Jun
18
Eloquence Matters
Filed Under Politics
This evening, I watched the replay of Tim Russert’s memorial service on MSNBC. There were many laughs during the course of the service, and several times that I was brought to the point of tears. This surprised me because while I certainly was a fan of Russert, I did not know him personally and never even met the man. Never the less, the passion and love that the speakers felt for Russert came across in powerfully in their eloquent eulogies.
Pondering on the power of eloquent speech to invoke emotion made me immediately think about the charge that Hillary Clinton and John McCain have tried to create that Barack Obama is all speech and no substance. This naïve and simplistic characterization of Obama is a microcosm of the fundamental issue at stake in American public policy. The simple fact is that the American people have, over the course of the last four decades, surrendered the reins of our participatory democracy to multi-national corporations who fund propaganda campaigns that we call American politics.
At this turning point in history, we desperately need a visionary leader who can leverage the power of honesty, intelligence and eloquence to evoke the emotion necessary to get the American people out from behind their TVs and into the public square to discourse with each other on what type of role this country will have in shaping our own future and the future of the world.
It is important to remember that the world was at an equally precipitous point 68 years ago today; three days after Paris fell to the Germans, Winston Churchill grasped that moment in history to address the House of Commons, the English people and the world:
“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
Listen to an exerpt from Churchill’s “Finest Hour” Speech (1.4mb)
Churchill’s eloquence at this moment of crisis for the world, changed the course of human events. I hope that the American people rise above the base emotions of hate and fear to elect an equally eloquent leader that can ignite the fundamental fairness, spirit and energy of the American people in a way that would make Tim Russert proud.
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Very well said. I appreciate the thought you put into this post and couldn’t agree with you more.