Burying the Lead
Though it originates in our nation’s capital, this blog is decidedly apolitical — with a few exceptions, several of them also occurring, curiously enough, on 9/11. What I have to say today is not a solemn memorial, though — it’s an editor’s view of President Obama’s speech on Syria.
Maybe it’s because I’m in the final stages of getting the magazine to the printer and am thinking best with a red pen in my hand, but it struck me last night that the startling new diplomatic developments that began emerging the day before yesterday were not so much fully incorporated into the president’s speech as they were tacked on at the end. This gave the address a confusing inconsistency.
For at least two-thirds of the 17-minute speech Obama told us why we should use force to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against its own people — and then for the next five he told us that the vote to authorize such force was postponed in order to explore a diplomatic solution. We in the journalism biz call this burying the lead.
This didn’t just confuse me; it made me feel used. As George Orwell pointed out 67 years ago in his essay “Politics and the English Language, “…[T]he decline of a language must ultimately have political
and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause…” As he noted a few paragraphs later, “[I]f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Perhaps there is no hope for political speech. Orwell didn’t think there was. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he said. It’s hard to believe that the world has improved much in the last seven decades.
But if last night’s explanation had been more honest from the start, it would at least have gotten my attention. And perhaps even earned my respect.
One thought on “Burying the Lead”
I was listening to the speech on the commute home, not watching, so I missed the visual cues, but also the distractions of the commander-in-chief setting and the President’s makeup. So when the "However" that turned into the last third of the speech came on, it felt like making a hard right going sixty. The last third of the speech, which amounted to a call to no action, was an anticlimactic though welcome order to stand down, and an invitation to stay tuned while the powers start to grapple with the numbing logistics: how to deal with Assad’s stockpiles in the context of civil war.
Alone in the car, it struck me that the President was off his game. His delivery sounded mechanical, in contrast to the passionate eloquence we’ve come to expect from arguably the country’s most inspiring orator since MLK. Those other speeches expressed ideas and values close to his heart, and he impressed them on ours. But it struck me that the confusion of his current message was eloquent as well. Didn’t it express where we stand as a country, cowed by our own blunders, fatigued by atrocities, inured to violence, but striving somehow to right things, to struggle our way toward a world that matches our ideals, or distant echoes of them?