Tag Archives: Richard Nixon

Messages Out of Sync

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In this age of distraction many of us don’t notice when we sabotage our own messages.

Over a lifetime of language use, if we are paying attention, most of us will notice the ironies and contradictions that so easily creep into our discourse. Some of us are better than others. And, as least in popular culture, even stand-up comedians can be good at zeroing in on pieces of our verbal or visual communication that are at war with other parts of the same message. Think of the old Woody Allen joke: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.'” In those ancient days of my college experience there also seemed to be no end  to repeating the same joke about Richard Nixon’s locution, “We can’t stand pat.” Of course he obviously meant that we need to keep moving forward. But Pat was his reliable spouse’s name. It was an unfortunate but funny unintended meaning that was further undermined by his dead-serious demeanor.

We are all guilty of blindly producing unintended meanings. But in this age of distraction many of us don’t notice when we contradict ourselves in the same message. That’s why one is lucky to have someone who can be their formal or informal editor.

There is no shortage of examples.

  • A full-page ad in a recent issue of Psychology Today features an image of a counselor talking to college students under the shade of large tree. The counselor wearing an official-looking lanyard and gesturing to the others is obviously in charge. It’s the bottom headline that is out of sync. “Earn Your Counseling Degree Online,” it asserts. The college making this offer is apparently prepared to deliver to your computer nearly all of the skills and knowledge needed for a counseling degree. Is it possible to teach and master this kind of personal communication almost entirely on the internet? A promise of teaching full competence remotely needs more.
  • Lately I’ve been reading and writing a about Mark Twain, a towering presence in American literary history. Early in his career he expressed admirable outrage for the same kind of governmental grifting and malfeasance that we are seeing today. His hostility to government leaders in the 1870s seemed prescient: an early warning for our own “Gilded Age.” And yet, as his biographers point out, his later years were often consumed in overspending on a lavish lifestyle, followed by dark moods when his investments floundered. I began to see my hero fading into the distance as he began duplicating the quest for easy wealth that he had criticized in his early writing.
  • There is an old advertisement for Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Medicine featuring the testimony of a trucker, even though the medicine includes a warning to “not use heavy machinery” while using it.
  • A few years ago I passed a car with a “Conquer Cancer” sticker on the back and a driver up front puffing on a cigarette.
  • Denali National Park is pristine region of thousands of acres that is named after the Indian name of what is now been renamed Mt. McKinley, the highest Peak in North America. GMC clearly wants to invoke the same spirit of this natural wilderness with their popular Yukon Denali, a hulking SUV with, as one option, a gas V8 that gets 14 mpg in ordinary driving. To the extent that “the personal is political,” this seems like a non-sequitur on four wheels for any environmentally conscious driver.
  • Apparent contradictions can also yield pleasant surprises. I’m struck by the achingly beautiful music that was written by stoic men writing the last century, including Johannes Brahms, Edward Elgar and Sergei  Rachmaninoff. Common motifs in many of their pieces are the very meaning of musical melancholy and wistfulness. Our modern view of masculine expression now admits to most of the same feelings that women express. Even so, and perhaps unfairly, I see in images of Brahms an unlikely figure to have produced examples like the 3rd Movement of the Third Symphony. The music of the Romantics is a reminder that a person’s appearance is an unreliable marker of what might be going on inside.

  • Facing politically divisive issues this June, President Donald Trump noted that “My supporters are more in love with me today, and I’m more in love with them, more than they even were at election time where we had a total landslide.” It was an odd kind of lexicon for a world leader to employ about him or herself. It is usually an insecure person might need to publicly affirm their popularity. That is usually left to others. Ironically, the compulsion to say it suggests the opposite. The spontaneous assertion of others’ love for oneself seems like reliable  evidence  of self-doubt.

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The End of the Rhetorical Presidency?

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No one will look at the output of the West Wing in the last four years for words of inspiration.

I’ll leave it to others to sort out the politics of our disheveled presidential campaign.  But we already have more than enough evidence to examine the ruins of something called “the Rhetorical Presidency.” The idea loosely encompasses the norms and traditions that have usually governed the occupants of the White House, at least since the Presidency of FDR. The Rhetorical Presidency includes the public statements and direct addresses made by the figure we used to call the “leader of the western world.” There may have always been a bit of hubris in that name.  But it suggests that the communications coming from the White House were often meant to represent the ideals of governance in a democracy.

We acquired some wonderful traditions from occupants who came in the last century, including Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. All are part of a tradition of using the office to urge the nation to focus on issues beyond their own personal interests. Think of inaugurals, state of the union address, oval office addresses, responses in times of tragedy, and formulations of progressive actions that could be effectively interpreted to the nation.

Generally, the Rhetorical Presidency represents a desire to weave the nation together as a national community sharing common goals, and it has fulfilled that ideal by leaving a legacy of public rhetoric that is more inclusive than divisive, more focused on shared ideals rather than divided loyalties, and usually resolute in not using the “bully pulpit” to demonize or denigrate other Americans.

Trump has used his office to demonize enemies and exercise his voracious appetite for fantasy over policy.

You can see where I’m going with this. If the condition of the physical structure of the White House could represent the current state of the Rhetorical Presidency, we would have to imagine a building ready to be condemned. Its columns facing Lafayette Park would be buttressed by metal scaffolding. Some of the tall windows would be broken and covered with bare plywood. Raw plaster would cover expanses well beyond the porticos. And badly fitted blue tarps covering leaks in the West Wing’s roof would also contribute to the look of an institution that has seen better days. This is the Trump legacy. More than any other modern leader of this republic he has used his rhetorical power mostly to demonize enemies and exercise his voracious appetite for fantasy over policy. The United States Printing Office issues a nicely-bound annual Public Papers of the Presidents for libraries. But no one will look at the output of the West Wing in the last four years for inspiration. If the best presidential rhetoric suggested fair-minded and moral leadership, the recent inability of the current holder to even condemn white supremacy groups speaks to how diminished this vital feature of the Presidency has become.

Not long ago a President was the first mental construct children had of their government. It was safe to allow them to listen to his (and someday her) words. To be sure presidents could have bouts of temper. Harry Truman wrote angry letters, and then never mailed them. John Kennedy mostly confined his public anger to a hapless steel industry trying to raise prices in the midst of high inflation. And Richard Nixon said a lot in private but taped that “decent” family papers in the 1970s couldn’t print. But to a person, they tended to use their public utterances to speak to the shared aspirations of the nation.  Even in the already hopeless early years of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson could still rise to the occasion and scold his Southern mentors hesitating on legislating for true racial parity. On the evening of March 15, 1965, Johnson told a special meeting of Congress the time had long passed to approve a Voting Rights Act with teeth. It was a long speech that was a national lesson in tolerance, ending with a phrase associated with Martin Luther King:

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

This was a very imperfect man still able to find the right words  to push an imperfect nation to do the right thing. That is what the Rhetorical Presidency could be about.

I miss those days.