I blame Dan Quayle.
Apr. 4th, 2007 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordDanforth Quayle is not a bad guy, but I blame him for so much. In showing the world that men of little eloquence can hold high American office, he set a dangerous precedent. He enabled future generations of the garbled to achieve dreams they should never achieve, namely the presidency of George W. Bush.
In an age where the words of our highest representative can be seen and judged by the world within minutes of their utterance, Quayle's words took on a higher signifigance. If it is not our words that define us in the minds of all nations, then by which of our actions will we be judged? By our wars - for surely they are the loudest of our actions.
Some people wonder how important a skill public speaking is anyway. Why does a president need to say intelligent things all the time? Because in a representative democracy, our leaders are not supposed to represent the average guy off the street. They are meant to represent the best of what America has to offer her people. Surely we can do better than Quayle and Bush.
In an age where the words of our highest representative can be seen and judged by the world within minutes of their utterance, Quayle's words took on a higher signifigance. If it is not our words that define us in the minds of all nations, then by which of our actions will we be judged? By our wars - for surely they are the loudest of our actions.
Some people wonder how important a skill public speaking is anyway. Why does a president need to say intelligent things all the time? Because in a representative democracy, our leaders are not supposed to represent the average guy off the street. They are meant to represent the best of what America has to offer her people. Surely we can do better than Quayle and Bush.
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Date: 2007-04-07 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-09 05:49 pm (UTC)What I hate is instead of respectfully correcting the President on his pronunciation of "nukular", his underlings along with teeming swarms of journalists fell into lockstep in mis-pronouncing it, so as not to rock the boat. I don't think this is respect, it's cowardice and a negative sort of conformity that does further harm to our language than has already been done by American dialects and slang.
One of the problems that arises when a country starts a war by "building a case", instead of hitting when the time is right(for instance, when Hussein was in the act of gassing Kurds), is that from now on, we cannot wage a just war without being defaulted to the bad guy to the world. No one will even believe good reasons when we have them because of the shaky ground that the Iraq war premise stands on.