A NORMAL TONE OF VOICE
“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” shouts Shakespeare’s King Richard III as his foes approach in overwhelming numbers.
In this election year, I have a quieter and more humble plea: My vote for a normal tone of voice.
The other night, I finally heard a McCain speech, on the program “Word For Word,” via Vermont Public Radio. I had hoped from some of his independent actions in the past that he would represent a break with the Republican past, and that if he did win, we wouldn’t face another four years of listening to bleating platitudes and searching the back pages for the devilish details.
Alas, McCain was dealing out the same old syrupy sweet-talk, the same condescending babytalk, that I’ve now enduring from Nixon, Reagan, and two Bushes. He was patiently explaining, in the same oh-so-Fatherly voice, how he would be the one to really represent what Obama talked about---typical Republican preemptive strikes—backing up what he said with glib half-truths that any intelligent person could see through. But he doesn’t care if a mere smear percentage sees through the screen, as long as a majority gets lulled. My wife, with her usual Emperor-has-no-clothes directness, summed up: “He isn’t saying ANYTHING.”
Specifics? Declaring that Social Security is in deep trouble, when it would have a huge surplus if Congress hadn’t kept appropriating the payments so their deficits wouldn’t look bad. We payers were left with a promise—not a promissory note, just a promise—and in the interest of blasting apart the last vestiges of government of, by and for the people, McCain is willing to forget that supposed guarantee.
Inveighing against “partisan politics” in Congress-- what a wonderful double-bind. If someone takes a principled stand, he’s an intransigent partisan. If he’s willing to compromise to get things moving, he doesn’t really stand for anything, and probably has been bought out by “special interests.” Using that phrase to describe dedicated groups formed out of well-researched concerns, rather than applying it to the power grabs of big money, is some kind of lie that the Greek experts in rhetoric probably had a term for skewering, but which gets past TV viewers just fine.
I’m so sick of phony tones of voice I could screech. Every time I come near a TV set—we don’t have any TV service—I’m reminded of the drivel that is poured into people’s ears by the hour. My wife and I aren’t monthly contributors to Vermont Public Radio because it’s liberal, but because it’s sane. I grew up on Canadian radio, back when CBC-AM at 940 was trying to be like the BBC (which VPR now carries); I’ve only had two people pick up the degree to which my way of speaking was formed by the CBC, but it’s there. I wish some of the “yay, yay; nay, nay” fundamentalists would get onto talk radio’s case about the angry frothing and sneering ridicule that people now accept as easily as they do brown horizons. I go back to when talk radio hosts tried to be unbiased moderators, before big companies bought the clear channel stations and hired biased hosts who would attack any suggestion that business wasn’t the best thing ever for our country.
Will Obama be any different? I don’t know yet. So far, I’ve only heard speechmaking, the kind necessary for navigating critical junctures in a long, hard primary. I long for a candidate who will say, “The surge in Iraq has put the lid on sectarian conflict, but in Baghdad, if you are a Shiite and you go into a Sunni neighborhood, you fear for your life—and vice-versa. This is a country that was put together by outsiders, by Western powers after they defeated the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and it will take a long, long time for the clashing groups to settle their differences, if ever. So far, mostly they have achieved peace by driving each other out of each other’s neighborhoods. Remember the Assyrians, fighting the Babylonians in the Bible? The Assyrians are still there. Babylon is called Baghdad now. These people are experts at holding grudges, for hundreds if not thousands of years--but the one thing they can unite around is, they want us out. We invaded them. We Christians invaded a Muslim country. Every time a terrorist holes up in a house full of children, and those children get bombed by our planes, we will get the blame. If someone drives a car at one of our checkpoints and doesn’t stop when signaled to do so, it’s our fault when the occupants get shot. And so on. There is no escaping the fact that we are where we don’t belong.”
I offer this only as an illustrative sample, not as an absolute position. Maybe the solution is to follow George Aiken’s advice: not that thing about declaring victory and getting out, which was an off-the-cuff remark taken out of context, but his position that we should hold certain enclaves and be there to make sure things didn’t break down, but not try to hold the whole country.
I want a candidate who will give supportive evidence: “There are people who say that fluctuations in the sun’s radiation, not human action, are driving global warming. In the first place, xyz studied that possibility and found the variations in the solar cycle were not large enough in the short run to explain what is happening. Second, if there IS an increase in the sun’s heat that we can’t control, that’s ALL THE MORE REASON why we have to start changing what IS in our power to control. If we’re facing two threats rather than one, we have no time to lose.” And so on.
No more superficialities, no more sloganeering, no more talking-down-to. We aren’t your brood, we’re your bosses.