This is a small note about Obama's spiritual mentor, the Reverend Wright. Something about this guy doesn't seem to bother anyone else, but it sure bugs me: He's inarticulate.
Across the political spectrum, everyone speaks of the man as though he were a gifted orator. Not to me. I think the examples of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan have taught us automatically to ascribe great oratorical skill to African American religious figures. Malcolm could call the white man the devil and many "devils" would consider themselves honored to receive the insult -- that's the kind of ability he had. The four men listed above were/are great orators, perhaps the greatest in this nation's history.
But not all black clerics have the gift. For example, Elijah Muhammed didn't. Neither does Wright. The guy has all the erudition of Archie Bunker or Al Bundy. Sure, he has passion -- but passion is not talent.
Our standards have lowered. That observation applies not just to the black community but across the board.
Today, many consider Ronald Reagan a superb orator, when he was -- at best -- a reasonably gifted after-dinner speaker, capable of telling cute anecdotes committed to memory or of reading from the teleprompter. He was hopeless at impromptu speech. He looked good because he followed Carter and Ford, who were abominable.
In the current political realm, Bill Clinton is very good; his wife, less so. Obama is extremely over-rated -- his pacing is off, and those weird pauses are going to drive the world buggo within a year of his attaining office, if he gets in. Joe Biden is good. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney had (I thought) some talent. Can you think of anyone else who does? I can't.
In the religious realm, the newer fundamentalist preachers do not possess the oratorical skill level of a Graham or a Falwell. Maybe that's a good thing.
To paraphrase Henry Higgins: Why have Americans forgotten how to speak?
23 comments:
"Why have Americans forgotten how to speak?"
Good question and here's my guess.
Induced Attention Deficit Disorder.
Causes: just about everything in the modern world encourages quick bursts of mental activity followed by a shift into an alternate state of torpor. Take driving on a freeway. Rinse & repeat.
There was a super-Mozart fan a few years back who named herself (get this) "W. Mozart". She conjectured that the fad for Mozart starting in the mid-70s (before the movie Amadeus was made) was due to the fact that he modulates every 3 minutes, which is about the length of a pop tune. People's brains had been accustomed by at least 20 years of mass media to expect a "song" lasting about 3 minutes, no more. Beethoven's music isn't better, but it sometimes requires more than 3 minutes before he modulates, by which time most untrained moderns have stopped listening. Bach? Fugeddaboutit: his music is way to demanding for modern ears.
I think she has a point.
Good question; not a new one.
--------
The boys 'ud always lead us,
An' the girls 'ud all chime in
Till the sweetness o' the singin'
Robbed the list'nin' soul o' sin;
An' I used to tell the parson
'T was as good to sing as pray,
When the people sung the ol' tunes
In the ol'-fashioned way.
How I long ag'in to hear 'em
Pourin' forth from soul to soul,
With the treble high an' meller,
An' the bass's mighty roll;
But the times is very diff'rent,
An' the music heerd to-day
Ain't the singin' o' the ol' tunes
In the ol'-fashioned way.
Little screechin' by a woman,
Little squawkin' by a man,
Then the organ's twiddle-twaddle,
Jest the empty space to span,
— An' ef you should even think it,
'T is n't proper fur to say
That you want to hear the ol' tunes
Now THAT's an interesting theory, j. It may explain why the fad for rock opera was so short-lived -- the demand for storytelling takes us out of the three-minute Procrustes' bed.
If you're right, Mahler/Bruckner guys like me have no real place in the modern world.
I think an even more telling popular indicator of induced ADD are television commercials. When TV commercials switched from 60 seconds to 30 seconds, you could feel the entire culture change.
Why oh why?
joe? u didn like seeing teh rev say 'different not deficient' ova and ova & ova? cuz u think he isn't a5 good a5 malcom or king? And u think its cuz we d0nt talk good no more? C, i dunno dood, jeremiah wright's stylez might not be like MalX or the Kizzle, maybe soundz mo like Jackie Chiles, Cozmo Kramer's Lawyer, but he showed more spine and more power these days than BHO HRC + JSM3 combined.
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pıɐs puǝɹʌǝɹ pooƃ ǝɥʇ ʇɐɥʍ s,ʇɐɥʇ...
who no talk 9ood?
In his 1948 work on The Philosophy of Modern Music, Frankfurt School leader Theodor Adorno argued that the purpose of modern music is to literally drive the listener insane. He justified this by asserting that [ . . . ] only by first destroying civilization, through the spread of all forms of cultural pessimism and perversity, could liberation occur. On the role of modern music, he wrote, "It is not that schizophrenia is directly expressed therein; but the music imprints upon itself an attitude similar to that of the mentally ill. The individual brings about his own disintegration.... He imagines the fulfillment of the promise through magic, but nonetheless within the realm of immediate actuality.... Its concern is to dominate schizophrenic traits through the aesthetic consciousness. In so doing, it would hope to vindicate insanity as true health."
much more:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/4qu54b
I blame television. For everything.
—gmanedit
I don't think Wright is inarticulate because he's quite articulate. Are we both referring to his address at the National Press Club this morning? He lacks appropriate humility - when he scores a point, he gloats for approval just like Dubya, but not from the obvious sense of inferiority and inadequacy that Dubya always betrays. But Wright's range of learning is unassailable, and he conveys it well. I never heard Malcolm but for some excerpts. Jesse Jackson is the best political speaker I've ever heard. I can't listen to Louis without his bow tie annoying me to distraction, but what I hear from him is ugly bitterness that doesn't arouse anything in me. I agree that Wright's no great speaker on the world's stage, but he doubtless enthralled his congregations for decades. It's a different context. (Hey, I was invited to speak at a black church by its pastor - O, she loved me so! I declined. BTW, I'm relying on her definition of 'articulate' below.)
Jesse is the master of metaphor and analogy; his rhymes always work perfectly. Yet, he's the least articulate speaker among those you've cited - it sounds like he's practicing the way Demosthenes had done; or he just put a burning coal on his tongue like Moses had. Of course, on a vast stage, he's very careful and less of a mumbler. You know, here in North Carolina, many natives think carpetbaggers are hard of hearing. True.
I'm thinking we use 'articulate' to mean different things. I use it to mean speaking clearly (in order to articulate a message).
Dick Gregory in his prime was great. Adam Clayton Powell and Daniel Patrick Moynahan rank high. Emma Goldman was so good she caused riots, but I don't know anyone who heard her. I've read her speeches, and they're brilliant.
Oral Roberts was better than Billy Graham, which reminds me, Burt Lancaster could have been great had he taken on Reagan after The Speech; but no one at the time thought an antidote was needed. Pride cometh before a fall.
Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker: Women who behave don't make history.
We need pop culture analysts like a fish needs a bicycle pump. If y'all have a minute, you might enjoy reading Richard Poirier's "The War Against the Young: Its Beginnings" (1971). If only a second, check out Lewis Thomas's "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" (1982).
I've been giving more thought to j's theory that musical styles impact oratorical skill. It occurs to me that America's greatest improvisatory speakers were born of the jazz age. True, Farrakhan was a calypso singer, and I'm told that he's a fine classical violinist, but he also possesses a good jazzman's ability to jam for an hour and still seem fresh.
H, you should have heard Farrakhan on the radio back in the day. The guy was really good. I didn't agree with what he said, and I doubt that he cares about my opinion one way or the other. But so what? This post is about style, and he had it.
Wright? He's Ralph Kramden. Every few seconds, you get the sense that he's about to forget the word he's looking for -- and when he does, all you're gonna hear is "Hummina hummina" as he stares into the spotlights.
I mean, the most memorable thing he's said so far is this:
"God bless America? No -- God DAMN America!"
Cah-MON. That chestnut was ancient when I was a kid.
I perceive no striking imagery, no sense of poetry, no modulation of his tone of voice, no understanding of the novel and striking example, no appreciation for the beauty of language, no swing, no magic.
I know I'll be slammed for saying this but -- the guy just has no rythm.
Whoops. I meant rhythm. If I were a practicing Catholic, I'd know that word better.
"Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker: Women who behave don't make history."
Hirsi Ali gets famous for blaming Islam for all that ails Africa, gets run out of Europe, moves to the US and joins the party that advocates Intelligent Design!
BTW, I never questioned Joseph's IQ, just the logic filter he is using lately.
Aw, Joe, don't pull those Vegas tricks on me by shifting the discussion to something that sounds like I said something I never said, and trying to get me to defend something absurd. Did I say Wright is a good speaker? I said he articulates his words well, and I'll add that he sounds like a rabbi sometimes (or Philip Roth's impersonations of a rabbi or psychoanylist). Cornel West annoys me that way also. I can't respond about anything other than his address this morning, which I watched on C-SPAN. I haven't heard his other remarks, except for the low-grade YouTube excerpted rant. American chestnuts disappeared from blight when you were growing up; most came from France.
beeta, I think you've hit on it, about Joseph's "logic filter". He's wondering if he should embrace the notion that "America's greatest improvisatory speakers were born of the jazz age", which sounds like a good "theory" (as he put it). Do you think he'll work out his theory scrupulously? By all accounts, Hitler was the "greatest improvisatory" speaker of his time (maybe of all time), and Hitler got boners listening to Wagner and that other stuff Joseph stuffs his ears with. I also have a 'theory' about how John Coltrane, when he was a caddy, could hear Sam Snead's club making contact with the ball, could hear it compress the ball, and could hear it decompress off the clubface. Of course, Snead used a persimmon driver when the ball stayed on the clubface for a shorter duration than on today's titanium drivers, approximately 0.000035 of a second less. Joseph grew up in a strange land. I don't know if he heard trolley cars and tenement radiator pipes; horse shoes on cobblestones; police whistles; elevator clappers; cabby honks at shouting stickballers; or the Purdie Shuffle when it was merely shoeshine rags snapping off a swell's brogues. Scott Joplin got his nerve at the World's Fair in Chicago, where he listened to John Philip Sousa. Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag was the first million-seller pop tune - as sheet music! Then came the craze of player-pianos with 3-minute ditties; then the 78-rpm 2 1/2 - 3 minute recording, and soon after, the most articulate American who ever lived, Louis Armstrong, after whom everyone else is a footnote (according to Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis). (It's hard to find Louis's "It's Sleepy Time Down South" when he sings 'darkies' instead of 'people'.)
California in the 1960s was indeed a strange land, but there were no trolley cars.
And what's wrong with playing with the idea j proposed? I'm not claiming that it should be applied with the rigor of a geometrical proof. I think j made his offering in the spirit of fun.
At any rate, the only people who can intelligently compare Hitler's oratorical gifts to those of any American re people who are fluent in both languages.
I once spoke to a prof at UNM about that very point. (He taught German history.) Part of Hitler's appeal, he said, was his Austrian accent, which struck German ears in somewhat the same way that our ears might be struck by the cadences of a Dixie plantation owner.
Those cadences definitely were NOT jazzy, and he did not improvise. All the words and gestures were worked out ahead of time. His normal speaking voice (we have only one surreptitiously recorded example of it) was VERY different from the Hitler you know from his recorded speeches.
His vocal teacher, incidentally, was fake mentalist Erik Jan Hanussen -- who was Jewish.
"I've been giving more thought to j's theory that musical styles impact oratorical skill."
No, "W. Mozart" was saying that a prevailing mentality created by the forces of modernity accidentally created the Mozart boom. Nor was she saying that Mozart's music was simple minded: but that its structural simplicity was pleasing to dumbed-down minds in a way that other composers wasn't.
Further to this, I think that the entire urban and ex-urban experience is akin to being in a war: short bursts of intense engagement followed by purposeful disengagement. Living in the modern urban world is one long process of tuning out. Living in the natural world is the exact opposite.
I had an experience a few years ago when I lived in the country for a while. I was walking around as I did in the city: lost in my own thoughts. Then I heard a noise, like a cross between a snort and a hiss. I looked up, startled. It was the most beautiful deer, looking at me with great curiosity.
Thank god it was a harmless herbivore, I thought. It occurred to me that our ancestors had to be constantly on guard against danger, and that their learned sensory apparatus was totally different from ours. Like a dull knife-blade.
I'll agree that our knowledge of Hitler's oratory comes from hearsay. My hearsay came from John Tolland, William Shirer, Walter C. Langer, and some others who probably are loops to those. Oh, yeah, Leni's Triumph of the Will, which wouldn't be hearsay. Anyway, Hitler always (they say, and I recall from TOtW) began with incoherent ramblings, not a set-piece beginning (presumably to tune his voice, to hear the hall or the P.A. system, to moderate his breathing and heartbeat - you know, the stuff performers learn to do, as in "How are you all doing?" "I can't hear you!" and as ol' Paul Krassner recently said, "No, I really can't hear you!").
If anything's "wrong" with J's stuff about Mozart it's that it depends on Mozart. To my thinking, there are some human phenomena for which there is no (mortal?) explanation, the ones that come to mind: Shakespeare, Mozart, Keats, Kafka, James Joyce, Bobby Fischer and Tiger Woods. Besides, music relies on intervals (even during tone), and we haven't got around to studying intervals and suspended time; we've barely come to notice them, and often call it 'boredom'. I loved Barry Lyndon, didn't you? It looked like Stanley wanted us to see what our way of life was like and had been like for thousands of years, but for the very last time before it would speed up, unrelenting. God, I miss him so! It was cool how he used a novel removed in time from our time the way Thackery's novel used Barry's time removed from his - nicely proportional. Sophocles did that with his Oedipus, making him show up from a thousands of years before, maybe so posterity can have the same proportion? My favorite Toss-Up:
Oedipus Tyrannus
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus the King
If anyone hasn't seen and heard Rev. Wright's NAACP speech and wants to,
it's here at youtube in 3 parts (the first being him being introduced, and worthwhile if you don't know much about the man's life experience and education credentials, as I didn't.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/buddyboyofcanada
I agree he's lacking in oratorical authority or "rhythm." I also think he has spent too much time in the now black hole of academia and what it has brought to him (social contacts, for instance). IMO he's got a soul much veiled by such experience; lots of pure sophistry in his speech here. I'd suppose he could accept me as "being different," as I likewise would accept him. Obama I see as similarly "veiled," but I don't see the soul. Given the choice, I'd rather spend time talking with Wright, or having him as a neighbor.
HD said, "If y'all have a minute, you might enjoy reading Richard Poirier's 'The War Against the Young: Its Beginnings' (1971). If only a second, check out Lewis Thomas's 'Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony'" (1982).
I rustled them up (Thanks for the suggestions):
Late Night Thoughts-
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Thomas/mahlers-ninth.html
War Against -
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/68oct/poirier.htm
.
Re Mozart
(Even though I've printed , and read this report three times, I'm over my head here as I'm not a musician, but just in case there is a musician with classical training about these parts...)
Mozart's 1782-1786 Revolution in Music
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/fid_924_lar_mozart.html
.
who cares about this (apart from Anti-Obama bigots and racist old fart who would not vote for a black man or a woman anyway) ?
Thanks, Gary M, for making the essays clickable. Poirier's 1971 version concludes somewhat differently, the last sentence ending with "... and we will have at last wasted some of the very best of ourselves".
aitchd, So noted. I read it, but also had plastered it into a word document for printing--I still love paper and the printed word--and now have added your note. Poirier profound and prescient.
Joseph, even after scanning this
http://www.upto11.net/generic_wiki.php?q=streetcar
I'm not so clear on the distinction between the cable-trolley-streetcar distinctions. Sure as hell remember something like them in San Francisco in the 60s , though.
From your making the distinction above, I'm presuming, unlike myself, you were an actual resident of San Francisco in those years. If so, did you happen to know Bill Hamm or Bob Fine? Gary or Maggie Lowe? Much loved friends I lost touch with.
Reverend Wright can speak very well indeed. I write this some two or three days after my comment above, where I said, "I agree he's lacking in oratorical authority or "rhythm." I also think he has spent too much time in the now black hole of academia and what it has brought to him (social contacts, for instance)."
I based that on a clip I saw; which upon reflection, is a stupid thing to do. I've just spent an hour or so watching Bill Moyers in discussion with him. Anyone who has not seen it should take the time.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/watch.html
Preaching to his congregation or even as an invited fund raiser is another thing from a conversation. And now I see that the Reverend is not sucked so deep into the rot of academia as I had said.
Please. Go listen. I think you won't regret the time or effort spent.
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