and mystical time: “four score and seven years ago” to he several times supplied new handwritten copies for
“now” in the first part of his remarks, “[the] larger later commemorative distribution.
sense” of its futurity being on “the earth” “under Let’s turn to the mechanics of the text-in-con-
God” in the second. In this way, ordinary space and text. First, the internal metrical organization of the
time of history in segments [1-3] are made parallel to verbal material, and then how the features of context
the mystical Christian realm in segments [5-6]. contribute to these metaphorically chained symbolic
Lincoln uses the physical arrangement of the equivalences in the overall “message” event.
ritual site to organize the relations of all the people In Figure 1 I give a diagram of the structures I
named as well as summoned to dedicatory effort. At am talking about, in order to allow you to follow the
the schematically apical top-and-center of the site he, text and its analysis. I have numbered and lettered the
Lincoln, “that nation’s” Chief Magistrate and major segments of the text that Lincoln spoke accord-
Commander-in-Chief, stands to call his audience to its ing to the tiered organization of clause-like units of
 Figure 1.

[1] Four score and seven years ago

our fathers brought forth
on this continent, a new nation,
.a] conceived
in LIBERTY
.b] and DEDICATED TO
the proposition that
.1] all men are created
EQUAL.
[2] Now
we are engaged in a great civil war,
.a] testing
.a]
whether
.1a] that nation,
.2b]
or << any nation
.1] so conceived
.2]
and SO DEDICATED
long can…endure.
[3 .a] We are met on a great battle[-]
field of that war.
.b] We [are met]/
have come
.1] TO DEDICATE
a portion of that field,
as a final resting place
for those
.a] who here gave their lives
.1]that that nation ≠ might live.
[4] It is altogether fitting and proper
.a] that we SHOULD DO THIS.
[5a.a]
But,<< in a larger sense,
 .1] we CANNOT DEDICATE –
.2] we << CANNOT CONSECRATE –
.3] we << CANNOT HALLOW
this ground.
.b] The brave men
.1]
living
and
.2] ≠ dead
.a] who struggled here HAVE CONSECRATED
it, far beyond
.a] our ≠ poor power
.1] to add
or
.2] ≠ [to] detract.
[5b] The world
.a.1] little will…note
.a.2] <<
nor ≠ long [will] remember
.a] what
we SAY here,
but
.b] ≠ it >> never can…forget
.a] what
they DID here.
[6a] It is for
us the living,
rather,
.1] here TO BE DEDICATED... TO
the unfinished work
.a] which
they
.1] who fought here thus far so nobly
have…advanced.
[6b] It is… for
χ rather
us
 .1] χ here TO BE... DEDICATED TO
the great task
.1] remaining
beff o re
us –
.a]
that f ro m these HONORed dead
we TAKE increased DEVOTION TO
that cause
.1]
for which
they GAVE << the last full measure of DEVOTION –
.b] that
we here highly RESOLVE
.1] that these dead
shall…have died
…not…in vain –
.2] that this nation ,
under God, ≠ shall have a new birth
of FREEDOM –
.3] and that government
.a] of the people,
.b] by the people,
.c] for the people, << shall not perish from
THE EARTH.
48 49
sentence-structure. At the same time, I have orga- simple sentence-subject and simple predicate (with or
nized the component unit-sized words and expressions without a preceding temporal adverbial—like four
of his prose into vertical columns to emphasize what I score and seven years ago—to set up the time frame).
believe are the remarkable verbal parallelisms, repeti- Most of the sentences conclude not with a simple
tions, and progressions that operate according to their noun, but with an appended object or complement
own special effects, much as in poetry, music, and construction to which are appended additional modi-
graphic art. Chains of such elements are lined up ver- fiers that prolong the basic, simple sentence. As a sen-
tically (as syntax allows), linked by being given similar tence unfolds in time within the complements or mod-
font and diacritic treatment, to indicate chain-complex ifiers, a yet further modifying phrase hangs onto modi-
equivalence or identity or, for various pairs and triads fying phrase in a structurally very rhythmic arrange-
of terms, special effects like chain-complexes of oppo- ment that creates a cascading series of memorable,
siteness (≠) or complementarity ( ), or semantic almost autonomous phrases of greatly resonant power.
crescendo (<<) and decrescendo (>>) effects. (These For example, right in the initial segment,
operate as well at the level of clauses, of course, as marked [1] in the accompanying figure, we have the
marked.) Nevertheless, the chart attempts to preserve simple clause [Subject:] our fathers—[Predicate:]
the customary left-to-right and top-to-bottom printing brought forth a new nation. To this Lincoln adds the
conventions so the text can be read normally from complex and parallel modifiers explaining what kind of
beginning to end. Where the rhetorical structure dic- nation they created relevant to the “message” of this
tates, some material has had to be charted out of the occasion. It is a nation, Lincoln declares, [1.a] con-
spoken order of denotational text. Accordingly, three ceived in liberty (passive participle followed by preposi-
dots (...) appear in the place where a word that is else- tional phrase), and one [1.b] dedicated to the proposi-
where plotted actually occurs in Lincoln’s text (it can tion (again, passive participle followed by prepositional
generally be located in my chart immediately before phrase). But which proposition? Another modifier
the marked gap or, rarely, as the following word in the expands, this one a full clause that quotes Mr.
same clause). The structure will become clearer as we Jefferson’s immortal text in the Declaration of
follow along. Independence: the proposition (or truth, we might say)
Lincoln organizes the whole text into a First [1.b.1] that all men are created equal. This structure
Part—Pause—Second Part structure, like a conical fig- rolls along from beginning to end, unfolding in a way
ure of two nappes meeting at their vertex (segment by adding deeper and deeper levels of grammatical
[4]). He structures each sentence internally to give structure.
maximal rhetorical presence and force to the important But this principle of composition even intensi-
concepts. Every sentence starts out, basically, with a fies as Lincoln moves from beginning to end. By the
50 51
text’s finale in segment [6], Lincoln lays out in seg- another symbol that he places in parallel to it, making
ments [6a] and [6b] the things for us the living to be a balanced pair at a relevant position within their
(here) dedicated to accomplishing so as truly to dedi- respective grammatical phrases: thus even within the
cate the cemetery. Here, his text gets very deeply first segment, our fathers [agent subject]—all men
embedded in syntactic complexity, level after level [patient subject] and brought forth [active]—are cre-
after level, the last unit [6b.l.b.3.c] resulting from five- ated [passive] are two pairs in tandem, like mirror-
fold nesting of phrases within phrases. The unfinished images nicely rounding out the two full clauses of [1];
work in [6a] of those who fought at Gettysburg is conceived (in)—dedicated (to) participial phrases used
spelled out in [6b] as our great task remaining and it is in describing the United States; liberty—equal[ity]
enumerated in multiple parallel formations, for exam- each as its phrase-culminating value we get from the
ple [6b.1.a] parallel to [6b.1.b]; within the latter, nation’s founding fraternity.
[6b.1.b.1] parallel to [6b.1.b.2] and to [6b.1.b.3]; and More importantly, note also what we can term
so forth. As each phrase occurring at some level of the Lincoln’s cantillation with tremolo on particular ritual
complex structure seems to come to completion, we points central to his “message”—his elaborate, decora-
are treated to yet another example of the same princi- tive emphasis of them by repetition (that we can see in
ples of composition all over again, as what we thought the vertical columnar array of Figure 1). Through rep-
was the last word bursts open with yet another con- etition-with-variation, the basic principle of poetic
struction to complete the thought. parallelism, Lincoln highlighted certain words and
So, even considered as a denotational text, a phrases as the vehicles of the central symbols of this
structured message in the informational sense, the ritual (a new nation [1] > that nation [2.a.a.1.a]—any
whole has what we would now call a “fractal” beauty nation [so conceived …] [2.a.a.1.b] > that nation
of structure. Think of the kind of aerial fireworks that, [3.b.1.a.1]; this nation” [6b.1.b.2]. (Here, also note the
shot up high, bursts open in sequential stages as its culminative progression, a > that [parenthetical any] >
remaining parts float down in the sky, each array of that > this, getting ultimately to the ritual “here-and-
color hanging in the air for a moment to dazzle us and now” nation that matters.) In several places, Lincoln
then in turn bursting into further, similarly dazzling repeats exactly the same linguistic forms with poeti-
color. It is the ultimate stuff, placed toward the end of cally new meanings each time—punning in a way that
every one of Lincoln’s rhetorical segments, that gives seizes our attention: conceived in [1.a] vs. so conceived
the central symbolic oomph to the whole segment and [2.a.a.1.a] plays on the senses of reproduction vs. ratio-
to its import for the whole ritual text. nal thought, figuratively making the key point about
At the same time, Lincoln develops for each what differentiates this nation from others. Again,
important symbol its proper emphasis in relation to dedicated (to) [1.b; 2.a.a.2.b.2] vs. to dedicate [3.b.1;
52 53
5a.a.1] plays on the difference between goal-orienta- his addressees, until he makes the physical ground
tion vs. ritually setting aside or consecrat[ing] [5a.a.2; part, in the larger sense, of the cosmic eternal of
5a.b]. Observe how the two senses are merged and fig- God’s—not merely humanity’s—earth: this ground
uratively equated, with passive construction, in [5a.a] > here and it [5a.b.a] (> 8 times here or equiva-
Lincoln’s twice calling for “us” to dedicate ourselves— lent) > this nation under God [6b.1.b.2] > the earth
that is, for us ourselves to be dedicated to [6a.1; [6b.1.b.3]. Lincoln starts from the “here-and-now” he
6b.1]—the unfinished work of the great civil war and had reached at the end of the first part, and draws it
thus of this nation. He also uses whole series or up not into mere human futurity, though to be sure he
sequences of words and phrases closely related in appeals to his audience in terms of what it is for
meaning to create the framework of overall metaphors [them] to do after the ceremonial occasion. His call is,
in which his ritual theme is established: (the nation’s) rather, for the rebirth of the freedom articulated in the
birth in history > (for humans,) actual or (for the Declaration of Independence, that is, for the sacred
nation,) threatened death > rebirth in or to (human) futurity of an eternal principle. This abstract value will
immortality or (national) cosmic eternity. not perish from the earth nor will this nation, under
Lincoln’s progressions of nested repetitions God, in that sacred order if the audience will only
first zoom in relentlessly within the spatial realm, like dedicate themselves to carrying on with the great task
a camera focusing us down, down, down; it is a field of remaining before us in the temporal order. The audi-
meaning made orderly in the very textual order of the ence will thereby join in the cosmic category he cre-
ritual: this continent [1] > a great battlefield [3.a] > a ates in this very ritual text, one that includes the
portion of that field and a final resting place (i.e., Revolutionary Era fathers, the Civil War Era dead sol-
‘graves’) [3.b.1] > here [3.b.l.a]. In this first half of the diers now buried “here,” those (here) still living, and
ritual text, he is tracing events in historical time as most of all the very individual who is grammatically at
well, first the founding of the nation on a principle or the center of and focused upon by the little inclusive
proposition; then the “testing” of that principle or word “we:” the speaker, Abraham Lincoln himself,
proposition—note how an exception “proves,” i.e., their Commander-in-Chief, their Chief Magistrate,
tests, a rule or timeless generalization—by the war their Executive, their President.
that is the ongoing reality; then the actual immediate We can note these poetic progressions inde-
present of the occasion itself, face-to-face with the pendent of any overall “logic” rhetoricians want to
dead and with each other. What to say or do now? find in the text—it’s technically merely an exhortation
Quite brilliantly, in the second half of the rit- to greater resolve in the war effort, now figuratively
ual, Lincoln precipitously zooms out again, though wrapped in eternal principle. The whole emergent text
always anchored in the “here-and-now” he shares with moves through two familiar orders, the temporal and
54 55
the eternal, manipulating symbols that draw people [5.a.b] in each sub-part of [5a] draws a contrast
and events in the first order together with forces and between us, the living, more this-worldly, and the
destinies in the second. So we can see why certain dead, now become eternal (buried, they have joined
things are constantly repeated and embellished “our fathers”). As a higher-level unit, [5a] as a whole,
through the whole text to show that they retain their dealing with these specific actors in the nation’s pre-
essence in both realms. Such are, for example, Liberty sent moment, is contrasted with [5b], which is framed
[1.a] and equal[ity] [1.b.1] at the initial, conceptual and by how the world—a generalized actor—is presumed
dedicatory founding moment of the new nation. to evaluate the contrast in [5a]. The significant differ-
These are recuperated in the cosmic realm of eternity ence the world will understand is between what we say
at the very end by “our” resolution to give a new birth here [5b.a.a], feebly trying, with words, to dedicate an
to freedom [6b.1.b.2]. earth(l)y memorial, and what they did here [5b.a.b],
Again, note the fractal structure of repetitions succeeding, with deeds, in consecrating it for eternity.
in positioning expressions for the United States, its Segment [6a] takes up the theme of [5a] once
history, its destiny. In segment [1], a new nation, a more: since our words alone will not succeed in dedi-
specific thing, is dedicated to the equality of all men cat[ing] this ground [5a.a], rather we must dedicate
[1.b.1], in the realm of general concepts; in [2], pre- ourselves, i.e., we must be dedicated [6a.1], to com-
cisely parallel, the fate of that nation [2.a.a.1a]—spe- pleting what they who fought here [6a.1.a.1] struggled
cific—is linked to the fate of any nation [2.a.a.2b]— [5a.b.2.a] to do. This specific unfinished work [6a.1]—
general—similarly conceived and dedicated. The which the crowd, in context, must have understood to
whole first part, the historical recitation of events, be the cause of the Union—is in parallel fashion ele-
concludes with Lincoln, using the modal might, mak- vated in [6b] to the great task remaining before us
ing contingent the continuing life of that nation [6b.1] in a generalized eternal realm. Being dedicated
[3.b.1.a.1], the one whose history has been recited in to the specific is, in parallel fashion, equated to being
outline from founding to Civil War to the Gettysburg dedicated to the general—to the cosmic fate of these
battle to the precarious “now.” Here is the crux of the dead [6b.1.b.1], of this nation [, under God,]
moment to hand. [6b.1.b.2], and of a principle of government [6b.1.b.3],
Then, in the second part, where Lincoln is all of which Lincoln anchors to the very site: “here,”
speaking in the “larger sense” of futurities of the where “we,” the living make the dead immortal.
sacred and eternal, he repeatedly uses exactly the same Within the last segment [6b.1.b] that calls Lincoln’s
structure of contrasts of specific and general. In [5a] audience to purposive resolve, note yet again the
and [5b], this same opposition is twice nested. We in three-part crescendo of abstractness in the parallelism:
[5a.a] and the brave men (who struggled here) in [6b.1.b.1] is a resolve to redeem the specific fact of the
56 57
soldiers’ deaths; [6b.1.b.2] is a resolve for the resurrec- ence or reader has any doubts left about the ritual task
tion of freedom in this nation, under God (whose con- he is summoning us to—he spells it out in the explic-
ception in Liberty is recalled from [1.a]); while itly defining performative formula for how, in democ-
[6b.1.b.3] is a resolve to render eternal the abstract ratic assembly, the people take binding action: we here
principle, given in the ringing phrase (borrowed and highly resolve (that…) [6b.1.b (.1,.2,.3)].
refashioned from many earlier writers) government of Observe the progression. In [1-3], dedicate
the people, by the people, for the people which, then, keeps its active voice, but shifts between [1-2]—where
shall not perish from the earth. the meaning is commitment to an eternal truth—and
But the two major parts of the text work simi- [3]—where the ongoing ritual event is named as a
larly. Lincoln recounts in [1] to [3] the whole set of dedicat[ion] [3.b.1], a setting-aside, the doing of
historical—and therefore specific—precedents for which, in [4], Lincoln judges to be altogether fitting
being at Gettysburg on that November day. In [5] and and proper. In [5-6], note, the earlier punning disjunc-
[6] respectively, he turns to the set of first moral and tion is made clearer in [the] larger sense. First, if we
then, additively, performative contingencies and futuri- cannot dedicate…this ground [5a.a], i.e., set it aside,
ties, the ones that depend upon and would follow on we certainly cannot consecrate it [5a.a.2], i.e., really
Lincoln’s success at forging a resolute “we.” These and truly commit it to the sacred eternal, as clergy or
futurities can be made real—can be made consecrated similar Christian religious officiants would do. Nor
flesh, as it were—only if the ritual is successful, if it certainly can we hallow it [5a.a.3], i.e., make it sacred
draws its speaker and addressees together in the unity in the first place, which only God can do. Notice that
it declares. those who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg are said
Here, then, we come to the most remarkable to be such consecrat[ors] of the cemetery ground
of the sustained parallelisms of repetition in Lincoln’s [5a.b]; they have already committed it to the sacred
text, clearly the central axis of what the ritual pro- eternal. In fighting or struggl[ing] here, they have
nouncement is all about: our “dedicat[ing]” and our done holy—if unfinished—work [6a.1] that the
“be[ing] dedicated.” Six times Lincoln repeats it in world…can never forget [5b.b], i.e., that is enduring.
one or another grammatical form, with one or another Now we can see Lincoln’s extraordinary and
special sense. Twice more he repeats it in the synonym priestly Eucharistic move in segment [6]: if we cannot
‘devote’ (as in the wonderful opposition of our tak[ing] really and truly dedicate—active voice—in that endur-
devotion [6b.1.a] from the dead’s having giv[en] the ing and eternal realm, we can be dedicated here [6a.1]
last full measure of devotion [6b.1.a.1]). He elaborates in it—passive voice form meaning just ‘committed to’
it in the brilliant verbal crescendo dedicate << conse- something. Now in the parallel segment [6b.1],
crate << hallow [5.a.a.1,2,3; 5.a.b]. And—if the audi- Lincoln uses the formal figure of chiasmus, crisscross-
58 59
ing, as he takes the passive form and returns it to its piece sections of graves for the various states’ dead in
ritual or performative meaning. Observe the changed various stages of completion or in-process freshness.
orderings: It is for us…rather…to be dedicated here to At the radial center of this semicircular array was a
… [6a.1] vs. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to flagpole, temporarily in the position where a large war
… [6b.1]. As in the service of the Eucharist, we must monument was later erected (dedicated, 1869), barely
become transformed and mystically set aside to (and beyond the closest-in circumferential lines of then-
within) “[the] cause”—that is, incorporatively dedicated fresh graves. Slightly higher up, on the grounds of an
to it—by tak[ing] increased devotion (like wine and already existing cemetery—the site was known as
wafer transubstantiated) from the martyrs who gave Cemetery Hill—there was set up a platform for speak-
the last full measure of devotion. Thus, our high ers and dignitaries, leaving room for the audience
resol[ution] to make it so that they martyred them- between it and the new National Cemetery. In effect,
selves for our cause—the cause of this nation, under on the surface of the hill all this comprised a some-
God and its new birth of freedom (a re-birth recuper- what lengthened and inverted (convex rather than
ating 1776), this cause that “we” can here-and-now concave) amphitheatre, all oriented to a high center-
make immortal and eternal, never perish[ing] from the point of interest, where the speakers’ and dignitaries’
earth. platform was set up. The speakers looked out from
Indeed, there truly is a quality of that center to the audience and beyond, to the places
Shakespearean seriousness to Lincoln’s puns and plays of burial of the dead. In the converse direction, the
on words! He was a highly gifted miniaturist in words dead lay beneath the earth at the backs of the audi-
as he moves across the realms of meaning that a single ence, who faced forward toward the center where
word-form can have, and as he plays upon the signifi- Everett and Lincoln and others spoke to them and
cant differences of the various grammatical forms of enjoined of them dedication to the completion of the
those very words. unfinished work which they who fought here [lying
But to appreciate further this masterpiece of behind the audience; constituting their background]
“message”ing, we must imagine the scene on that have thus far so nobly advanced.
November day. (If you’ve been to the site recently, you We can note in the address the way that the
will know that the cemetery has now been enveloped system of what are technically called “deictic” cate-
in large-scale Gettysburg Battle tourism that decreases gories—the way one uses thises and thats; the way one
the contemplative sacredness of the site, instead speaks of a “past,” a “present” and a realm of futurity;
emphasizing the battle itself.) Imagine an open-fan, a the way one refers to what is here and to what is
semicircular-shaped cemetery sloping down-and-out there—is masterfully used by Lincoln (who even
from near the top of a knoll or ridge. Imagine pie- revised the text after the fact to make it better, that is,
60 61
tighter in its ritual poetics of deixis). The national actions of the fathers of a new nation at the far end of
past, the bloody and immediately deadly present, and the time interval of 87 years before the moment of
the destiny Lincoln and his audience (and successors) speaking. In [2], a present form of an inherently con-
will shape is verbally put into correspondence with the tinuous verb, are engaged in, describes the ongoing
shape of the physical array in which the address is frame of a great civil war, implicating its habitualness
delivered: fathers metaphorically rolling up from the or surround of the moment of speaking, hence now.
mythical past; honored dead, lying in graves just In [3], a present perfect, are met/have come, describ-
downhill and all around behind us; us the living, ing a resultative state of an action, brings us, still
arrayed inside the concentric rings of the cemetery within “now,” to “here.” Observe that in this first,
being dedicated; and the focal point we all seek in the recitational half of the text, each time something is
nation’s future, starting behind the audience and introduced—for example, a new nation in [1], the next
marching up to the high-ground top-and-center point time Lincoln holds it up he does so with that, the dis-
of the audience’s gaze where Lincoln himself stands, tal demonstrative appropriate to setting things out for
speaking to them. As in any good sacred ritual, the contemplation at a distance.
cosmic axis—here, leading us to redemption by In his text-dividing sentence, [4], Lincoln uses
(re)dedication and rebirth—runs right through the a present tense and the verb do this, with the proximal
position that Lincoln speaks from, so that the futurity demonstrative, that substitutes for the whole complex
is indeed the mystical futurity of that larger sense in phrase of [3.b.1] (…to dedicate…might live).
which we are here [very much on this ground as well Then in the second half, in [5] and [6],
as, in mystical nationalist time, on this continent and Lincoln moves out from “here” and “now” into con-
the earth] not so much to dedicate, as to be dedicated, tingent futurities, futurities that depend on our orient-
punning on the official-collective ceremony vs. the ing ourselves to the deontological lessons of the
personal-spiritual meaning of the ceremonial transfor- recitation of the first segment. At this point, Lincoln
mation. Compare here again the Eucharistic service, switches entirely into the “proximal” deictics, here,
in which, inscribing the figure of a cross—The this/these, we; he has now brought everything he
Cross—in ceremonial action, one incorporates the denotes inside the ritual precinct. So, we start from
sacred Body and Blood so as to be mystically incorpo- the impossibility of really doing this, i.e., dedicating,
rated into the Body made institutional in the church consecrating, or hallowing this ground by merely
and among its congregation of worshippers. say[ing] something (as opposed to the soldiers’ having
We can now appreciate even more the subtlety done something!). We learn that we can in effect do
with which Lincoln uses such deixis. In [1], a past this by ourselves being dedicated to joining Lincoln in
tense verb, brought forth, describes the founding the “we” who will bring about actual futurities, all
62 63
wonderfully laid out as such in parallel future con- The Myth is the “Message”
structions that are thus made ritually equivalent—an
emotion-filled chain-complex of ideals—in [6b.1.b]:
As I observed, “[t]he world will little note, nor
that [the dead] shall not have died in vain = that [the
long remember” what Edward Everett said in his
U.S.A.] shall have a new birth of freedom = that [the
Gettysburg “Oration.” But the mythology surrounding
principle of democratic government] shall not perish
Lincoln’s “Dedicatory Remarks” celebrates them as a
from the earth. The proximal demonstratives
rhetorical triumph of the quintessentially “American”
this/these—here combined with implied and actual
civil-religious voice, and it celebrates Lincoln as the
future forms give us a presentational effect, holding
people’s evangelist for the Union cause. As this very
before the ritual participants the very outcomes of a
constructed “message” had already been helpful to his
successful performance.
initial election, it was all the more definitively elabo-
rated at his death. Each of the various mythological
strands indicates something interesting about the
“message”-worthiness of the Gettysburg Address.
There are various myths about the text’s com-
position. The one I was told in elementary school was
that Lincoln quickly jotted it on the back of an enve-
lope while waiting at the train station, or while on the
train to Gettysburg. There are variant details: that it
was composed after dinner in the Wills house the night
before its delivery; or, early in the morning before its
delivery; or, partly in Washington and partly at
Gettysburg. Or even that the text was only partially
written out, the rest coming spontaneously from
Lincoln in an inspired burst of feeling at the dedication
ceremony itself. The absence of a definitive reading
manuscript in Lincoln’s hand that matches the steno-
graphic record of a reporter reinforces the sense of
these words as more or less divinely inspired and spo-
ken by a priest if not prophet. These accounts, to dif-
ferent degrees, imbue the text with the sincerity of
64 65
inspired, spontaneous words-of-the-moment that, like Even earlier, when the war was in its initial
all good poetry, are supposed in a kind of Romantic phases, Lincoln had sent a message to a special session
view to come to the inspired poet fluently and directly of Congress on 4 July 1861, in which many of the
in an inspiration—like the feelings of religious conver- phrasings of the Gettysburg remarks can already be
sion and ecstasy that they allude to. noted. Addressing the Confederacy’s secession,
But in actuality, Lincoln had long since formu- Lincoln argues that
lated the general metaphorical structure of the
Gettysburg text: the providential delivery of the Union this issue embraces more than the fate of these
to “us” on the 4th of July, the birthday of the nation, United States. It presents to the whole family of
upon principles of universal human rights (notwith- man the question, whether a constitutional repub-
lic, or democracy—a Government of the people by
standing the later Constitutional compromises about
the same people—can or cannot maintain its terri-
slavery). Already on the evening of the 7th of July in torial integrity against its own domestic foes. It
1863, just a few days after the Gettysburg and presents the question, whether discontented indi-
Vicksburg engagements, Lincoln extemporaneously viduals... can... put an end to free government upon
spoke to a crowd outside the Executive Mansion on the earth.
this subject. His words were stenographically reported
as follows: Lincoln rhetorically asks why, in contrast to
the ideals for which he—and, he hopes, Congress—
How long ago is it—eighty odd years—since on the stand, the Confederate declaration of independence
Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the “omit[s] the words ‘all men are created equal’, and
world a nation by its representatives, assembled and why their constitution omits the phrase ‘We, the
declared as a self-evident truth that “all men are
People’: Why this deliberate pressing out of view of
created equal.” That was the birthday of the United
States of America....
the rights of men and the authority of the people?”
[A]nd on the 4th [just passed] the cohorts of those And he concludes by remarking that even “[a]s a pri-
who opposed the declaration that all men are cre- vate citizen, the Executive [=President] could not have
ated equal “turned tail” and ran. Gentlemen, this is consented that these institutions [of popular govern-
a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but ment] shall perish”; and much less can he do so as
I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occa- President.
sion. I would like to speak in terms of praise due to So it was not merely the issues that were
the many brave officers and soldiers who have Lincoln’s to articulate; the very images of a “message”
fought in the cause of the Union and liberties of the had long been forming themselves in phrasings that he
country from the beginning of the war.
ultimately put together in the brilliant poetry of his
66 67
text of November 1863. While that text may have got- recollected memories of silence, whether hostile,
ten a final pre-delivery polishing in the days before uncomprehending, or whatever.
the 19th, it certainly was in far advanced draft by a But of course the myths tell us something
week or so before, when Lincoln was studying the lay- about the folk notion of the differences between the
out of the cemetery and reviewing the text of Everett’s plain- and brief-spoken Lincoln, President of the peo-
oration. ple, speaking in language for the people, hoping to be
Then there is the myth of the audience’s reelected by the people, and the distinguished and
stunned—or indifferent—silence at the dedication, Brahmanical public servant and Harvard president,
and of Lincoln’s sense of the immediate failure of the Mr. Everett, who represents the gifts of elite artistry in
speech. Just as the myth of whole-sprung, inspired the heroic Hellenic mold. (The very next day,
composition (or extemporaneity) hints at the “mes- Ambassador Everett wrote compliments to Lincoln,
sage” of Lincoln’s powerful evangelical fervor, so this saying, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I
one constructs the image of the overlooked treasure— came so near the central idea of the occasion in two
perhaps like Christ’s disregarded message?—proffered hours as you did in two minutes.” To this, the gracious
to an initially uncomprehending world. (But the world Lincoln—ever the master of compactly witty words—
ultimately discovers its treasure and grants immortal- replied, “In our respective parts yesterday, you could
ity to the message.) not have been excused to make a short address, nor I a
Actually, upon delivery, the speech was inter- long one.”) When successful “message” wraps the
rupted five times for applause, at what we can see are message-bearer in its folds like a draped flag, the myth
all “right” places, as well as receiving sustained becomes the message. Lincoln’s dedicatory remarks
applause at its conclusion. The Associated Press became “The Gettysburg Address” and this aspect of
stenographer notes applause after [1], when Lincoln his “message”—what was at stake “in [the] larger
quotes the Declaration; after [5a], for the consecrating sense” in both the war and him being President—was
acts of the brave men… who struggled here; after [5b], completely off bounds in the particularly rough politi-
contrasting what they did here to our mere verbiage; cal season ahead. The verbal and cartoon attacks on
after [6a], noting that the combatants have thus far… Lincoln from the militant northern Abolitionist side
nobly carried on the nation’s unfinished work or the side of compromise with the Confederacy were
[changed to nobly advanced in later, post-delivery sustained and vicious until the 1864 elections and
manuscripts]; after [6b.b.1], resolving that these dead beyond. But he had managed to inhabit a “message” at
shall not have died in vain; and at the end, after shall Gettysburg that, in his eventual martyrdom-to-“that
not perish from the earth, the correspondent noting cause” down to the present, seems “not [to have] per-
“long continued applause.” All these noted, in spite of ish[ed] from the earth.”
68 69

Homer Simpson Goes to Washington “The vast majority of our imports come from out-
side the country.”

From the mystical realms of Lincoln’s “mes- “Republicans understand the importance of
sage” in American memory, let’s come back down to bondage between a mother and a child.”
earth. Let’s look at the “message” of our current Chief
Magistrate, a.k.a. “W.” How has he managed “mes- “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our
sage” as a candidate and office-holder? Let’s start with nation’s history—I mean in this century’s history.
his relationship to language and communication. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this
What do people expect verbally nowadays of a person century.”
in such a position of responsibility? If Lincoln’s best
“message” moments resonated with a Christian evan- “We have a firm commitment to NATO; we are a
gelical plain-style, what do Mr. Bush’s best “message” part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to
Europe; we are a part of Europe.”
moments resonate with? What does this say about the
central workings of our political system?
“When I have been asked who caused the riots and
The current President, the press reports, the killing in LA, my answer has been direct and
thinks he has moved up from the Texas Rangers and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters
Harken Oil to head the country’s largest diversified are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The
corporation, the United States government, of which killers are to blame.”
he is the Chairman and CEO. (This was how
reporters contemporaneously characterized Mr. “We are ready for any unforeseen event that may
Reagan’s style of presidency, too.) How does such a or may not occur.”
man talk? How did he talk as a candidate who
appealed to enough of the electorate that the Supreme “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer peo-
Court’s right-thinking offensive line decided—5-to- ple going to the polls.”
4—to propel him bodily into the presidential end-
“It isn’t the pollution that’s harming our environ-
zone?
ment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that
Here’s a small sample of one-liners recorded
are doing it.”
during his 2000 candidacy. In one sense, they address
what we might understand to be a range of very “Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that
important current “issues” then—and now—facing teach our children.”
American society. Observe:
70 71
“[It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar attempting to grasp things—whatever they are—with
system.” his whole being. What has been really trying to the
“conceptualizing elites” who criticize him is that
“Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.” Dubya has successfully projected, and successfully
continues to project, determination, “really trying.”
“Well, I think if you say you’re going to do some-
(When his candidacy first surfaced, it seemed to me
thing and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.”
that Dubya in fact combined attributes of both Ronald
“I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward Reagan and Dan Quayle. He was like mellow Reagan
more freedom and democracy—but that could for projecting principled determination, though with-
change.” out the clarity of Reagan’s global anti-Communist slo-
gans Dubya has had only free-enterprise, anti-govern-
“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” ment slogans to captivate the Reagan Republicrats
while doing the bidding of corporate interests in oil,
This stuff looks like political parody, scripted energy, etc. who have invested in his candidacy and
perhaps for Saturday Night Live. It ranges hilariously then administration. He was like youthful Quayle for
over the whole gag kitbag. Double-talk, malapropisms, lowering expectations to those of the C-minus legacy
the worst hack bromides, logical—denotational—non- child, though in a more robustly acceptable way in its
sequiturs and redundancies, semantic ignorance of one new, Texas version.)
or another sort, and on and on. At times, the speaker When he was tapped by the RNC to rush The
wants to correct himself, but, like verbal slapstick, gets Presidency (bigger than Yale’s Skull and Bones but—
bollixed up even worse. And yet it is very appealing in under Dubya—yet more secretive!), he was probably
its own way, is it not? It is, I shall argue—or, rather, reassured that he himself would not have to face
the man speaking it is—“on message” in the sociopo- intractables like Middle East foreign policy—much
litical context in which this conceptual dross—like the less the twin rubbleheaps of a physically attacked
stuff of the bumper sticker—happens. America and a gutted American economy. (But don’t
But there’s the key point. It’s conceptual dross, worry; the servants—Dick, Rummie, Condie and all—
to be sure. But it has been consistently delivered with will take care of it, as they always have.) So in the
a manly tone of conviction, even aggressiveness; with a campaign the important “message” was to hold out
firm-jawed, non-sissy Texas style of pronunciation that the promise of change of administrations from
Poppy never really mastered; and with a facial and smooth, Slick Willie, the “in-yo’-face” Know-It-All.
whole bodily posture of earnestness that has got to Reverting to the uncouthness from whence he sprung,
make our hearts go out to the guy: he’s really, really Pimp Willie succumbed to the fleshly temptations of
72 73
his position of power. For a long, drawn-out time the Control over detail is precisely what middle
state of his affairs became the embarrassing center- management does, in the corporate world. They’re the
piece of our affairs of state. And poor Al Gore, by ones who know how to write contracts in the detail
contrast, turned himself into Mr. Know-It-All- sufficient to execute the deal made higher up with a
Without-(Extramarital-) Lust-in-His-Heart. For handshake. They’re the ones who know how to draw
Gore, it became increasingly difficult even to keep up tiered organizational plans, modularizing the tasks
people convinced that he had the fire-in-the-belly as to get a large job done. They’re the ones who know
well. But George W. Bush: earnest in his sincerity, so how to look things up like the market projections for
seemingly ingenuous in his platitudes and gaffes—as raw materials, labor, transportation, etc. and compute
well as deflectively proclaiming born-again Christian the parameters of profit. They’re even the ones, it
redemption from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll—he turns out, who know how to disguise losses in the
was—and, when “on message,” still is—really trying. accounts, to find arguable loopholes in those loose
There’s hope (and not as in “The Man from ___”). regulatory laws, and to apply science in de facto if not
This guy—as well as things—can get better, if he and de jure dangerous and harmful ways.
especially we really try. And we can have a non- That’s not what this language of Candidate and
Clinton without all those issues, issues, issues and now President W projects; just the opposite. It’s
those speeches written and delivered like policy mem- Homer Simpson’s kind of language, or, for older tele-
oranda. vision generations, Ralph Cramden’s or Chester A.
So look at the quotes again. They are the stuff Riley’s. (But Dubya is spouting his verbiage from an
of someone who is trying to touch issues, but is some- inherited, hence familiar position of privilege, and
what uncomfortable, as well as unfamiliar, with the looking forward to even more.) He’s really trying, and
details of them. Missing is the detail of how one in that’s fine. Or at least good enough, in this all too
fact gets from first principles through a chain of imperfect world. We’ve seen what happens when the
informed inference to a conclusion. Missing is the underprivileged and oversexed Mr. Know-It-Alls get
detail of technical and other memo-words that live in power! (So poor Al Gore. As his axis of self-differenti-
those places where the gears of actual administration ation from Mr. Clinton, poor Al Gore bumblingly
turn. Missing is the detail of factual knowledge of hints at middle-aged sexuality, no less—even if faithful
tables of organization and of the functioning of the within marriage—polishing all the while the Mr.
things in the political, economic, social, and even nat- Know-It-All image, precisely what the upwardly
ural worlds. Someone who communicates this way mobile Mr. Clinton, as President, seemed to have
communicates concern—“really trying”—but not usurped from middle management!)
expertise; command, as it were, but not control.
74 75

Take That! he got where he now is. It took his brother, his
father, his father’s friends, the Florida secretary of
state, and the Supreme Court to pull it off. His
Middle management, professional people, and entire life gives fresh meaning to the phrase
their press and media—Hey! That’s us!—make fun of “assisted living.”
such folks in CEO and Chairman of the Board posi-
tions behind their backs. And we make fun of these As you see, Mr. Trudeau emphasizes the inert-
kinds of political candidates and officeholders in pub- ness, the helplessness of the privileged scion: “a stable
lic. Where do they get off taking up such positions? hard target. It’s as if Quayle had won.” People like him
We get the queasy feeling from hearing people who concluded that Mr. Bush’s featured demographics
talk like W that the infelicities, the lack of command heightened each other—coddled Texas oil-man over-
even of a “standard” register of English, speak vol- laid on clubby, Ivy-League “legacy child” of poor
umes about other aspects of such a person’s being. For mental endowments—so as to produce an embarrass-
the large number of people whose command of, even ing specimen at the head of our government.
virtuosity with, such language is part of their daily Aggressive, if ignorant, only wannabe hillbilly mas-
lives—for example the means by which, at work, they culinity (as opposed to Mr. Clinton’s genuinely
earn their living—talking this way bespeaks, say, igno- upward-struggling—and therefore respectable—kind).
rance, and/or pretension and/or stupidity and/or a Such a guy can clearly never be concerned with what
particular déclassé group-membership, etc. etc. So the anxious intellectual bourgeoisie thinks is impor-
folks like Dubya become fair game for jokes that tant.
emphasize the unseemliness of the perhaps blind, Likewise, here’s a bit of what was circulating
dumb luck that makes those behind—below— on the internet in earlier days of the Bush presidency.
beholden to them and highly embarrassed so to be. At least it’s some of what circulated to me:
In a January, 2001, issue of The New Yorker, for
example, the Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau Al Gore and George Bush had breakfast together
observed in relation to then President-Elect Bush: before their meeting in D.C. last week. The wait-
ress greeted them and asked for their order. Gore
My suspicion is that the Bushes’ seeming antipathy said he’d have oatmeal and applesauce. Bush asked
for me stems from a certain traitor-to-his-class for a quickie. The waitress glared at him and
incomprehension. Because, on paper, I’m one of stalked off. Gore leaned over and said quietly,
them [Yale]. Anyway, it’s true the election result is “That’s quiche.”
good for me. ***
Bush is this stable, hard target. It’s as if Quayle had George W. was asked if he knew what Roe vs. Wade
won. Plus you have the wonderful narrative of how was. He replied: “I think it was the decision that
76 77
George Washington had to make before crossing unfit to be taken out to a fancy restaurant; unfit to do
the Delaware.” more than make a schoolboy stab at critical knowledge
*** underlying issues; unfit to be with real royalty (a sup-
Queen Elizabeth II and Mr. Bush are riding toward posedly distant cousin, no less!), and hence unfit to
Buckingham Palace in an open, 17th century coach represent his country.
hitched to six magnificent, matching white horses. Perhaps the most telling in this respect are the
As they proceed, waving to the thousands of cheer-
cleverly doctored images that have made their way to
ing Brits lining the streets, the right rear horse lets
fly with a horrendous, eye-smarting blast of flatu- the computer screens of the “knowledge workers”
lence. Uncomfortable, but under control, the two around the world. Here are two that circulated early
heads of state do their best to ignore the whole in W’s term of office—both, unsurprisingly, on the
incident. same, recurrent theme.
But the Queen, seeking to reassure her guest
with a down-to-earth genuineness, turns to Mr.
Bush and explains, “Mr. President, please accept
my regrets; I’m sure you understand that there are
some things that even a Queen cannot control.”
Ever the gentleman, Mr. Bush replies, “Your
Majesty, please don’t give the matter another
thought. You know, if you hadn’t said something, I
would have thought it was one of the horses.”

So real men—as opposed to Democrats—do

like quickies? So feminism’s empowering moment, the
equivalent of Gay Liberation’s “Stonewall,” goes
unrecognized and—unlike the quickie—unloved? So
prairie-patty gentility is offered in return for a royal
gesture of reassurance? Look at the unflattering image
of Mr. Bush posed by such material. In each case it
involves a kind of verbally-cued oafishness and igno-
rance: an inability to read and recognize the referent
of a sophisticated word; unfamiliarity with the legal
case-caption that points to one of the key issues of the
last half century; unfamiliarity with truly genteel ver-
bal cues of politeness in context. These translate as:
78 79

Oh shit, he is even dumber than I thought.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.
80 81

Communicating (in a) Democracy Look at that textbook account of governance.

There is a whole foundation of Enlightenment politi-
cal theory that underlies the noblest political actions
But it is not just the chardonnay, Brie, and
of the revolutionaries who created this country.
quiche set who have been disturbed by the significant
American democracy was established in the eigh-
amount of truth in these jokes, to judge even from the
teenth century as “the great experiment” in relation
small sample of quotes above. There is, after all, mali- to a “talking” political process—like a “talking cure”
cious partisanship in them, and after all, the Clintons of Freudian psychoanalysis. Language is the medium
and their Democratic ilk have spent years kowtowing of politics in this order of democratic self-govern-
to the grande bourgeoisie of torrential cash flow on both ment derived from philosophical views of Lord Bacon
coasts, those mighty of the metaphorical pen, to be and of John Locke. Such a governmental order is
sure, not the metaphorical sword (Reagan’s and internally self-regulating, abstractly speaking, in the
George H. W.’s people). same way that Bacon laid out the self-regulating
But there is an irony in all this. It involves, not nature of natural science as a truth-seeking enterprise.
surprisingly, the two ways that those of the pen—in Everything depends on talk, talk, talk: from
particular those of the media—have become involved our Constitution to our legislative process to our
in modern politics, corresponding to “issue” vs. administrative and legal systems to the workings of
“image.” The point is that the language-focused bour- public-sphere political communication and its feed-
geoisie have professionally created the very conditions back in election results. The language of the
for the viability of George W. Bush’s “message,” even Constitution licenses or authorizes Congress to
as they perhaps long for the only theoretically imag- debate and pass legislation, as well as to regulate its
ined yesteryear when politics was supposedly “issue”- own internal workings. Members of the houses of
dominated—and purportedly free from economic Congress are elected, so there is a direct feedback (for
influence as well! Of course, “message” has always the Senate, perfected by Constitutional amendment).
been part of our politics; even Mr. Lincoln strived to Such legislation as Congress passes implies all kinds
be “on message,” at Gettysburg and elsewhere. of administrative follow-through by an Executive
Contemporary critics do not see that it is merely the branch, headed by the President, also an at least indi-
rectly elected official (though not usually via the
way that “message” now emerges that heightens the
Supreme Court). And since the Marbury v. Madison
crisis they may perceive: that “message” rears up
case (1803), the Supreme Court and its lower federal
and—like Her Majesty’s white horse—embarrasses the
courts have taken it upon themselves to create admin-
processes of self-governance of the civics textbook.
istrative meaning for Constitutional and statutory lan-
82 83
guage as the means of regulating the workings of gov- expert language-users par excellence, and how many
ernment. Even the concepts of the Constitution do young people who say they want to go into politics
not in practice mean anything until tested by the see legal training and a law degree as a first step.)
cycling of this process. It is language all the way Critical to the whole system is the legitimated
down. renewal of government through the electoral process,
In theory, this is the deeply rooted, com- the very mechanism of consent of those governed.
pletely language-dependent governmental framework Here is where “message” centrally and forcefully
of our politics, despite gradual change in some of its comes in. Lincoln himself certainly understood this,
specific forms. So we have expectations about the as have the administrations of his successors, though
rational deployment of expository language: language that some have been more able than others to be “on mes-
speaks to truth and falsity—to what is and what is sage” in a winning way. Today, a politician—certainly,
not—and language of argument—the dialectic of someone aspiring to the Presidency—has to present
debate about what is and what ought-to-be. We him- (or her-?) self in relation to how “message” poli-
expect governmental processes in all branches and at tics works. As I said at the outset, a candidate with
all levels of our reticulated system to reach a closure only issues, issues, issues will not cut it; this never has
of verbally achieved “judgment” and “persuasion” that worked.
results in some action. This is especially so in our current era of elec-
Theoretically, government works verbally. toral self-government. Our process has become
Practically, we acknowledge the influence of financial increasingly frank as a species of what is termed
and other extra-governmental quia pro quibus in Hegelian “politics of recognition.” Identities—demo-
aspects of government—we call much of it corrup- graphics, for example—are mobilized to the exercise
tion—though people are always anxious about this of power, for example electoral power. And in turn
corrupting factor. (The order of most-to-least unac- governmental process “recognizes” identities in
ceptable seems to run from judiciary to executive to allowing access to itself—like a presiding officer “rec-
legislative. Buy a judge: very, very bad. Buy a presi- ognizing” someone so as to allow him or her access to
dent/governor/mayor: rather bad. Buy a the speaking “floor”—and in allocating to various
federal/state/city legislator: well, what do you expect?) identities goods, services, resources, etc. Ever hear of
But notwithstanding, the public expects a government the “angry white male?” Ever hear of the “soccer
of language-mavens; the semblance must always be mom?” Ever hear of the “welfare queen?” These are
maintained of verbal expertise and verbal fluidity. It’s identities, and can be cast as subjects or objects of
the very majesty of democratic government. (And political process—those appealed to, as well as those
note how many people in government are lawyers, in respect of whom one is appealed to.
84 85
It is a kind of 14th Amendment collectivist obtrusive reality that if all politics—court cases, regu-
politics of the electoral process. The post-Civil War latory and administrative processes, and most to the
14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, among other pro- point electoral politics—is local, it can also be made to
visions prevents any of the states from “deny[ing] to be personal. (In retrospect, the equity feminist slogan
any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection that “the personal is the political” was perhaps more
of the laws.” It has been an effective avenue of legal descriptive than hortatory!)
action in the struggles of categories of people for gov- The media are key here. They are the elabo-
ernmental recognition of who-and-what they are (or rate networks of communicational institutions that
want to be). shape personal identities in public. They have long
Accordingly, the struggles of many in power to been central to how identity is brought together with
recognize them or not to recognize them as “equal[ly] political process. This, obviously, has both positive
protect[ed]” by this or that government practice are at and negative sides: trying actively to shape certain
the very heart of how this country now works. (Note communications while trying actively to suppress oth-
the new reading this gives to the figure of blindfolded ers. Especially today, through technical support of
Justice!) Politics is a subtle process of inclusions and broadcast media for communicating “message” with
exclusions. Candidates and officials and legislative great immediacy, political figures and those in their
bodies and even courts selectively “recognize” cate- target “recognized” political markets rely upon com-
gories of persons whose “equal protection” must be municated “message” as the glue bonding them
considered—by courting votes, by administering laws together. Truly a “mediated” charisma. It is much as in
in certain ways, by passing laws or not, and by inter- multi-media “brand”-focused advertising for goods
preting statute one way or another. Politicos call it and services. The idea is to help people define them-
“[someone’s] constituencies”; their media advisors call selves by structuring a significant portion of their
it “[their] markets.” identity-image, their “life style,” around use or con-
A president, like any elected person, is caught sumption, “brand” conferring value on identity-image:
in the middle of such a politics of recognition. So “I’m a Ford Bronco kind of guy!” This kind of politics
especially is a President’s “message.” The Lockean makes of language a means to “message”-relevant
government of, by, and for language may be an ideal- image rather differently from the way it works as the
ized, theoretical model of democracy in America. Yet medium of Baconian-Lockean talking-democracy. And
none other than Lincoln, recall, made this his very here’s where Dubya’s “really tryin’!”
“message.” He wrapped himself and his war in it: “this
is what we’re fighting to preserve and sustain.” The
politics of recognition, by contrast, is the increasingly
86 87

Presidentiary Misspeakingfulness rhetorical periods frequently petered out and ceased,

rather than coming to any conclusion. Here are a few
extreme examples of this style of reply to reporters’
It’s not as though President Bush is unique in
questions:
his presidential misspeaking. Far from it. There’s lots
of presidential misspeaking we could focus on in the
“Well, it wasn’t on his desk yet. It was a report that
cumulative record of modern politics alone. One can had—well, he didn’t know whether it was a report.
summon to memory Lyndon Johnson and Richard It was a study—he had—as he had seen it—and it
Nixon, caught by their own taping system in White had been going back and forth—and they had been
House meetings. The tapes reveal them to be speaking going at it for a long time. And it wasn’t ready at
a rather foul, informal, obscenity-laced register of the this moment—at least, for publication—and its
language sometimes laden with derogatory epithets for eventual destiny—he had forgotten the details.” [9
the identities of people then clamoring for recogni- February 1955 press conference]
tion—whose very votes they courted.
“[A]t the same time, if we limit ourselves to [mili-
At his inauguration on the Capitol steps,
tary aid], then I would say we are—it was a self-
Warren G. Harding repeated the whopper, “nor-
defeating effort because we must—by—particularly
malcy,” for standard register normality, invented for by technical help and sometimes by helping in
his 1920 anti-Wilsonian campaign slogan—and it investments—let them develop their resources so
stuck! (“Not notions and nostrums, but normalcy!”) they can have a better life.” [23 January 1957 press
Those old enough to remember President conference]
Eisenhower’s news conferences will recall that he gave
the rhetorical figure of anacoluthon a breathtaking run “He—and some of them he didn’t like at all—He
for its money—broken, stop-and-start, incoherent was a really—not only to my mind—a great man.
fragments of sentences stopping and never ending, just He’s one of my—certainly—one of my greatest
friends that’s not of my nationality.” [15 January
ceasing in mid-construction. I recall as a child being
1959 press conference]
socialized in elementary school in the mid-1950s to
The New York Times, observing with Mrs. McNulty
What did this guy mean? Being a grandfa-
their innovation in reporting, printing exact tran-
therly figure by that time, Mr. Eisenhower had the
scripts of Ike’s news conferences, just as they were
cuddly look of concerned befuddlement. But it was the
delivered: three words and an em-dash, four more and
1950s, after all, and Ike had both won the war—the
an em-dash, seven more, dash, three, dash. Like a
big one, WWII—and settled the Korean Conflict—
Morse code of concept dots connected by dashes, the
the little one. He used his immense centrist popularity
88 89
to counteract the worst right-wing and isolationist ele- ever you want to call it—speech to the nation—I
ments in his own party. So, except for the Adlai asked Americans to give 4,000 years—4,000 hours
Stevenson “I-told-you-so”s, everyone gave the old over the next—the rest of your life—of service to
gent a pass on his incoherence (except my Pop, who America.”
referred to him as “Blubberhead, Jr.,” recalling
Herbert Hoover, for him the nickname’s prototype). (This, though, to an adoring, $5,000-a-photo fund-
Revisionist pop historians even now claim it was raising audience in Old Greenwich, Connecticut on 9
Eisenhower’s cunningly strategic backing-and-filling April 2002, as reported by The Times’ Elizabeth
in the face of an aggressive White House press corps. Bumiller.)
Now, the current President is a particular When you’re handed lemons, make lemonade.
specimen of language use, intriguing in many respects. A couple of shaky months after having been installed
People have been poking fun since “W” has emerged in office, the Dubya White House has gone back to
to national prominence, really, when the earlier the pre-Eisenhower practice of allowing the press to
Reagan and Bush administrations-in-exile gave him quote only “official” versions of all of the President’s
the go-ahead and pledged to come in from their cor- remarks, i.e., ones from which all the fun stuff has
porate pastures. After taking office, the administra- been deleted. They have confined videotaping and
tion’s presidential image-shapers were much disturbed photographing of live appearances exclusively to trust-
by the ridiculing aftereffects of full frontal, uncosme- worthy audiences and venues, from which, save for the
tized interaction of the President with press and other occasional reportorial leak (see above), only the care-
outsiders. What could the “spin”-folk do with all those fully rehearsed sound-bite line or two have emerged.
deer-in-the-headlights freeze-ups when the guy was After the terrorist bombings in 2001, when
asked a substantial question of fact? And worse was Commander-in-Chief gravitas had to be mixed into
what followed: like scenes from Peter Sellers’ brilliant the “message,” the cover of quasi-military censorship,
film Being There, the pastiche of improvisational too, became convenient.
ready-mades that could have been delivered by More recently, apparently desperate, they have
Chauncey Gardiner (Chance The Gardener): “When taken many pains with constructing back-drops with
you have your own money, it means you’ve got more the “message”-words printed so that camera operators
money to spend.” Or is it a repeat of Poppy Bush or and photographers can hardly avoid including them in
of Ike himself: a headshot. So in print and television shots,
“Corporate responsibility” floats all around Mr. Bush
“And so, in my State of the—my State of the as he makes his huffy and stern, supposedly newswor-
Union—or state—my speech to the nation—what- thy remarks on Wall Street that CEO and CFO fraud,
90 91
embezzlement, and “malfeance” would not—or at The Linguistic Substance of the Style
least would no-longer-for-the-time-being—be toler-
ated by this administration! “Recovery” in no-non-
The raw verbal material that is Dubya, gath-
sense, solid-white, bold serif—rather than the Seal of
ered to much amusement during the 2000 presidential
the President of the United States—graces the front of
campaign, in fact continues unabated, to judge from
the red-draped dais behind which is seated the blue-
the rare candid recordings we only occasionally now
suited Mr. Bush at his Baylor University “Economic
overhear or read. What kinds of linguistic facts about
Forum” in August, 2002. It is as though the adminis-
Mr. Bush’s speech does this verbal material reveal to
tration’s “message” personnel no longer trust even the
us? I have taken a major collection of it made during
dutiful media to convey the “message”-relevant
his candidacy and in the first, transcriptionally unsani-
themes in presidential stories—much less the
tized months of his Presidency, and have classified
President himself! So the staff now includes them as
them according to the kind of “misspeakingfulness”
feel-good indelible picture captions. They are visually
that is in evidence. Here are the kinds of things I have
sewing Dubya’s “message” onto his image like pinning
found in the collection of instances.
easy-to-forget gloves to a schoolchild’s winter coat.
First, noteworthy rarities. There are very few
Pinned “spin” that leaves your head spinning.
examples of the following:

Register Violations:
“One of the interesting initiatives we’ve taken in
Washington, D.C., is we’ve got these vampire-bust-
ing devices. A vampire is a—a cell deal you can
plug in the wall to charge your cell phone.”
[Denver, 14 August 2001]

“The budget caps were busted, mightily so.”

[Washington, D.C., 22 February 2001]

These are of a sparse, but regular occurrence,

especially when the twin pulls of Connecticut vs. Texas
jostle with each other in Mr. Bush’s verbal delivery.
Observe in the first how Mr. Bush slips from a formal,
expository register, speaking of “interesting initiatives”
92 93
to a kind of commercial descriptor, “vampire- amounts of subliminal pressure on us to edit our ver-
bust[er]”—remember the anti-radar dashboard device bal usage toward standard register as we are producing
called a “Fuzz Buster?”—to the truly substandard, “a it. In written language, we can go back over our forms
cell deal,” a.k.a. a gadget (and recall its hypertrophic and edit them; in speaking this is much more difficult.
cutesy—though masculine, still!—form, dealie- At that threshold of semi-consciousness that is the
bob[ber]!). editing function in speaking, the central fact is that
Compare Eliza Doolittle, for whom, in there are alternatives one of which, the standard, is
Pygmalion, Shaw wrote a drawing-room scene of hilar- more highly valued than the other, the nonstandard.
ious register shifts. Having observed, in perfect RP Sometimes we put in what would be the standard form
pronunciation, that her “aunt died of influenza: so in a different, but related grammatical construction—
they said,” the others react sympathetically, so she but not in the particular construction we are using—
continues: “But it’s my belief they done the old because we are so nervously focused on the fact that
woman in.” And the floodgates of Cockney open. valued standard and de-valued nonstandard forms
Who, moreover, can forget the Lerner & Lowe ver- coexist: “Whom shall I say is calling?” (In standard reg-
sion at the Royal Ascot race? “Come on, Dover, move ister, who ought to be marked as the grammatical sub-
yer bloomin’ arse!” ject form for the predicate phrase is calling, of course;
A second, truly rare occurrence in my corpus the higher clause shall I say takes the whole lower
consists of the single example of: clause as its object. In contemporary English spoken
vernacular we simply collapse the semantic distinction
Grammatical hypercorrection: between the forms who and whom in favor of using
“I’m looking forward to having dinner with he and who at the beginning of a clause. So use of whom has
Mrs. Blair on Friday night.” [Washington, D.C., 22 cachet as the high-falootin’ form—if you can use it
February 2001; first press conference, quoted by according to its older semantic rule! Which, of course,
Mark Shields] you don’t when you hypercorrect.)
“Just between you and I…” (In written stan-
Now this is diagnostically interesting. dard, the phrase you and me is the object of the
Hypercorrection is the use of “too much of a preposition between, so both pronouns, you and me,
good thing.” It comes about in this way. We are fre- are marked for that grammatical function. Vernacular
quently ill at ease about whether or not we are saying spoken English uses the me form, however, when the
only the “standard register” forms of our language, pronoun bears stress or is final in its phrase. So, anx-
and are correctly avoiding use of the nonstandard iously avoiding the stereotypically déclassé—and
ones. Situations of language use exert different impolite—me and him, as in “Me ’n’ him wen’ t’ da
94 95
game,” hypercorrect use of I becomes an index of dis- Labov and others select a form that has wide
tinction, even after the preposition.) variation in a language community that seems to be a
…—and so forth. Observe in each case the function of speaker demographics and attitudes. They
existence of at least one anxiety-causing explicit rule create scales to count and measure the degree of
dearly loved of standard-register grammar teachers. So “standardness” (rate of using a standard form) vs.
the nonvernacular alternant becomes endowed with “nonstandardness” (rates of various nonstandard alter-
that soupçon of distinction-conferring value. And so nants) of language-production by people of known
long as one has internalized the grammatical conditions demographic characteristics under different, specifi-
under which actual speakers of standard use it, fine. But able conditions of usage.
there is pressure to use it whenever one or the other Look at one typical result for an aspect of lan-
form of the set should occur—whom (even where use guage that is subject to standard-anxiety. We find that
of who would be standard), I (even for me). So people the rates at which people perform “standard” do, in
do. fact, vary. The accompanying Figure 4 is taken from
Now hypercorrection is usually evidence of William Labov’s early 1960s studies of New York City
demonstrable linguistic insecurity, a degree of unease English on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (before
about our own and about others’ standard usage that gentrification). It shows the pronunciation of <r> at
comes from our anxiety about norms. Such anxiety is the end of syllables, as in words written “partner,”
apparently unequally distributed across society. It “shore,” etc. by speakers of various socioeconomic
shows up again and again in various studies of what is classes under different conditions of speaking. These
termed the sociolinguistic stratification of a language conditions run from overheard private conversation
community. This is a picture of the way that differ- with a familiar, up through the task of reading target
ences in a society’s language use—the pronunciation, words aloud from a printed page for the interviewer.
grammar, vocabulary, what-have-you that people use Observe how the hyper-anxious “lower middle class”
on occasions of communication—correlate with differ- speakers hypercorrect way beyond the rate of produc-
ences in people’s societal position. For example, when tion of post-vocalic [r] pronunciations even of the
we look at the different rates at which, under various “upper middle class” speakers, whose language, more
conditions, different kinds of people in society pro- or less invariant across these task demands, is rela-
duce, or attempt to produce, “standard” forms, we get tively like standard. (They do pronounce <r> consis-
a picture of the sociolinguistic stratification of their tently most of the time.) The hypercorrecters are say-
language. The studies of William Labov and others ing things like “[laryer]” for the word lawyer,
reveal interesting characteristics in this respect for “[sowfer]” for the word sofa, and so on. They’re so
aspects of language subject to such anxieties. anxious about dropping the <r>s where they should be
96 97
putting them in, that they overshoot what plausibly
seems to be the target, the prestige form of speech of
the standard register.
When people are basically non-standard
speakers, and are anxious about it, as soon as some
speaking situation arises in which standard would be
demanded, or even expected, they start moving
abruptly away from their basically non-standard pat-
terns of speech toward the standard. And beyond. I
believe that in our evidence, at the level of standard
grammar, Mr. Bush reveals himself to be basically
secure in his use of English as a grammatical system—
though it would be interesting to see if he has been
made less so by the comic barrage of Bushism-bash-
ing. He is emphatically not one of the anxious, “chat-
tering classes,” as people like professors and lawyers
and reporters and such would be termed, all people
who make a living by using language expertly. And he’s
certainly not of the lower middle class, where, charac-
teristically, linguistic insecurity and hypercorrection
cluster together!
So Mr. Bush appears to be relatively outside of
that system of anxieties. Or is he? We might view his
usage against the backdrop of expectably coherent
expository prose—“U. S. Government Jeffersonian
and Madisonian standard,” we might term it. What
Figure 4. kinds of violations against good textual sense does Mr.
Bush’s usage demonstrate? I have classified the other
kinds of Mr. Bush’s verbal nonstandards, abundantly in
evidence in the collection (though some examples
show more than one dimension of unacceptability as
standard discourse). These types are:
98 99
Incoherence by locution: “For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three
Here, a sentence that starts off with one syn- non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable
tactic form and word-choice veers off into semantic in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going
incoherence when a conflicting construction or con- to do something about it.” [Philadelphia, 14 May
2001]
tradictory word-choice shapes the talk later in the
flow. At least we think it’s incoherence: sometimes, as
Dubya must think that the 1:3 ratio of fatal to
these examples show, W seems inadvertently to be
nonfatal shootings must be increased, from the way he
speaking from a subliminal font of truth!
phrased this! Perhaps it’s the “take-no-patients”
“My administration has been calling upon all the approach of his federal healthcare policies toward hos-
leaders in the—in the Middle East to do everything pital emergency rooms.
they can to stop the violence, to tell the different
parties involved that peace will never happen.” “First, we would not accept a treaty that would not
[Crawford, TX, 13 August 2001] have been ratified, nor a treaty that I thought made
sense for the country.” [Washington Post, 24 April
If one “stop[s] the violence,” that is usually 2001]
called a state of “peace,” of course. But if one is fight-
ing for peace—and aren’t we all?—maybe it will never Could The President, having put in so many
happen! negatives in the first several phrases, gotten “negative
exhaustion” where it really counted, making sense for
“I haven’t had a chance to talk, but I’m confident the country?
we’ll get a bill that I can live with if we don’t.”
[Brussels, 13 June 2001] “We’re concerned about AIDS inside our White
House—make no mistake about it!” [Washington,
Perhaps the suggestion here was to be that D.C., 7 February 2001]
even if Mr. Bush could not confer, an acceptable bill
would emerge from the legislative process—or maybe Does Mr. Bush harbor suspicions about some-
no bill at all. What he instead suggests—no doubt body’s secret history of unprotected political or finan-
echoing Messrs. Daschle and Gephardt, and perhaps cial practices? Even after the Clinton administration?
Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld as well—is that he
“I mean there needs to be a wholesale effort against
should specifically keep his hands off that process! racial profiling, which is illiterate children.” [2nd
Presidential Debate, 11 October 2000].
100 101
Can this wholesale effort really reach its goal of Finality, of course, has a propensity to happen
illiteracy for all of our children? finally, especially when closure is reached.

“I understand small business growth; I was one.” “It’s very important for folks to understand that
[New York Daily News, 19 February 2000] when there’s more trade, there’s more commerce.”
[Quebec City, 21 April 2001]
Perhaps the speaker wishes candidly to indicate
that as a young man he was a small, if somewhat One wonders if there’s also more business,
benign and ineffectual, growth on business; then again, more pecuniary activity, etc.?
given insider-trading scandals, perhaps he does not.
“Redefining the role of the United States from
enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the
“This administration is doing everything we can to
end the stalemate in an efficient way. We’re making peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assign-
the right decisions to bring the solution to an end.” ment.” (broken grammar, too) [New York Times
[Washington, D.C., 10 April 2001] interview, 14 January 2001]

It must, of course, be a very tricky assignment

Ending solutions, as for example to global
“to keep the peace from peacekeepers,” must it not?
warming, to toxic dump-site cleanup, to separation of
But surely we must commend the then President-
church and state, to yearly budget surpluses, and so elect’s continuing his resolve to do something about all
forth, certainly has been a hallmark of the younger that peace being kept around the world, especially by
Bush administration. peacekeepers enabled by the previous administration.

Verbose redundancies/incoherence: “The California crunch is really the result of not

Here is classic “double-talk:” precise or near enough power-generating plants and then not
synonyms are strung together so as only to seem to be enough power to power the power of generating
making an informative statement about some topic. plants.” [New York Times interview, 14 January 2001]
Through this device, one adds maximal verbiage and
minimal—if any—new (denotational) thought. What powers of powers be these of which ye
speak, My Liege? The nth power: the power of the
“I knew it might put him in an awkward position Texas firm Enron to drain Democratic Governor Gray
that we had a discussion before finality has finally Davis’ state treasury of some 50 billions of its surplus
happened in this presidential race.” (nonstandard dollars while the federal regulators under Mr. Bush
grammar for: if) [Crawford, TX, 2 December 2000] “helplessly” watched?
102 103
“I’m hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Broken grammar (anacoluthon with/without repair):
Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious An utterance starts off as one construction
realize that they are more likely to succeed with type, and then, with or without a hesitation or break
success as opposed to failure.” [Associated Press in the talk, it continues as though it were a very differ-
interview, 18 January 2001]
ent construction type. Sometimes the speaker goes
back to start up again from a prior position that allows
This must be a clever rewording, must it not,
the transition to the new grammatical form.
of the administration’s bromide for business people,
“Do as I say, not as I did!” Those others in “The fact that he relies on facts—says things that are
Washington ambitious “to succeed with failure” cer- not factual—are going to undermine his campaign.”
tainly were discouraged from government service (incoherence, too) [New York Times, 4 March 2000]
when the administration took over.
Starting out to say that a certain fact is going
“Home is important. It’s important to have a to undermine Mr. Gore’s campaign, at mid-sentence,
home.” [Crawford, TX, 18 February 2001] when “he relies on facts” is incoherently glossed as
“[he] says things that are not factual”—there’s a “lie”
You can say that again! And root, root, root for in “rely,” after all!—those “things that are not factual”
the “home” team! become the subject of the—now correct—“are
going....” Of course, Mr. Gore was plagued in his cam-
“Our nation must come together to unite.” [Tampa,
FL, 4 June 2001]
paign by both “facts:” that he relied pedantically on
“facts, facts, facts,” at the very same time that Mr.
No two ways about it, for sure! Divided unity Bush’s people relentlessly accused him of saying “non-
can be, at best, half-baked. factual” things.

“I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate “The person who runs FEMA [Federal Emergency
what I believe and what I believe—I believe what I Management Administration] is someone who must
believe is right.” [Rome, 22 July 2001] have the trust of the President. Because the person
who runs FEMA is the first voice, often times,—
of—someone whose life has been turned upside
It is good that Mr. Bush explained so forcefully down—hears—from.” [Austin, TX, 4 January 2001]
to the European audience just whose beliefs about his
beliefs about his beliefs about…—whatever they actu- The poor guy seems to be trying to express
ally consist of!—are “right!” the complex thought that [1] a natural-disaster victim,
104 105
“someone whose life has been turned upside down,” to get the framework—the groundwork—not the
hears the voice of FEMA first, perhaps even that of framework—the groundwork to discuss a frame-
“the person who runs FEMA,” and that [2] the work for peace—to lay the—all right.” (substandard
President hears from the FEMA director first and so grammar, too) [Crawford, TX 13 August 2001]
must trust that person. All of these constructions, plus
the nonsensical “the person who runs FEMA is the All right! Beyond the hesitant self-corrections
first voice…of…someone whose life has been turned at the beginning, Mr. Bush finally gets to the presum-
upside down” are woven together, turned upside ably diplomatic formula he must dimly remember
down, in an unmanageable syntactic disaster of enor- from a briefing or ten, “groundwork to discuss a
mous proportion. framework for peace” in the Israeli-Palestinian con-
flict. But he recalled only the nominal part, and forgot
“So on behalf of—a well-oiled unit of people who that “groundworks” are “laid,” in the idiom. So he
came together to serve something greater than tacks it on at the end, like a reverse-order index entry.
themselves—congratulations!” (register-shift, non- Completed, sort ’a. Whew!
standard grammar) [Washington, D.C., 31 May
2001 (U of Nebraska women’s volleyball team, “If he’s—the inference is that somehow he thinks
national champions 2001)] slavery is a—is a—noble institution I would—I
would—strongly reject that assumption—that John
Well, getting “well-oiled” might not at first Ashcroft is a[*] open-minded, inclusive person.”
seem to be the way to “serve” in volleyball, but Dubya [NBC Nightly News, 14 January 2001]
should know; he is reputed to have been well oiled
throughout his youth. Here he seems to be having a This utterance itself is so inclusive, it winds up
great deal of difficulty discerning on behalf of whom hinting at a war among Dubya’s head, heart, and deep-
he’s serving up congratulations—or is the White seated heart-of-hearts. If in his heart-of-hearts the
House team, too, “well-oiled?” (As for the other President rejects the “assumption…that John Ashcroft
virtue, we certainly know that, among others, Mr. is a[n] open-minded, inclusive person,” maybe he has
Ashcroft professes to “serve something greater than given reason to others so to “infer”—and worse, as the
[himself]!”) first claim reports. Another one where too much is
going on for the speaker to keep track of—who’s on
“There’s a lot of people in the Middle East who are first, what’s on second, and so forth, semantically
desirous to get into the Mitchell process. And—but speaking.
first things first. The—these terrorist acts and, you
know, the responses, have got to end in order for us
106 107
Broken grammar (non-standard and substandard): Singular or plural, we still understands what
Even with no indication of the stop-and-start the man mean, don’t we?
of anacoluthon (though this sometimes accompanies),
fluent but grammatically ill-formed sentences occur. “We understand where the power of this country
The corpus is full of the predictably substandard usage lay. It lays in the hearts and souls of Americans. It
(charitably to be interpreted as dialectal?) that gram- must lay in our pocketbooks. It lays in the willing-
ness for people to work hard. But as importantly, it
mar and diction teachers have long and fruitlessly
lays in the fact that we’ve got citizens from all
been inveighing against in elementary grades. Subject- walks of life, all political parties, that are willing to
verb agreement, for example, seems to be a major say, I want to love my neighbor.” (ungrammatical,
stumbling block for Mr. Bush. too) [Concord, NC, 11 April 2001]

“She is a member of a labor union at one point.” —or is that “I want to lay my neighbor?” Well,
[Austin, TX, 2 January 2001]
there’s loving and there’s loving, after all! As can be
seen, this is not a random slip; it’s that old teachers’
Is this like being joined (as a member) at the
bugaboo, (to) lie (down) [“intransitive”] versus (to) lay
hip? At least a past tense form, “was a member,”
(something down) [“transitive”]. (And then there were
would have helped this dangler.
the pasts, lay and laid, and those suggestive participles
“Of all states that understands local control of
to torture us, lain and laid! What’s a [Good Ol’] boy to
schools, Iowa is such a state.” [Council Bluffs, IA, do?) Perhaps Mr. Bush just had “Lay”—as in Kenny
28 February 2001] Boy—or DeLay—as in Tom—too much on his mind!

“But the true greatness of America are the people.” “I have said that the sanction regime is like Swiss
[Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., 2 July cheese—that meant that they weren’t very effec-
2001] tive.” [Washington, D.C., 22 February 2001]

“Our priorities is our faith.” [Greensboro, NC, 10 “Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend theirself.”
October 2000] [Good Morning America! 25 April 2001]

“Laura and I really don’t realize how bright our “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be
children is sometimes until we get an objective able to pass a literacy test.” [Townsend, TN, 21
analysis.” [CNBC, 15 April 2000] February 2001]
108 109
So not only agreement of verbs and their sub- “Well, I think that if you say you’re going to do
jects, but as well agreement of anaphoric pronouns and something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.”
their antecedents, are full of holes in W’s usage. Or just [CNN Online Chat, 30 August 2000]
substandard. The last one is touching, of course, since
it shows what happens when the President attempts And here I thought it was misspeakingfulness!
gender-neutral anaphoric usage, as prescribed by all Note that, increasingly, many people have accused the
those bra-burning feminists. Finally, the poetry of a Bush administration of using Orwellian Newspeak;
grammatical spoonerism added to a grammatical mis- perhaps more folks should have been alerted by such
match: early indications of upside-down semantics during his
candidacy.
“Families is where our nation finds hope, where
wings take dream.” [La Crosse, WI, 18 October “It’s going to require numerous IRA agents.” (“it” =
2000] Al Gore’s tax plan) [Greensboro, NC, 10 October
2000]
Ignorance of terms, morphology, and referents:
Here we find a plethora of coinages akin to Mr. This gives a whole new sense to getting one’s
Harding’s. A misspeakingful creation substitutes for a Irish up! IRS—INS—IRA; who can keep them all
perfectly ordinary, expectable term we can almost guess straight? Dick? John? Don? Are you there? Which
from context. We also find that Mr. Bush uses particu- bunch is in charge of my “War on Terror?”
lar words in senses wildly different, if not opposite to
“Neither in French nor in English nor in
the norm. Especially do we find use of expressions
Mexican.” [Quebec City, 21 April 2001]
indicating the speaker has—at least temporarily—no
real idea as to what these terms pick out in the world.
Don’t we have a NAF TA do to try to speak
“I do think we need for a troop to be able to house
just one of the major North American languages? This
his family. That’s an important part of building gaffe was worthy of Dan Quayle, who thought the
morale in the military.” (substandard grammar, too) “Latin Americans” must be speaking in “Latin!”
[Tyndall Air Force Base, FL, 12 March 2001]
“They want the federal government controlling
Given this charming concoction, we might Social Security like it’s some kind of federal pro-
gram.” [St. Charles, MO, 2 November 2000]
conclude that Mr. Bush speaks of each vertical half of
his trousers as a pant, or as well of one part of a cutting
instrument as a scissor!
110 111
Looking forward to the day that his privatiza- In fact, markets must unequivocally be open!
tion plan for Social Security accounts would get That is no doubt why dead, equivocal messages have
Congressional approval, candidate W must already to be carried out to the trash-heap of history.
have been subliminally imagining what Arthur
Andersen & Co. could do to re-balance the budget! “A tax-cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming
out of an economic illness.” [The Edge with Paula
“There are some monuments where the land is so Zahn, 18 September 2000]
widespread, they just encompass as much as possi-
ble. And the integral part of the—the precious But boy, it really packs a wallop on such infec-
part, so to speak—I guess all land is precious—but tions as Treasury surpluses! And have you heard the
the part that people uniformly would not want to one about the last time a President had trickle-down
spoil, will not be despoiled.” (several anacolutha, disease?
too) [Washington, D.C., 13 March 2001]
“And we need a full affront on an energy crisis that
The difficulties with diction here are monu- is real in California and looms for other parts of
mental, to be sure! So much so, they seem to have our country if we don’t move quickly.”
spoiled, or perhaps even despoiled, the integral and [Washington, D.C., 29 March 2001]
precious thought encompassed.
Finally, lurching ever more definitively into And here we thought that Enron’s CEO and
the abyss of diction and grammar beyond the Mr. Cheney’s Energy Task Force worked as fast as
President’s ken, we come to the Bushisms that have they could to assault California’s state treasury as well
proven the most fun for Saturday Night Live and The as other parts of the country with a full affrontal plan!
Capitol Steps and fun-pokers on the Internet:
“What I am against is quotas. I am against hard
(Classic) Malapropisms: quotas; quotas, they basically delineate based upon
George Bush is the best thing since Mrs. whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think,
vulcanize society.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 21
Malaprop herself!
January 2000]
“Ann [Veneman] and I will carry out this equivocal
message to the world: markets must be open!” My understanding was that only elastic quotas
[Washington, D.C., 2 March 2001] need “vulcaniz[ing],” however. And I certainly draw
the line at delineation, as should everyone!
112 113
“Anyway, I’m so thankful, and so gracious. I’m gra- The Collage and Montage of “Message”
cious that my brother Jeb is concerned about the
hemisphere as well.” [Miami, 4 June 2001]
As I noted, the “message” professionals in the
Even though “gracious,” one should, I guess, current White House are concerned enough to have
not be shy about it! made great efforts at controlling public access to
Dubya’s spontaneous speech. Yet, in spite of problems
“You subscribe politics to it. I subscribe freedom to it has when measured against fluid, fluent, spoken
it.” (“it” = the Elián González affair) [Associated expository standard speech, there are important,
Press quote, 6 April 2000] “message”-worthy aspects of it. Aspects that the pub-
lic and the media have responded to quite positively.
This must depend on what magazine ascrip- And since the air-borne terrorist attacks of September
tions you’re signed up for, I imagine. Poor guy; he 11, 2001, Mr. Bush’s image has been almost exclu-
must have gotten miscued somewhere along the sively narrowed to the embodied message of strength
speech process by talking to the Associated Press—you and seriousness—Texas-bred [!] toughness—in “really
know, the people who publish those things you “sub- trying” to cope with “evil” and to succeed at doing so
scribe to!” beyond (others’) expectations. To this, there has been
positive reaction even from The New York Times.
Others around him—his top Cabinet mem-
bers, his top staff members—appear in the media
sounding informed, professional, and on top of
things; they sound off in expository standard English.
Where media appearances have been arranged for
him, Mr. Bush is shown projecting a determination to
cope and win—with all of his being, it seems, as he
makes a hard, breathy attack on every consonant of
every important syllable he speaks, dysfluent as it may
be when left unscripted. It’s plosive-pounding
punches from the jaw of determination, folks.
Miraculously rescued miners in Pennsylvania
in summer, 2002: a case in point. Here was an oppor-
tunity to show that this rescue effort had coped with
114 115
the crisis and succeeded against the odds. Both the sibility about language and its power to contribute to
personnel above ground and the trapped miners image. Language reformed for a People Magazine poli-
below, using all their ingenuity, had “really tried.” So tics.
a media ritual occasion was duly arranged to show To be sure this is not Lincoln’s sensibility
that it’s the same with terrorism, of which the “mes- about “message” language, though in moments of seri-
sage”-opportunity for W would make the rescue a ous crisis every President, including George Bush, has
metaphor. Not, note, an occasion for dramatizing the had to make some stab at Lincolnesque preacherliness,
issue of mine-shaft safety (Too pro-labor and anti- with its evangelist-like affective loading. Mr. Bush, for
company? Too associated with Democrats?), or even example, did just fine with the register in the course of
the soothing, pro-status-quo and pro-business reas- three formal speeches crafted for his delivery in mid-
surance that a safety-net exists even for miners terror- September, 2001; each had moments of resonance
ized below terra firma. The denotational nonsequitur with the canon in what we can term the Lincoln-
is unimportant; the moment of Vygotskian chain-con- derived “civil religious register.”
ceptualization is all. The fluency or dysfluency of the Yet, consider the one-year commemoration of
language of W’s remarks is unimportant; what carries the terrorist attacks, on September 11, 2002.
is the rich visual context of the event’s crafting: the Officialdom, in the respectful silence of things-still-
President dressed to look like a miner, standing at the beyond-them, turned again to the very thing,
same level and in a group with them, breaking into Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was proclaimed over
jocular, congratulatory holds, pats on the shoulder, “Ground Zero” in New York City, thereby consecrat-
etc. Not victims, but survivors. In-and-by surviving, ing it as “hallowed ground” in the longer sweep of
not merely rescued men, but burly quasi-heroes. The American sacred nationhood. The dead firefighters,
President forcefully articulates in his no-nonsense police, and even office and restaurant workers all
syllabary style the now metonymic as well as become construable as heroes for the administration’s
metaphoric comparison-words in which “America” current “unfinished work” against terrorism. Even at
coming to the “rescue” of “freedom” from terrorism the Pentagon that day, another site of damage a year
stands tall with the rescuers/rescued. We get the pic- earlier, Lincoln’s words “these dead shall not have died
ture. in vain” needed to be used for properly honoring, thus
That’s how and why this particular kind of also assimilating, the dead of the Department of
political “message” language works. It is the culmina- Defense. Only immortal Lincoln can really “cope”
tive coming together of a politics of recognition—a when the rhetorical task before us is this great.
two-way affair with a public that encompasses a Lincoln’s text has, indeed, proved to be of a truly tran-
politician’s electorate—with a very contemporary sen- scendent “message”-worthiness. (But consider this.
116 117
Shanksville, Pennsylvania was the crashsite of the truly It’s the Language, Stupid!
heroic citizens on board American Airlines flight 93.
On September 11th, no one recycled Lincoln’s
Not unrelated to this contemporary develop-
rhetoric at the commemoration there, an out-of-the-
ment in political language is the following history. In
way and starkly less monumental site. Ironically
1976 (and years following) the U.S. Supreme Court
enough, the visuals of the site compare with the stark-
brought commercial speech under a particular kind of
ness of Cemetery Hill outside Gettysburg in 1863
First Amendment protection. This is popularly coded
where the rhetoric itself made the site monumental.)
as protection of “free speech.” The Court was almost
So when the going gets tough, the tough get
droll in its legal construal of advertising. It took it to
Lincoln. But what about in between such Lincoln-
be purposive communication of truths about a prod-
worthy moments? Talking politics is publicly experi-
uct, etc. under consideration for purchase, etc. by the
enced nowadays through a very different, this-worldly
addressee, the potential buyer. In this way, an adver-
rhetorical sensibility. It rests upon a different set of
tisement’s text is seen as expository prose, even if fre-
intertextual connections, to what I would term corpora-
quently somewhat distorted by overblown claims
tized language. Fashioned along the lines of modern
(termed “puffery”) about one’s wares. Expository
advertising copy, language in this mode is very pre-
prose that ought to be protected—not “abridged”—
cisely composed by phrases and words as the units, not
when considered as generally honest, sincere commu-
by sentences and paragraph-chunks of denotational
nication of important messages in the ordinary sense
exposition. It’s a compositional “language”—really, a
of the term.
code—of imagery. It uses what look and sound like
Observe, however, what follows as a conse-
words, but ideally, each contributory word or expres-
quence for the now “protected” legal realm of adver-
sion counts as a kind of autonomous emblem of an
tising content: it could be scrutinized for accurate (or
identity, targeting the sensibilities of a position in
inaccurate) propositional statements explicitly made
social reality. Someone is out there, at this or that
or conventionally “implicated”—that is, suggested to
number in a demographic scale; leaning this or that
the ordinary citizen-addressee by what was explicitly
way in an attitudinal profile scale; etc. The potential is
claimed. And this, obviously, exposes advertising copy
for such an emblem to “speak” to a targeted type of
to regulation and to lawsuit as truthful communica-
addressee, whom it invites to identify with a product, a
tion. Think of the disgruntled customers who think
service, a person, a corporation, a goal—whatever is
they were misled by propositional content. Think of
being marketed. Flash the composite text of all the
suspicious regulatory overhearers of such communi-
right emblems, and you get the keys to the kingdom.
cation, as for example the FDA testing claims made
118 119
by purveyors of quack as well as of legit medical desire, or how “you” ought to be having some other
products. reaction that causes anxiety relative to sometimes not
Since the late 1970s, as Richard Parmentier so subtle norms in the product’s market sphere.
points out in a study of regulation and “puffery,” (Think cosmetics and looking-one’s-age anxieties.
advertisers’ textual use of direct and propositionally Think certain automobiles and parents’ child-safety
complete factual generalizations about the goods and anxieties. Think more-or-less anything and sex.)
services advertised has plummeted. Who wants to be Why should this be? It is a strategic retreat, to
taken to have made a cause-and-effect statement these be sure, from what the Supreme Court declared to be
days? Remember “99 and 44/100ths % pure. So the expository or informational value of commercial
pure…it floats?” (The soap turned out to float because communication. But the retreat is one perfectly con-
each bar, made of whipped (“puffed?”) sodium stearate sistent with how politics in public now moves far away
and other stuff, had a very high air content. Three from language as the instrument of precise articulation
dots as printed were not enough to prevent Jane Doe of “issues” the public can experience via politicians’
from being misled and understanding “unintended” truth-claims and especially—Poppy, are you listen-
cause and effect relations here.) ing?—promises. In fact, the politics of recognition has
Instead, advertising copy in the public realm ultimately found its very semiotic technology of “mes-
concentrates much more on the selection and artful sage,” a technology whose expert practitioners are ver-
textual organization of images and of detachable words bal, visual, and media artists of sometimes great
and phrases, static or dynamic as the particular accomplishment. With its history of slogans, catch-
medium allows. In text and image, it may narrate sto- words, and multi-modal orchestration of “message”—
ries about characters, even purportedly “real” people, Gettysburg was no exception, recall—American poli-
as a mode of “third-person” testimonial. But when we tics long has provided the raw materials for their artis-
look for expository claims directly about the mar- tic labor. Now it provides major and continuing
ketable thing itself, we find instead a high number of employment, most effectively, it seems, by the RNC.
denotationally incomplete sentences and sentence (It was advertising bigwigs who, “liking Ike,” came to
fragments, registered slogans and catch-words, and General Eisenhower to persuade him in effect to leave
other—as we may term it—residually poetic material, the 1952 campaign to them.)
grammatically problematic but artistically put In the current state of the “message” art,
together. One frequently encounters specific claims, moreover, all of the other institutions of political life,
but they will be claims about “you”—or a stand-in, an and especially the public, have seemed to adjust. We
“image-you” the real you is supposed to project onto. see and hear political communication with the eyes
These claims will be about how “you” feel, think, or and ears of consumers of “message.” Even news
120 121
sources now duly package politicians for use along medium, of communication in the public sphere. The
these lines. They just accept “message” as what is at effect is seen in an adjustment of the ratio of operative
issue in political life. And continuing stories give meanings in any linguistic expression, the denotational
politicians biographical continuity in relation to “mes- and the context-indicating. Both are always present,
sage.” Insiders’ connoisseurship of the product, as it always involved in communication. But think of any
were. One’s biography is—or becomes—one’s “mes- words or expressions that have been finely ground
sage,” remember. through the mill of “message”-copy. These words and
(Interestingly, the “messages” of the “major expressions are particularly precise in suggestively
brands” themselves, Republican and Democratic, may communicating the identity “who” and the contextual
well have become too compromised as such for the “why” of their use. Not necessarily much in the way of
electorate and the public-at-large. Yet at least for an precise denotation. “Hey, where’s the beef?”—“Make
electoral cycle the apparatus of either party “brand” my day!”—“I like Ike!”—“…whom you trust…”—....
can be put at the disposal of a politician who can The more of these that constitute the currency of our
define his or her independent “message”—frequently a mutual adjustments one to another, the more these
“message” (brand) with a strong anti-“brand” stance! kinds of words and expressions imperceptibly influ-
Recall Mr. Reagan the “outsider” to Washington poli- ence the way we listen for them as a shortcut to
tics, and young Bush in his image. The parallel to understanding the world: thus, “…freedom…”—
market forces in fashion and taste is not at all fortu- “…peace…”—“…honor…” in the texts of political
itous, since it operates with much the same logic. Seen “message.” The key expressions are no longer experi-
always and only as a potentially “brand”able image, enced—or to be experienced—as signals of concepts with
any initially counter-cultural emergent can be assimi- which we communicate denotational truth-and-falsity.
lated to the larger system of commodity-value so that As we encounter them in circulation, they are doing
its “message” now within the system is “I’m not in the their work of socially locating speakers and addressees,
[= those other folks’] system,” e.g., punk or “Goth” and reinforcing their emblematic power to do such
clothing, hip-hop music, etc. Remember the 7-Up ad work. Their potency lies in how they conjure up a
campaign in which this brand took upon itself the kind-of-“who” at a certain cultural “where.” And of
soubriquet “The Un-cola,” aimed principally at the course this is precisely what is central to building
Pepsi- and Coca-Cola generation thirsting to break “message” through carefully—artfully—fashioned
free.) exposure designed for such purposes.
But here is the most telling fact. There is a But this is exactly how language itself—and in
reciprocal effect, too. It is exerted on the very nature particular what we might term “corporate standard
and meaningfulness of language as the stuff, the register”—is actually being marketed. The addressees
122 123
are aspiring people who are uncertain about their fit- sense of what language is about, is the world of indexi-
ness to join the ranks of middle management and cal meaning. “Paradigm—Transcend—Discursive—
higher. So language is being authoritatively marketed Ubiquitous—Stratagem:” “Do you know these words?
as indexical Viagra for the yupwardly mobile, essen- … Can you use them… with confidence and accu-
tially in pill or pellet form. And complete with size- racy?” asks the brochure for Career Success
anxiety: “Success in your business or profession and Vocabulary Cassettes, available only through American
the size of your vocabulary show a definite correla- Express. “Now, you can amass a Harvard graduate’s
tion,” Learn, Inc.’s Vocabulary Program advertise- vocabulary in just 15 minutes a day!” Verbal
ments inform the underendowed. (And you can self- Advantage® reassures us. Our current Harvard
administer the remedies in the privacy of your own M.B.A. Chief Magistrate and Commander-in-Chief is
home. Forget the embarrassment of English—let living proof.
alone gym—class!)
So what is going on is the quantization of lan-
guage, standard-sized packaging. We get a language
being turned word-by-word and grammatical-con-
struction-by-grammatical-construction into a collec-
tion of life-style commodities. Available to the cus-
tomer or client for self-help. “Acquire a powerful
vocabulary that catapults you into the top 5% of all
educated adults—the most successful, highest-earning
people!” screams the ad for “Verbal Advantage®
Success Edition” vocabulary audiocassettes. “Put a $ in
front of each word you learn,” as you move up the
corporate ladder, circulate in the best clubs, and pick
up the most desirable partners.
It’s language broken down into a word-by-
word display of one’s target identity, words to throw
into one’s speech for impression-management. There
is indeed an anxiety that creates the market; it is the
anxiety of the would-be Harvard M.B.A.—maybe
would-be President!—who lives in the world of index-
ical meaning, whose experience of language, whose
124 125

Real-“message”-Politik perfect; but I’m really trying!” (“Message?” Gee,

because, as he says, he has really been trying in the
past, he will really try in the future, lack of apparent
In a very real sense, then, there has emerged
fluency and knowledge notwithstanding.)
an agreement, an implicit contract between politicians
In at least two of the televised presidential
and the vast pool of media to use the “axis of ‘mes-
debates, the cocky and confident Al Gore tried time
sage’” to mediate the relationship of political figures
and again to do the same thing to Bush in his out-of-
and the public. Mr. Bush’s whole political life has
order and rule-breaking direct address. With a display
depended on this, the availability of the corporate
of precisely mobilized detail, he would attempt to
standard register and how it centers on image. As a
expose Dubya’s evasions and contradictions, his lack of
presidential candidate, certainly, he took maximal
control of detail, or even comprehension of the previ-
advantage of this each time an issue-focused and
ous question—all to no avail. The “message” was that
pointedly factual question came his way. Especially so
Gore had joined the so-called “liberal press”—you
when the question was from a reporter or citizen not
know, the ones who ask all those trick questions that try
quite clued in to the narrowed boundaries of “fair-
to pry positions on issues out of a candidate, the ones
ness” in the corporate communicative culture of
who try to expose the depth with which a candidate
national politics.
knows answers to—can make accurate denotational
The same in the so-called “debates” with Al
prose about—issues of fact. (That’s just what Dubya
Gore. Dubya simply ignored the question; perhaps he
couldn’t do, of course. But did it matter?) So by sharp
didn’t follow it. In place of an answer he recited as
contrast to Bush, all fidgeting and little tics and ner-
much of his “message”-relevant autobiography, drop-
vous re-posturing aside, Gore conveyed a counterpro-
ping in as many of the targeted words and expressions
ductive “message” of being one of those folks who
as he could in the sincerest first-person. Again and
don’t understand “message,” but are focused on issues,
again we heard: that he was Governor of Texas, the
issues, issues. Brimming with issues; overflowing with
second largest state of the Union; someone who got
them. Good grief, knowledgeable about them! Allied
things accomplished by finding compromises with
with that part of the press corps who don’t stick to the
Democrats; someone whose state’s schoolchildren had
rules of “message.” You know, the ones with perhaps a
improved reading and math scores; someone whose
little whiff of the late Izzy Stone about them? Bush
state was making progress on…; someone who was—
didn’t have to answer, of course; all he had to do was
by contrast to Clinton—morally clean (or at least
make that look into the camera: “Who is this guy?
repentant); someone who was—by contrast to Gore—
Why’s he pestering me?” (Even mainstream reporters
modest (or at least quietly smug);.... “Hey, I’m not
had stopped by this time.)
126 127
Given this as our style of political communica- called—“war,” then toned down to “campaign,” and
tion, so-called “voter apathy” is better seen as the pub- now, alas, back to “war,” we’ve all been summoned in
lic’s sharp implicit understanding of what their votes the last year. Now it has become a movie with the
have become. They are little more than market acts, U.S. Marshals closing in on the armed and dangerous
buying into a narrow “message” field increasingly villains holed up—somewhere… perhaps… we think…
divergent from the realm of actual political issues and well, at least there’s no evidence to the contrary. The
increasingly irrelevant to where such issues are shaped whole administration has been shouting to Mr. Bin
and decided (could it be big-donor occasions and pri- Laden and his dastardly minions, “We’ve got you sur-
vate briefings for corporate executives?). “Issues,” rounded!” And the trick will be to keep the audience,
recall, are either “message”-relevant, or to be avoided. the American public, identifying with those grateful
For this reason, who among us ever believed that what townsfolk who appreciate that the Head Marshal is
candidate George W. Bush put forward as his “issues” “really trying” to cope with “evil.” Everything has got
were actually his issues, his or his major backers’ real to be aligned with this “message,” assimilated to it.
program, and not just “message”-material? In a way, One way or another, it will have to be sustained in lit-
the more convincing he has been via “message,” the tle ways—Pennsylvania hard-coal miners in summer,
more he has pressed his issues—which have been the 2002—and big ones—Iraq in the pre-election autumn
very articulated “issues” everyone thought was just and its triumphant aftermath.
“message!” North Slope oil flowing and old-stand tim-
ber falling; regulatory agencies humming business’
tunes; the rich paying nothing much in taxes; nuclear
sabers rattling and Star Wars missiles at the ready; etc.
But: when you’re handed lemons, make
lemonade, right? The September 11, 2001 terrorist
bombings could not have been better for the actualiza-
tion of Dubya’s “message.” Mr. Bush can issue threats,
all right; that’s a distinct and ever-present aspect of his
“message”-identity, the Texas “law-and-order” lawman
recruiting the frontier posse—for his Christian jihad,
a.k.a. “crusade.” Remember how the use of that C-
word in a not carefully scripted outburst in those
angry September days scared the bejeezus out of peo-
ple in the orbit of Islam? To this—as it was first
128 129

That’s My Bush! little bursts of light in a network, each word, with its
image-enhancing “message”-relevance can be thrown
in to connect with the others to paint an image of
So note that Mr. Bush and his entire adminis-
something—something, but what?—in the area of
tration are now dressed in the metaphorical verbal
concern. There’s still the sense of a corporate-standard
battle fatigues of the “war on terrorism.” And while
language register that alludes to an important policy
in this realm they are “really trying,” assimilating all
area one might want to denote, but having alluded to
and sundry to its chain-complex of identifications,
it, moves on to allude to something else, the some-
they are really trying to jettison—and have the public
times ungrammatical textual contiguity of them being
forget—about the vast and contentious domestic
left for us—if not the Times!—still to parse as denota-
agenda, including doing something about matters eco-
tional text:
nomic and corporate. (These have thus far not yielded
such good “message”; hence, they were determinedly
“I appreciate diplomatic talk. But I’m more inter-
erased in the midterm elections with the cooperation ested in action and results. I am absolutely deter-
of Democrats.) mined, absolutely determined, to rout terrorism out
But, in the realms of “message,” “war” is war. where it exists and bring them to justice. We
After the September attacks, even The New York Times learned a good lesson on September 11: that there
cheered “Mr. Bush’s New Gravitas” on 12 October is evil in this world....
2001, the day following an East Room press confer- “And it is my duty as the president of the United
ence. “He seemed more confident, determined, and States to use the resources of this great nation, a
sure of his purpose and was in full command of the freedom-loving nation, a compassionate nation, a
nation that understands values of life and rout ter-
complex array of political and military challenges that
rorism out where it exists. And we’re going to get
he faces,” gushed the editorial page: “Mr. Bush clari-
PLENTY OF NATIONS a chance to do so.” [11
fied and sharpened his positions on several important October 2001]
issues.” Perhaps because the positions the Times dis-
cerned happened to be closer to theirs! Note here the combination of numerous “mes-
So they were quick to award Dubya’s vocal sage”-words and -expressions, the very stuff of stand-
performance the Gravvy Award, notwithstanding his ing tall and silent and tough and ready-for-action in
delivery was very much like what they had been exco- the same first-person casting as was so effective in the
riating him for earlier. There’s still a paint-by-word 2000 campaign. Note the charming, leftover phrasal
rhetoric of “message” in the transcript of the ornamentation no doubt still lingering somewhere in
President’s answers to questions. Like that thousand memory from the three excellent set speeches that Mr.
130 131
Bush had delivered in September, 2001, a couple of unscripted, unrehearsed, un-Tel-e-Prompt-R-ed
weeks before (“this great nation,… of life”). And of speech.
course there are the howlers. There are errors of Language used in the expository mode, used to
agreement, as in “terrorism…it…them.” There are create argument and therefore, at its most successful,
malapropisms, as in “rout out.” There are register to become the instrument of reason and rationality, is
shifts, as in “plenty of nations.” There are substandard clearly not one of Mr. Bush’s attributes. This is not
locutions, as in “values of life,” “get…a chance.” Lincoln. This is not Kennedy. Neither Roosevelt.
But look at the President’s attempt at policy- or Whatever else we think of him, not Mr. Clinton.
issue-talk: it’s still as confused as anything the Times or These were Presidents for whom language was both a
Jay Leno was squawking about from the campaign on, renvoi, a hearkening back, to the experiences of literary
until that point. Did he mean “rooting out” terrorists imagination made concrete in words, and to systematic
or “routing” them? Is he “giving many nations [where use of language for critical thought such as we do in
terrorism exists] a chance to root out—or rout—terror- science, in religion for narrative and theological inves-
ists from their soil” or “getting many nations [together] tigation, etc. Whatever the field. Mr. Bush’s is a
while this nation has a chance so to do?” What, Mr. phrasebook notion of political “message”-language,
President, is the specific policy that follows upon our straight out of anxious corporate standard, in which
great, compassionate, freedom-loving understanding of saying the right terms, with luck in a poetically perfect
“values [sic!] of life?” New gravitas? Gimme a break! arrangement, is all the message there is.
Sure, Mr. New York Times-man, the poetry-to- It’s emphatically not just the problem of
your-ears was that he said big-government (rather than “soundbites,” as print journalists and their partisans in
libertarian) things, and internationalist (rather than iso- academia keep saying. This is just killing the media
lationist) things. That’s your interpretation, and those messenger. Short excerpts from longer texts can pow-
are merely implications for your issues. What you’re erfully outline and encapsulate a message while not
not understanding, however, is that the “message” is necessarily being only “message:” “Absolute power
still composed out of those fulsome malapropisms and corrupts absolutely”; “E = mc2”; “Tune in, turn on,
anacolutha and incoherences and agrammatisms drop out.” If you can find an actual message to summa-
because it’s just the use of the “message”-word itself that rize, that is (in the non-insider sense of the term), one
counts. It’s still poetry of “message.” Its coherence with otherwise developed with a fluency of overall argu-
what else is going on, as in the discourse of rationality ment, with all due complexity of exposition that it
presumably located elsewhere in the administration requires.
(one hopes), seems hardly to be at issue. Time has Think of the high and low points of the
borne this out. It’s unmistakable in Mr. Bush’s American presidency manifest across the range of its
132
venues for speaking, for using language. Mr. Lincoln’s Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC is the North American suc-
Gettysburg Address (that he wrote himself), in its 272- cessor of Prickly Pear Press, founded in Britain by Keith
word final version, is the most concentrated, effective, Hart and Anna Grimshaw in 1993. Prickly Paradigm aims
and sustained union of a rhetorical argument within to follow their lead in publishing challenging and some-
Baconian—Jeffersonian democracy and an identity- times outrageous pamphlets, not only on anthropology,
piece—Lincoln’s identity—of self-fashioning as hum- but on other academic disciplines, the arts, and the con-
ble, plainspoken, King-James-Bible-to-Declaration-of- temporary world.
Independence Eucharistic Americanism. It is one of
the best moments in the entire speech-canon of presi- Prickly Paradigm is marketed and distributed by
dents. By comparison, Mr. Bush’s speechwriters for his The University of Chicago Press.
National Cathedral memorial address of 14 September
www.press.uchicago.edu
2001, and his subsequent address to a joint session of
Congress of 20 September, also gave him not at all
A list of current and future titles, as well as contact
bad examples.
addresses for all correspondence, can be found on our
But, linguistically speaking in the politics of website.
recognition, we recognize what Mr. Bush is and what
his “message”-folk want him to be by the way he www.prickly-paradigm.com
speaks on those relatively unscripted—even if carefully
manipulated—occasions. And we must say, that Executive Publisher
notwithstanding his scripted eloquence on memorial Marshall Sahlins
and commemorative days, Dubya’s spoken identity
ought, perhaps, to give us pause. And that is so partic- Publishers
ularly in these days of rather knee-jerk “patriotism,” in Peter Sahlins
which criticism of the individual who happens to be Ramona Naddaff
titular President is easily recast as disloyalty to the Bernard Sahlins
country (or so The White House would have it). Seminary Co-op Bookstore
In our politics, identity is “message” embod-
ied. So listen to the language. Where, as Julia Ward Editor
Howe would have it, Lincoln, verbally embodied, Matthew Engelke
info@prickly-paradigm.com
would have Americans die for Freedom, Bush would
have us die for Management. I’m not certain we’re all,
Design and layout by Bellwether Manufacturing.
as they say in those parts, “on message.”