Some Wednesday Readings

I really didn’t think politicians were giving substantive speeches of ideas anymore, the kind with thesis statements, the marshaling of evidence, and a compelling call to action. Whether you’re a supporter or not, that’s what Vice President J.D. Vance has been doing. He gave two speeches in Europe that are still ricocheting back and forth across the ocean – one at the AI conference in Paris and one at the security conference in Munich. Weeks later, people are still talking about them. Christian Hacking at The Critic Magazine says Vance was right about free speech in Britain; Madeleine Kearns at The Free Press interviews the grandma arrested by Scotland’s speech police. N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval says Vance’s real message to Europe was give up the information war. And he’s continuing to speak; at a recent National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., he said that “foreign misadventures” have sometimes led to the eradication of historic Christian communities. 

Mad Monks and Alchemists – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

Murders for March – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

How Movie Theaters Got Their Start in America – Dave Roos at History.

Data and Social Media Effectiveness – Chris Martin at FYI.

Sewing Kit Save: Clement Evans – Phil Greenwalt at Emerging Civil War.

Civil War Era Themes in Mardi Gras Celebrations, 1880-1940 – Neil Chatelain at Emerging Civil War.

The American West – Writing Advice from John Steinbeck – William Groneman at Cowboy State Daily.

Photograph: John Steinbeck.

Some Wednesday Readings

The speech Vice President J.D. Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference last week continues to reverberate. I don’t think I can recall a recent speech that has had as much reaction and response as this one, and it was on top of the one Vance gave at the Paris meeting on artificial intelligence. The Critic Magazine in the UK said Europe deserved it; The Spectator says it sent shockwaves across the continent. Matt Taibbi at Racket News looked at the reaction and said the mask has dropped. 

To prove Vance wrong, CBS followed German police who made arrests for violations of speech, and somehow managed to prove Vance right. Ben Domenech, a former CBS newsman, wonders why CBS has developed a penchant for censorship. 

Meanwhile, the new Administration in Washington makes its first move against sex trafficking. Oliver Wiseman at The Free Press describes what’s happening overall in Washington as the “everything is broken” administration. 

More Good Reads

Patrick Colquhoun and the Thames River Police – A London Inheritance.

Mud – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

The (British) police are ruining their reputation – Fred de Fossard at The Critic Magazine.

5 Tips for Writing Page-Turning Historical Fiction – Julie Hartley at Writer’s Digest.

“Street Light,” poem by John Crowe Ranson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Photograph: Poet John Crowe Ranson in 1941.

“The American Spirit” by David McCullough

David McCullough has spent his professional lifetime exploring the people and events that form a goodly part of what we call American history. He’s fascinated by the history of the United States, but it’s a fascination that doesn’t preclude understanding of or excuse things that need to be criticized. His reach and interest are as broad as they is deep.

McCullough – editor, teacher, lecturer, television host – is the author of numerous works of history and biography, including The Path Between the Seas (1978); Mornings on Horseback (1982); The Johnstown Flood (1987); Brave Companions: Portraits in History (1992); Truman (1993); John Adams (2002); 1776 (2005); and The Wright Brothers (2015); among several others. He’s won two National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, and two Francis Parkman Awards.

In other words, he’s an eminence in American historical letters.

He gives speeches, and when he does, it’s worthwhile to listen and ponder. He’s assembled 15 of those speeches, stretching from 1989 to 2016, in The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For.  The volume is a gem of understanding, and of American history, the words and insights spoken by one of our pre-eminent American historians.

He’s a master of the telling detail, such as that of Simon Willard’s clock, which sits within a statue in Congress and has been there since 1837. “Its inner workings ticked off the minutes and hours through debate on the Gag Rule, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, tariffs, postal service, the establishment of the Naval Academy, statehood for Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, matters related to immigration, the Gold Rush, Statehood for California, the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the final hours of John Quincy Adams,” he writes. These were events and actions not only important for the United States but indeed the world.

And we read the story of John Quincy Adams, who returned as a congressman from Massachusetts after he served as our 6^th President. Adams, the educated and experienced son of John Adams, would die in Congress, stricken while in the House of Representatives and carried to the speaker’s office, where he died two days later. Henry Clay held his hand as he died.

David McCullough

In these speeches, McCullough talks of buildings and commemorations, historical figures known and not-so-known, and events that we’ve heard so often they seem trite but in his hands become living things.

One of the common themes is education – why it’s important and why it needs to be a lifelong pursuit; it’s not a monopoly of the institutional classroom. Here his speeches show a shift, however. From 2005 on, McCullough begins to note what he sees happening in the classroom – that we are not teaching American history as it has been taught or even at all. And citizens, and the country, are both poorer for it.

During a time like now, when divisiveness, rage, and outrage are the political order (or disorder) of the day, The American Spirit is a potent reminder of what we have had, what we’re risking, and what we might need to do to recover.

Top photograph by Frank McKenna via Unsplash. Used with permission.

What Resonates? (It Matters)

Most of my working career has been spent in speechwriting. It’s tempting (the temptation being smugness) to think that the 30 years I spent immersed in speechwriting (roughly 1976 to 1980) were the last hurrah of formal discourse. Television, PowerPoint, and now social media have all had an impact, and not necessarily positive.

Instead of civil discourse, we utilize videos and talking points.

Instead of speeches, we have PowerPoint.

Instead of intelligent conversation, we tweet.

For someone like me, whose day-to-day work occurs online and largely within social media, I understand what we have and what we have lost.

The change was already obvious by the mid-1980s, largely due to television. “Sound bite” had entered the communications lexicon. So had “talking points.” Up to that time, most large companies had speechwriting departments (we didn’t call them teams then). But change was underway. The great corporate restructurings of the 1980s did not spare the speechwriting departments. In 1980, I was one of four full-time speechwriters for the company I worked for. In 1990, I was the sole corporate speechwriter left, and I had supervisory responsibility for other functions.

The conventional wisdom about speeches had become (1) shorter is better, (2) use illustrations like photographs and videos, and (3) be entertaining.

And then I attended an event that turned the conventional wisdom on its head.

In 1992, I attended a speechwriter’s conference in Chicago. One of the speakers was Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a former aide to U.S. Rep. Claude Pepper and now with the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. A few years before, she had published Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechwriting. The book spoke to political and corporate speechwriters alike, and it articulated the unease that many of us speechwriters felt. It wasn’t only speeches and speechwriting that were changing; it was all discourse – corporate, political, academic, and social. And it wasn’t change for the better.

Jamieson spoke with interruption or a break for an hour. A solid hour. The audience was spellbound. No one got up to leave. She finished to thunderous applause. She was asked one question, and spoke for 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes to answer one question, and the audience remained spellbound.

What she said resonated with me and the other 200 people in the room. I still consider it to be one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. Two years later, I arranged for her to speak at a company conference. She had the same effect. By 1994, many of us could see what was coming with electronic communications technology, and how it was already transforming how we communicated with each other.

Today, I hear and read very few “speeches” as I understood and wrote them. Speakers string together message points and call it a speech. Virtually no one utilizes the tools of rhetoric. Few marshal evidence. Instead we make assertions as emotionally as we can, and it passes for thought leadership.

In Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, Todd Henry talks about the importance of resonance,  which he calls a “valuable clue on the path to performing your best, most unique work.” We each have, he says, “resonant frequencies that we respond to naturally, and when we encounter them in others, their words or actions are amplified in us and we begin to resonate with the other person…Typically, these points of resonance are thematic, not specific in nature. It’s more about the deeper theme their words or actions point to and not just what was said.”

Her words resonated. In the years that followed, I wrote some of the best speeches I had ever written. What she said also had an impact on how I approached social media, and I generally use it in atypical ways.

I still remember that speech. I still remember the room, and being there. The impact was lasting.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading us in a discussion of Die Empty. To see what people are saying about this section of the book, please visit the site.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work: The Poetry of the Speech

For some 30 years, my professional career centered on speechwriting, mostly of the corporate variety. I had taken a speech course in college – Contemporary American Speeches – but it was more because of my journalism curriculum than a desire to learn about speeches.

Like most corporate speechwriters at that time, I fell into it, accidentally. I was working on a big issue, someone needed a speech on the topic, and I was told to write a draft. I did, it was okay, the speaker liked it, it went over well – and like magic, I was suddenly being called the department’s newest speechwriter. This was all mildly unsettling; I knew next-to-nothing about writing speeches, so I got myself off to a speechwriter’s seminar to learn what I was already considered an expert at.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Message is Also the Medium

On his blog today, literary agent Nathan Bransford asks a question -- how does technology affect writing style? And I recall a conversation I had with a university English professor in a writing class, circa 1985.

I was in a masters program, and the course on writing was an elective. (For what it's worth, I received a B in the class -- the professor didn't like the way I wrote -- it wasn't literary enough.) And we were having a discussion in class about writing tools. The year before, I had received my first computer at work -- an IBM desktop (I think it was the IBM 286). And I found myself puzzled by something -- I wrote differently depending on what tool I was using. I mentioned this, and the professor was absolutely fascinated. I was fascinated, too -- it was the only thing I said that semester that he actually paid attention to.

Now you would think that an IBM Selectric (with correcto-type) is not radically different from a desktop word processor. But I found myself writing in different ways. I was more precise and slower on the typewriter. I was more "stream of consciousness" on the computer.

Then came the most startling discovery. I was writing a lot of of speeches at the time, and the writing requires you to write for the ear as opposed to the eye (makes sense -- speeches are supposed to be heard, at least first). For certain kinds of speeches, and sections of speeches, I was frustrated with both the typewriter and the computer, especially when it came to writing the more soaring, more emotional stuff as opposed to the more analytical. Both the typewriter and the computer didn't lend themselves to that, for some inexplicable reason.

One day I walked away from both tools, and sat in a conference room and wrote an emotional section of a speech -- by hand, on paper, with a pen. And it worked better than either the typewriter or the computer. In fact, it worked phenomenally well. The particular speech ended up blowing people's socks off when they heard it given by an executive in Denver.

I still do this today, with all kinds of writing. If I need to employ emotion and empathy, I write it out on paper with a pen. Then I type it on the computer. And it works.

I can't claim to understand why it works. It just does.