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Barnie Day was a Democratic delegate from Patrick County from his election in 1997 through the 2001 session. A former county administrator and business owner, he is now a banker.
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“It is not the powerful arm, but soft enchanting tongue that governs all.”
— Sophocles (495-406 B.C.)
The power of spoken communication has been recognized for a long time.
Says Homer in the Iliad, sometime between the 10th and the 8th Century, B. C.: “When his words fell soft as snowflakes on a winter’s day, then could no mortal man beside vie with Odysseus.”
Maybe so. But a few could give Ody his comeuppance.
Lincoln, at Gettysburg, surely. Churchill? Hands down. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is, in the English language, incomparable. And, sure, I know what a broad swath of literature that includes.
The most memorable speeches, the ones that move people, that inspire them, are political. Perhaps it is because only politics can move nations.
Sometimes the direction of the move is hellish. See Hitler’s Germany. Sometimes, not quite so. See Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech at the time of his first arrest. (Then his only real claim to fame was high school athlete of the year in Cuba.)
Perhaps the power of speech is in inverse proportion to the fear most people have of giving them. Public speaking routinely ranks in front of snakes and spiders on phobia surveys.
It may be something a little stronger. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), herself no slouch, opined that it may be sexual. Said she: “If ever a woman feels proud of her lover, it is when she sees him as a successful public speaker.”
Translation: may be a good way to pick up chicks.
Great speeches, or at least phrases of them, hang in the mind. Politically, some are capable of pulling the chestnuts out of the fire. See Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, wherein he blubbers on about his wife’s “good, Republican coat.”
Some, clearly, can push the chestnuts into the fire. Bush The First: “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Bush The Second: sixteen little words that everybody from the doorman to the National Security Adviser has claimed so far.
Some soar. Kennedy’s inaugural stand-up; Kennedy in Berlin. Some hit with the thud of…well… See Goldwater’s “extremism,” vice-virtue debacle.
Speech-making is like bull-riding. Both can be exhilarating; both can break your back. Time is warped by perspective. Eight seconds seems like a blink, unless you’re on the bull.
In bull-riding, the bull gets 50 points and the rider gets 50. Same with speakers and speeches.
The immortals write their own. Easy to imagine Lincoln scratching away. Churchill won the only Nobel Prize for Literature that cited “the spoken word.” Any doubt that King wrote his is dispelled by the reading of his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”
Still, rare magic happens when great writers converge with great “givers”, when that twain shall meet.
It happened often with Ronald Regan, the Great Communicator, the “Morning in America” man, and Peggy Noonan, a gifted writer. Who could forget Reagan’s soaring, searing rhetoric after the first shuttle tragedy?
Jimmy Carter couldn’t buy the convergence. He could never get over that annoying habit of flaring his eyes for verbal emphasis. Still can’t.
We had a touch, if not of greatness, then at least informed grace, here in Virginia the other day.
Sen. John Chichester, powerful chairman of Senate Finance, who learned a thing or two about state finances at the knee of former chairman Hunter Andrews (who learned at the knee of the quintessential chairman, Ed Willey), gave a sock-o stand-up to the Virginia Foundation for Research and Economic Education (Virginia FREE).
The most important speech given in Virginia this year, it met with near universal acclaim.
(Three of the state’s major daily newspapers — in Roanoke, Norfolk, and Newport News — led their Sunday opinion sections with it).
Said he: “Resources will never be limitless; we will always need to set priorities and make choices. But we are way overdue to begin the conversation about what we want Virginia to look like 10 or 15 years from now.”
Count that one as reality converging with common sense.
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Copyright 2003