Another organisation has, in the past few days, declared Turning Point to be extremist. Knowing a little of that other organisation that could be regarded as a badge of honour, and I am interested to learn what Kirk has to say.
I wish he weren’t carrying that sheaf of paper when he enters. He barely looks at it through the speech so he doesn’t need it. If he had entered empty handed it would have done wonders for his initial impact.
The opening minute is a little messy, which is not unusual among those who have yet to learn the secret, but at 01:13 he’s into the driving seat. The opening salvo concerns how the left is unable to debate, having no case to argue, so expends all its energies in cancelling debates and no-platforming people. That is why students are politically crippled.
At 02:58 he launches into epistrophe – “…you do not mean well” – which morphs into symploce – “If you wanna … you do not mean well”. It goes on and on, powered by a steady auxesis and culminates in ecstatic applause. Another epistrophe-cum-symploce begins at 05:17. A huge anaphora appears at 06:35, with a massive nine elements. Another anaphora kicks off at 07:56, though with just a paltry four elements. At 10:54 his peroration begins with a three-element anaphora.
When someone like me analyses a speech down to a bunch of obscure rhetorical terms, you might expect that speech to be talking-by-numbers and therefore dull. But Cicero and other ancients only coined these terms because they swayed audiences. Kirk’s audience is in the palm of his proverbial.
We have met Gowdy before on this blog. The previous time he was delivering a formal speech to students, and I described him as a speaking phenomenon. Here he is not on a speaking platform but essentially delivering an impromptu monologue, and my opinion of his speaking ability has – if anything – increased. I have said before on this blog that passion is worth buckets of technique, and the dream ticket is to have both. Here Gowdy is displaying passion, and conveying it with consummate skill. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the tongue when wielded by a such master is still mightier.
The background to this issue is very clearly laid out here. It’s a relatively short read, and a good way to understand what has caused Gowdy to be so exercised. This matter concerns not my country, but I find myself easily transposing the circumstances across the Atlantic, seeing parallels, and getting likewise exercised.
The above clip begins with forty seconds of Gowdy putting questions to Brian Miller, The GSA Inspector General, and then Gowdy sets off.
Immediately we get the gist. He is comparing the difference between spending our own money and dipping our paws into a bottomless fund, fed by coercive tax. Most of us could make quite a reasonable fist of that; but not many when talking of a charitable gift (beginning at 1:00) would come up with,
I hate that you robbed yourself of the satisfaction of knowing what it feels like to do it yourself instead of spending someone else’s money to do it.
The amazing thing is that in this monologue that isn’t particularly exceptional. Every time he makes a point he finds a new, different, and particularly telling way of couching it. At 2:25 he even dips into the Book of Exodus to compare the GSA’s profligacy unfavourably with the Children of Israel in the desert, and the parallel is flawless.
He swings into an auxesis at 4:00 with anaphora on the words, “what’s the penalty…”, but when he comes to his actual peroration he doesn’t keep the crescendo going, but suddenly drops into bitter contempt.
Yes, I know that as a District Attorney he will have examined and cross-examined witnesses countless times, and addressed juries as often, and his skill has been honed in the process, but this is mind-blowingly effective.
Since this occasion, and in fact since he was last on this blog, Trey Gowdy has been appointed Chairman of the House Oversight Committee. What a sound choice!
On 6 July in Warsaw President Trump delivered a speech to the people of Poland.
It was greeted in general by the press in the USA and UK with a warmth that was rather luke. That’s not a surprise: Trump Derangement Syndrome has become so modish among the chattering classes that it even has a name – that one. A few minutes research through the English language sections of the Polish press yields a very different story: they lurved the speech.
Why don’t we have a look for ourselves?
We join it in the middle of joyful chants of “Donald Trump”, before a wreath-laying ceremony which itself is followed by a brief speech by the First Lady. I have seen this described as ‘predictable schmooze’, though I reckon its actual existence is unpredictable. I have failed to find in my memory another FLOTUS speech under these circumstances. It is competently delivered, contains a little meat in the schmooze, and I doff my hat to her for it.
After more chanting of his name, POTUS begins at the six-minute mark.
The sound on this video suffers from sporadic bursts of very loud amongst long periods of rather quiet. I believe that this is caused by Automatic Volume Control. AVC can be a blunt instrument that worries during big pauses and winds itself up to look for sound in the silence. Added to that, I think it has been programmed also to adjust the volume on the ‘atmos’ microphones that are supposed to feed us the audience response. Audience applauds, POTUS pauses, microphone system has panic attack trying to catch up with what is happening, POTUS starts speaking again, and blasts our eardrums. I comfort myself that though we are getting our feed of his voice from the same microphone as the audience they are unlikely to share our volume craziness.
He is using AutoCue, or equivalent. Even before we spot the perspex screens, we know that this speech is one of those which absolutely has to be scripted. Very soon after he starts we also get glaring confirmation at 7:35 when he has to correct himself. Having said “sincere” he tells us that he means “sincerely”. No one says the former when they mean the latter, so he has to be reading. If reading and the script scrolls up too slowly and the last syllable is on the next line the mistake is easy. I reckon the error comes from the AutoCue operator, which I mention only because that is very rare indeed. They tend to be brilliantly skilled. The smoothness with which Trump makes the correction is also skilled. He is only a minute-and-a-half in, and already in complete control.
The early part of the speech is more diplomatic schmoozing – how could it be otherwise? There’s a warm moment when he names Lech Walesa who is in the audience and stands for a bow. But as the speech progresses the subject matter gets more purposeful. What I particularly like is the judicious mixture of that which is spoken for the benefit of the onlooking world and that which is aimed at his immediate audience.
One device he uses to achieve this is by expressing a link between the two countries as co-representatives of the free West. Poland is one of the European countries that has paid its agreed share of the cost of NATO, and now is resisting huge pressure from Brussels to take a proportion of the gigantic influx of migrants – or, to put it another way, bail Merkel out of her madness. Poland is accustomed to huge pressure, and Trump goes out of his way to itemise some of the many ways it has been tossed on stormy seas over the centuries only for its spirit to triumph.
The speech gets very powerful at 18:50, talking of Soviet occupation, leading to his recounting the holding of a Mass in Victory Square on 2 June 1979 by Pope John Paul II. He culminates in a spellbinding moment where he speaks of the million in that square who “did not ask for wealth, did not ask for privilege”. They wanted God.
He goes on to highlight the inroads of those who would destroy what western civilisation has achieved. This is another wonderfully powerful section, not least because of his referring not only to the threat of the enemy from without but also the enemy within. This section alone would make this speech a triumph, because – script or no – he gets firmly in the driving seat of his message and presses the throttle.
For his peroration he swings at 36:00 into an account of Jerusalem Avenue in the Warsaw Uprising. I doubt there’s a soul in that audience that does not know the story, but won’t mind hearing it again – particularly while the whole world is listening. The final auxesis comes out through more chanting of “Donald Trump” and is greeted by a standing ovation which is very definitely not a hollow formality.
That’s a bloody good speech!
Donald Trump is not everyone’s cup of tea. Though he may have flaws, he loves his country, what it has achieved and what it stands for; and that’s unfashionable among the self-regarding, self-appointed elite in the USA. But what they particularly can’t forgive is that so do the electorate that made him President.
I deliberately went looking for this. I had discovered Fatah’s existence as a result of a reTweet. What I found interested me, and I became one of his Twitter followers. Shortly afterwards I went seeking a speech and found two.
This was the most recent.
We immediately discover that he is surprised to be called, so he is mainly shooting from the hip. As an author and journalist he will have opinions a-plenty, but we have found often enough on this blog that those who live by the pen are by no means necessarily able to communicate well by the tongue. Nevertheless it takes only a few seconds to discover that here is a very skilled speaker.
Just listen to his tone colours. He plays his audience wonderfully.
He needs to because although he switches back and forth between languages, and has a habit of switching out of English for the punchline of each point made, I think it is clear that he is confronting group-think. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he is giving this audience an industrial strength bollocking. And what impresses and amazes me is that they let him.
The audience listens in respectful silence and even applauds sometimes. This is a tribute to the persuasiveness of his speaking, but it is also a tribute to his audience. Although the bilingualism of this speech might be confusing me I think – and if I’m wrong no doubt someone will tell me – that he is scolding India for being too tolerant of Islamisation within their Hindu country.
Can you imagine the reception this would receive in the west (and it’s worth bearing in mind that Fatah lives and works in Canada)? For much less than this we see ferocious street riots, with shop windows broken and cars set alight. The cancer of political correctness has metastasised within western society to such an extent that we have ‘hate speech’ laws whose counter-productiveness is downright imbecilic. This sort of polite and respectful exchange of ideas and opinion is today just a memory in the west. I am reminded of that famous quotation from Mahatma Gandhi when asked what he thought of western civilisation.
I think it would be a good idea.
So do I, and we can apparently look to India to set us a noble example.
Even if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick completely, I am still in awe of this speech. We’ve had a Gandhi quote, let’s have a Fatah one –
There is no democracy without individual liberty (4:20)
Just after 13:30 he moves into his peroration. He has given us loud power, quiet intensity, and wonderful flavour-enhancing pauses. Now he goes super-quiet for a while, drawing his audience to a focal point just a few inches from his nose. And then a huge auxesis arrives in the last couple of seconds. My word, but he’s good.
I mentioned that I found two speeches of his. This is where you will find the other. That was delivered in Canada in 2011, and he had come from cancer treatment in hospital to deliver it. Again it is brilliant, though his being unwell he doesn’t use quite the same breadth of palette. He is warning of Islamism as distinct from Islam. He is a Muslim.
I have become a fan of his, and delight in the discovery that we were born in the same city – though my being three years older we were born in different countries. I’ll leave you to work that out.
On 17 January Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered a speech which had been eagerly awaited by many. Since the people of the United Kingdom, on 23 June 2016, had decisively voted to leave the European Union the country had seemed to be stuck in limbo. For the benefit of non-British readers, allow me to outline the background.
Mrs May’s predecessor as Prime Minister, David Cameron, had called the Referendum. He had announced, in a highly publicised speech in January 2013, that he intended to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU, and then put this expected new dispensation to the British people in a referendum during 2017. In 2015 there was a General Election in which this promise of an EU Referendum was a central plank of his campaign. He won the election, launched this renegotiation in a fanfare of trumpets while many of us marvelled at how radically he had watered down his promised demands, went off to Brussels, and came back with essentially nothing. The little he claimed to have been agreed was not remotely binding, and even that was disputed by many European politicians. He rushed into the referendum, rather earlier than originally promised, on a platform that we should vote to remain ruled by this ‘reformed’ regime. Nevertheless he undertook that in the event of the British people voting to leave he would immediately trigger Article 50, the EU exit door, and lead the exit negotiations.
The referendum took place, the people voted for Brexit, and Cameron immediately vanished. He simply welshed on all assurances and left everything for someone else to sort out. That someone turned out to be Mrs Theresa May. Her principal problem was that incredibly the British governing establishment had put no contingency plans in place against the vote going for Brexit, so she had to start from scratch. Thus for six months the country was in limbo, with several establishment figures openly attempting to thwart the expressed democratic will of the British people who in turn were supported by little more than periodic assurances from Mrs May and her cabinet that Article 50 would be triggered before the end of March.
This speech had been loudly heralded as a key piece of progress report.
An opening pause. Immediately I am encouraged.
This video, originally a live, streamed feed, occasionally shows live tweets commenting in a separate window. At 11:07 there is one which expresses the hope that the speech gets more interesting. I can understand this up to a point, because in laying out her stall Mrs May has needed to cover very many bases. I however am in possession of information not then available to that tweeter: there is half-an-hour still to come.
Do you have more than 40 minutes to listen to the whole thing? If not I can recommend two short excerpts that summarise effectively. This is so much better than my cherry-picking quotes. It’s safer too, because of being less susceptible to my confirmation bias.
Between 31:08 and 31:43 she very clearly summarises all that she has thus far covered. If you want to stick with it to 32:58 you will hear how she intends to keep her cards face-down,
“because this is not a game, or a time for opposition for opposition’s sake.”
You may find that this satisfies your curiosity or that it excites your appetite to hear more. Either way, I whole-heartedly commend all this speech.
The other excerpt is her ending. I recommend that you pick it up at 38:55 with the words, “I don’t believe…” I have heard worse perorations, and didn’t care that it had no auxesis, because the content and the occasion did not call for it.
Only a few days later she delivered another big speech, this time in the USA. In it she was busy massaging the ego of a huge ally, but still I felt that she meant what she said. It is this quality that I like. Even if I don’t always agree with everything she says and stands for, I don’t feel embarrassed that she is representing my country. That speech did call for an auxesis to herald the peroration, and it got it. If you don’t listen to the whole thing you can pick up the peroration at 33:00.
Like or loathe her political position, she does not beat around its bush. More and more I sense that this woman is a WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – and I find that hugely refreshing after the dismal succession of duplicitous twits that have been representing us for a quarter of a century. (The word ‘twits’ was a slight edit from the first word there.)
Four days ago on 12 July – her 16th birthday – Malala Yousafzai, wearing a shawl that had belonged to Benazir Bhutto, delivered a speech to the United Nations. On 9 October 2012, along with two classmates, she was shot in the head and neck by Taliban gunmen, wanting to suppress the education of girls. I am reluctant to use terms like ‘icon’, still less ‘poster-girl’, but undeniably she quickly became a symbol for a struggle for freedom against forces of terrorism. Western governments and media seized her story; she was flown to Birmingham, UK, and treated in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
The shooting incident did not parachute her from nowhere onto the world’s stage. Nor was the speech to the UN her first. She had blogged anonymously and spoken publicly for some years about the drive for education for Moslem girls. She had chaired public meetings, made videos. She featured in a 2009 TV documentary about The Taliban’s attempts to close down her school; and this public profile undoubtedly had something to do with her school van having been sprayed with bullets that day last October.
Immediately I have to marvel at the extraordinary assurance she shows in the opening minute. She has learnt how to convey confidence by opening with a very measured pace. She perfectly reflects the decorum of the setting. The only incongruity, if I might nit-pick, is in the words, “I don’t know where to begin my speech”. Oh yes she does!
At that second the camera cuts to three people sitting in reserved seats. In the middle is Ziauddin, her father; so I assume the others to be her brother and mother. I think we are observing whence this speech came. I don’t mean they wrote it for her or coached its delivery, though they may have made contributions; but we see the family unit that provided the nature, nurture and support that has put an astonishing degree of fire in this young belly, steel in her backbone and eloquence in her tongue. We can no more than guess at the constant peril in which they live at home in Pakistan.
Did I say steel in her backbone? Listen to the defiant auxesis with which she declaims from 4:35 that the bullets ignited thousands of voices in support of her campaign. Did I suggest that she knew exactly what she was doing in preparing this speech? Listen to the epistrophe that begins at 5:31, or the anaphora at 7:31
Does she know how to work a crowd? Listen to, and marvel at, the list of her heroes beginning at 6:30. That is a lesson in inclusivity. The list concludes with her parents and could be desperately saccharine, even emetic, in less skilful hands.
Her enunciation is excellent. Never does she sound over fastidious, yet every word gets across. At 9:03 the word “asked” has both the ‘k’ and the ‘d’ discreetly and effortlessly yet clearly uttered. She is really very good indeed.
If bullets do not silence her she has a distinguished future, but what will be the nature of that distinction? If I were to pray for her it would be for the wisdom of Solomon. As with the fictitious Dictator’s Speech by Charlie Chaplin that I critiqued a few weeks ago she, her talent and her message could be used to support many creeds and philosophies, not all of them benign though plausible and backed by immense political strength.
She will need that fire; she will need that steel; she will need that eloquence; she will need that wisdom.
My brother expressed to me disquiet over this blog. He felt that it covered the performances of speakers that were so good that readers might be fed unreasonable expectation. Upon my probing further it emerged that the only posting he could remember was Daniel Hannan. On that sample he had a case. Hannan is about as good as they get.
At an Oxford Union debate in November 2012 he had to be at the top of his game because, as we saw in my previous posting, he was preceded by a barnstorming performance by Cornel West. Indeed he begins his speech by suggesting that he should just agree and have done with it – “…but while I’m on my feet I’m going to say one other thing…” and then he says a great deal. The Motion was ‘The House Would Occupy Wall Street’ and Hannan was speaking against it
The Oxford Union, despite the formal garb, lends itself to animated delivery. You think you know what decorum means? In rhetoric it means blending to your advantage with the prevailing environment. Hannan doffs his “smooth as a kitten’s wrist” image, replacing it with enthusiastic energy.
The enthusiastic energy [anadiplosis] begins with the last thing the audience had expected to hear from him. He castigates the bailing out of the banks. These students, fed on a diet of mainstream media, thought they knew what all politicians of the right stood for and he is determined to disabuse them. He creates a slow-building auxesis whose impetus is so strong that he perhaps stuns the audience into missing a potential laugh at 1:30. No matter: without breaking stride he throws it away, forges on and is rewarded with full-blooded applause at 2:18. He’s got them! Now with the assistance of a little pantomime he gets a huge laugh at 2:37. The auxesis continues to its punch-line for which he unexpectedly takes the top right off the volume to underpin the earnestness of his central message which is that corporatism is not the same as capitalism, This is the end of his beginning.
He swings into the main body of his speech; and my pulse quickens. He is using a Tripod structure. He even gives us a Contents Page! Has he read my book? Not as far as I know, but then I merely codified and named the structure: creating it for yourself is hardly rocket-science. This is truly magnificent. His message is crystal clear, transparently sincere and solidly argued. As he swings into his closing you feel that though Cornel West brilliantly grabbed the audience’s emotion and heart, if the vote goes with the head Hannan must win.
The closing is another auxesis. He had told them at the beginning that the Occupy movement was misdirected, aiming at the wrong target. Now he closes the circle (has he read my book?) listing for them the buildings they should be occupying, intensifying example upon example till … aargh! He spoonerized the punch-line! The micro-structure that lead to the punch-line was pretty as could be and should have climaxed triumphantly. In the event it was a bit of a smudge. It was momentary, half-way only, corrected after a mini-second, probably didn’t matter at all to the audience; but if I were in his shoes I know I’d be kicking myself black and blue. I am not: I can look at it with my nose further from the canvas, and I am convinced it didn’t matter. I doubt that he sees it that way.
Dan Hannan is really outstanding. Could I help him improve? In terms of his material I could really help only by being a sounding board; and with this speech I’d have to be picking nits off nits. There is one area that bothers me slightly. He makes much use of vocal colour-tone, and does it very effectively. The trouble is that when he goes dramatically quiet he loses some intelligibility. It’s because his voice is not trained.
So what about my brother’s disquiet? Can I help others to reach this standard? Yes and no. It depends on them. Hannan certainly has natural ability; but don’t make the mistake of supposing that he emerged from the womb doing this. He has worked hard. Any candidate that came to me asking for that level would have to want it very much, and be prepared to put in the work! And some have done all of that.
Rhetauracle 