Why Our Political Life Needs Inspiring and Memorable Language

There was a time when the political life of the United States of America featured stirring and memorable language. The ideas in that language inspired people not just for a particular news cycle, but for the lifetime of our republic. Sadly, the era of uplifting and memorable political discourse seems to have passed, at least for the present.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “How Long?” speech in Montgomery, Alabama; March 25, 1965

The lack of moving and unforgettable language has left a void that has made our democracy weaker. We are now subject to barrages of the most banal social media messaging that stands uncontested by words that hold our hearts and democratic values. We need to rise again to the summit of discourse, to find language that displays the panorama of what we stand for and that energizes people not only in our country, but around the world.

The United States was born with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. That document included language that has resonated throughout history:

    We hold these truths to be self-evidence, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The idea that people have freedom and happiness as birthrights was revolutionary in the 18th century, when divine-right monarchies still held sway almost everywhere. The Declaration of Independence inspired people to risk life and limb for self-determination, and to take on the world's greatest superpower at the time. Those ideals continue to vibrate today.

When the United States was split apart by the Civil War, the greatest test of our history, Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg on the battlefield where only a few months before soldiers had offered their lives for the Union. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of only 271 words concludes:

    …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. 

Lincoln's emotional speech stands in bold contrast to the long, shopping-list discourses of today that try to touch on every political issue and appeal to every possible constituent. 

Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches during the civil rights movement also had the ability to motivate people to take action based on the highest ideals. When the marchers who were beaten in Selma, Alabama, finally arrived at the state capitol in Montgomery, Dr. King said in his “Our God Is Marching On” speech:

    I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ Somebody's asking, ‘How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?…How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

We need speeches like that again from our progressive leaders, speeches that sanctify our ideals in ways that are unforgettable and make us pull back the tears. Without speeches that can serve as lighthouse beams to guide us, our political discourse gets sucked into the whirlpools of social media. 

Steve Bannon on the Culture and Reason for Being of the United States—A Different View

In his talk to the Conservative Political Action Committeein National Harbor, Maryland, on February 23, 2017, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said about the United States, “We are a nation with a culture and a reason for being.” Oddly enough, I agree with the ultra-conservative Bannon on this point—but I completely disagree with his definition of the culture and reason for being of the United States.

I think that Bannon and Trump believe in a culture of the U.S. that is dominated by one group—white Christians. In fact, their actions are all aimed at creating a world lorded over by nations where white Christians rule. Every one of their policies points toward this: the travel ban on six predominantly Muslim countries, the denial of the Black Lives Matter movement in favor of a blanket law-and-order policy, the expulsion of immigrants from Latin America who have put down deep roots in the United States, the building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, the embrace of Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian state in Russia. Clearly the “reason for being” of the United States in the mind of Steve Bannon is for white Christians to predominate in America and globally.

What is the alternative to this culture and nation of white Christian domination? There is another concept of the United States that generations of Americans have been working toward, from the demonstrations of the suffragettes, to the pro-union strikers who occupied the GM plant in Flint in 1936, to the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, to the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, to the Native American encampment resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline. That idea of the United States is one based on the most enlightened and progressive strains of the American Revolution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women!] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” as Thomas Jefferson so beautifully phrased it in the Declaration of Independence.

That fundamental belief in the equality of all people and the sanctity of life is the true reason for being of the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed that vision of the U.S. when he said in his “I Have a Dream”speech: “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The culture of the United States is not a private club. It is an open culture rooted in the traditions of Native Americans and added to by every wave of arrivals to this country from every latitude and longitude of dry land on the globe.

The culture of the United States is inherently a hybrid culture. American culture blends melodies from Scotch-Irish fiddlers with Yoruba drumming patterns to create jazz and country music. American culture combines the humor of Yiddish theater and vaudeville with the theatrics of the English stage to give birth to Hollywood movies. In American culture, lesbian feminist poets write in the ghazal form devised by Arabic troubadours and elaborated by Persian bards. American culture wants to try out knishes with Spanish rice, it needs to taste Korean kimchee in Mexican burritos. It fuses ballet and African dance and creates Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor.

Yes, the United States has a reason for being and a culture. That culture and that reason for being are fundamentally democratic, pluralistic, and multicultural. Nothing that “the Donald” or Steve Bannon can do will ever change that.

______________________________________________________________  

Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Deliver Your Message, Part 5: Summon the Winds of Righteousness

There is another way to deliver a message that I haven’t discussed yet. It’s not an easy topic to approach for me in this context because I’ve taken great pains in this series of blogs to rail against wielding a message like a blunt weapon. But the kind of writing I’m going to discuss in this blog isn’t didactic, even though it makes its point fairly directly. When done right, it’s one of the most effective forms of writing I know. This means of delivering a message is to focus on an injustice or a wrong that the writer feels acutely. It doesn’t have to be an injustice or wrong the author has experienced personally, but it has to be one that comes from a writer’s very core. Rather than testify individually, the writer becomes like a prosecutor, calling witnesses, introducing evidence, creating a watertight case that the reader will then be asked to decide, like a jury. It’s not a simple way to write, because an unskilled or naïve writer can easily fall from righteousness into self-righteousness. The writer has to have some moral standing to argue this particular case, as certain attorneys can only argue a case before the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. if they fulfill certain requirements. Two poets who use this strategy exceedingly well are Linda McCarriston and June Jordan. Both have written incredibly eloquently about mothers. June Jordan wrote about mothers in “Getting Down to Get Over,” among other poems. “Getting Down to Get Over” is a hymn to African American women, not just Jordan’s own mother. We feel the poet’s intimate connection with this subject in these lines: Consider the Queen she fix the cufflinks on his Sunday shirt and fry some chicken bake some cake and tell the family “Never mind about the bossman don’ know how a human bein spozed to act.…” June Jordan isn’t mouthing platitudes about how racial and class inequality are bad. She has known this woman, and she has measured the weight of her suffering and her dignity. Even though this poem has a message that is not subtle, it works because of the veracity of the testimony. Jordan’s poem begins with an incantation, a recitation of many terms that might be used to describe a Black woman, positive or derogatory. Here are just a few lines of that sequence that takes up two full pages: honeychile sweetstuff sugar sweetheart baby Baby Baby MOMMA MOMMA Black Momma Black bitch Black pussy The sound patterns of that incantation enable Jordan to lift her words to the level of a spell. When Jordan invokes the figure of Black motherhood at the poem’s close, the wizardry of the poem shakes us to the foundations: momma help me turn the face of history to your face. I’ve been using the metaphor of a court in discussing this method of delivering a message partly because I want to close with Linda McCarriston’s great poem, “To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons.” In this poem, the judge, who commands the forces of money, patriarchy, and the law, sends the speaker’s mother back to the husband who brutalized her. But the poet can summon other powers against those forces. Call them the winds of righteousness. By describing the mother’s wounds and the family’s terror, McCarriston conjures a moral tornado, magically stripping away the judge’s power. The poet turns the tables and makes the judge the accused. His punishment matches his legal crime of ignoring the suffering of those he’s entrusted to serve. As in Jordan’s “Getting Down to Get Over,” the language has the diction and force of an incantation: I call your spirit home again, divesting you of robe and bench… The sentence that McCarriston proposes for the judge is no less than his reincarnation as a powerless woman at the mercy of a sick and violent man, so he may personally feel the abuse he ignored when he was in a position of authority. These two poets are skillful at calling on the force of righteousness to make their points. They do this partly by the incredibly specific details they use to describe moral wrong, and partly by the incantation of their speech. This sort of voice is also familiar to those who follow U.S. history. It’s the energy behind Soujourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most powerful public utterances. It’s not a mode that a writer can call on every time, but for particularly strong statements against injustice, I don’t think anything is more effective. Other recent posts about writing topics:  How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4  How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4  How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina; Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka