Communication is not done with any of us, nor can we be finished with it. It will have its way with us for the remainder of our days.
These are the weeks when the nation launches another cadre of college graduates into the world. The annual ritual marks an important milestone for them and their parents. Most welcome the day; but I can sense that for others it comes with some trepidation. Graduates are given a map that is ambiguous. With a mix of joy and uncertainty some move on to jobs, perhaps a lazy summer at the shore, graduate school, or back to the shelter of their old bedrooms. No thanks to our politicians, they enter a world that is far from the stable platform they might have imagined back in high school.
When I graduated from the leafy outdoor theater at a college in California things were not that different. True, the Civil War was over. Rails had finally been joined at Promontory Point in Utah. And we were getting spoiled by the comforts of indoor plumbing.
With all of its uncertainties, the frequently rampaging river of American life obscures what we thought would be clearer pathways.
In actual fact, the stormy year of 1968 held out the same kind of outstretched hand of opportunity, but we also knew that thorns were concealed in the other. Then, the Vietnam War threatened to be my generation’s next experiment in communal living. And that was only one reason the nation faced doubts that stained its collective soul. Our cities had been battlegrounds. A president, his brother and Dr. King had all been killed by assassins. Racial justice was still in the distant future. What other options were there but to draw on youthful reserves of optimism and move on, comforted in the possibility of marriage, a good job, or perhaps escaping deeper into academia.
With all of its uncertainties, the frequently rampaging river of American life obscures what we thought would be clearer pathways. That’s especially true for young adults in the arts and humanities. Even so, I think anyone who has become a student of communication has a little bit of an edge, but only an edge. In truth, communication is everybody’s business.
When I have the chance, I usually offer some version of this idea in a parting comment to the seniors graduating from our program:
When you begin to think about it, your degree in this subject carries burdens. This isn’t a static discipline you learn and then move on. There really isn’t such a thing as complete mastery of the arts of connecting with others. Like all of us, most of you will spend most your days in hot pursuit of rewards for changing the thinking of others. This may require acts of creation, education, interpretation, explanation, persuasion, justification, reporting, narration or defense. To be sure, all of these efforts can be taxing. And listening to others do the same can turn mastery of the tools of everyday discourse into a life-long enterprise. This is true for all of us, whether or not we have chosen to study communication formally.Over time college graduates sometimes abandon in life what they studied in college. But that will not be true for you. Communication is not done with any of us, nor can we ever be done with it. It will have its way with us for the remainder of our days. Over a lifetime of relations with others our abilities to connect will sometimes open doors and occasionally not be enough to keep them from closing. We will often wonder what we might have done to tame the forces that create barriers. So, as the cliché has it, we must embrace even an uncertain future: to be ready to find whatever communication resources we can to make friends out of strangers.
It’s still a surprise to encounter a president who mostly shuns the potent rhetorical power of the office in favor of throwing little grenades of text out to small screens.
Since the early 1950s presidents have always made effective use of television. As my colleague David Blake points out in his new book, Liking Ike (Oxford, 2016), even the rhetorically awkward Dwight Eisenhower warmed to the demands of ‘putting on a good show’ for Americans anxious to be reassured. With its obvious interest in pictures, television is anything but a natural home for political discussion. But the presidency obviously has the advantage of singularity. This is what the “bully pulpit means in the 21st Century. Video in various forms sustains our need to understand that one person is mostly in charge. We use this reductionist idea to make the presidency a vessel into which we place a lot of hope for our well-being and security.
So it’s all the more surprising to encounter a president who still shuns the magisterial power of the Presidency in favor of throwing out little grenades of text to small screens late at night. To be sure, our Donald Trump remains true to his reality television roots. He has mastered a kind of bumper sticker rhetoric, even though these missives betray him as a shallow and surprisingly mean-spirited leader. In more normal times presidents usually try to offer to the nation the best versions of themselves.
The screen of a smartphone is too small for this task, especially since presidents have an IMax of possibilities they can use to press their views to the American public: availabilities for journalists, junkets, and visits to Americans to offer support and reassurance. By tradition the best and most transcendent causes are at his disposal. The job requires the celebration of all things quintessentially American.
We usually come to terms with the President largely as a dominating presence in video set pieces: press conferences, the State of the Union Address and carefully choreographed interviews, especially when they are carried by one of the big three cable news channels. It’s a puzzle no one has clued him in on how to master these venues. He survived the State of the Union Speech. Many thought it was one of his best moments. Surely he must have some additional American values to celebrate, features of the national character that he could endorse. They would at least make a play at reframing himself as a leader with a heart. Events like a walk-through at a veteran’s hospital or simply throwing out a baseball as the National’s start of their season could humanize him. Moments like these could only leave his doubters silent. Even Richard Nixon could be charming when reminiscing about his four brothers, or the hard-scrabble life of his Quaker family in small-town Whittier California.
What kind of president reverts to a divisive campaign speech in the first three months of office?
To understand how much an outlier Trump is one need only look at his strange “campaign” appearance in Harrisburg Pennsylvania on April 27. The Leader of the Free World looked small and defiant in that speech, which was mostly an attack on all sorts of Americans: the press, the Senate Majority Leader, migrants and minorities. He found time to criticize the architecture and new location of the “fake news” The New York Times. There were also predictable scuffles outside. And a few hecklers gave him a chance to use his beloved mafia line, throw them “outta here!” As the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson noted, “It was a speech with all the logic, elevation and public purpose of a stink bomb.” Another Republican presidential adviser David Gergen, told CNN it was the most divisive presidential speech he had ever heard.
What kind of president reverts to a divisive campaign speech in the first three months of office? Why is his eye always on the rear view mirror rather than the tortuous road ahead? And why is he still issuing jeremiads against his foes rather than sharing national aspirations? Time will tell. But at least for now, and from a rhetorical perspective, Trump has managed to make the Presidency small and diminished, and too many of us nervous.
