On Rhetoric

I have been reading former President Elect Al Gore's The Assault on Reason. (And yes I am still pretty disgusted that the Supremes handed Florida to Bush in 2000. Just think, if Poppy Bush had appointed someone who put patriotism before party then a man who read his daily briefings would have been president and prevent among things the horrors that took place on Tuesday September 11, 2001. Instead we got Mr. Vacation.)

Well in The Aussault on Reason Gore quotes from an early player in the civil rights movement, and oddly I neglected that speech in my own thoughts on American Rhetoric, so I will include it here now. The following was delivered by a President who did not have Rush Limbaugh "hop[ing] he fails". But it is moving none-the-less.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or
any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great
battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field
as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that this
nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do
this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate…we cannot consecrate…we
cannot hallow…this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled
here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The
world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated
here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so
nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of
the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Many, too many, school children are made to memorize that address, and all its 10 or so sentences. How many people read it and actually try to understand it? I think every person who can, ought to go to DC at least once in their life, go in the summer, when congress is out of session and hotels are cheap, go to the museums, they are free, see Apollo 11 and a da Vinci.

But one day walk through the national mall, see the more than 50 thousand names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as well as the cards and flowers left at the foot of the wall by the families of the boys who died for a war as hopeless and futile as the war in Iraq. Then walk over to the Lincoln Memorial, its only about 50 or 100 paces away, if you aren't balling your eyes out by the time you finish reading the Gettysburg address make a try at the second inaugural address on the opposing wall. If you still are not balling you mustn't have a heart. Recall that one day in 1963 a clergy man proclaimed his dream on the very steps of that memorial. Not five years later he was dead, assassinated.

Human history is the measuring of blood letting and that is disturbingly, painfully, aganozingly, obvious in DC. Until we can all realise the horrible truth of our nature, come to terms and undo that horrible inner darkness, I can only pray that from this time forward better men than George Walker Bush work in the Oval Office.