Joho the Blog
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July 28, 2004
John Edwards - The forgotten Osmond Brother - knows how to build applause by waiting it out. And he knows how to accept applause while looking embarrassed at it. He opens with sentences that serve the purpose of pumping in the key phrases: volunteers, respect others, valor, what he's made of. It's how you make the character argument. Trying to set the terms of the rest of the campaign, reject negativity. Great if it works. Doubt it. Trying to beat the Big Lawyer rap. And into the Two Americas, a narrative central to populism that we've forgotten. Of course, it requires Americans to vote for the sake of others - the way it ought to be, but necessarily a tougher sell than "Tax breaks just return your money to you." "What's the first thing that goes? Your dreams." Not much applause, but I thought it was affecting. Some specifics about tuition tax breaks. Excellent! I've been hungry for a few damn details. "Moral responsibility" for eliminating poverty. Yes! We need to have this discussion elevated to the moral plane. And he goes after minimum wage. I wish he'd said how much working fulltime for minimum wage amounts to - around $11,000 a year. "Not in our America." Damn right. He is setting the table. Now it's bringing race into the discussion. This is just what he should be doing: define the terms of the campaign, and leave plenty of room for Kerry to plop the main courses onto the plates he's set out. (Hmm, if I worked on it, I could probably come up with a worse analogy.) Terrorism: Well, this one's already on the menu. I hope Kerry does the Clinton thing of listing 40 things he's going to do to make us safer, steps Bush has not taken. "I'm strong, we're strong, and together we'll be strong" is not doing it for me. Appreciating our soldiers: The Democrats make a believable support-the-military party, IMO. Details about how we can be safer. Why the hell aren't we doing this stuff already? I like details. He's telling us about a hypothetical mother. This sort of stuff loses me. It goes all sentimental. I can't tell if it works. It just makes me wince. We don't have to fight alone. Yes. Hope is on the way. I always like a good call and response. Plus, I do believe and have believed that this year it's all about the hope. Hope vs. fear. We choose hope over despair. Damn. I want him to hang W with fear, not despair. There's been a lot of talk at this convention about "one America." Unusual rhetoric f or a party in an America more divided than any time since the Vietnam war. Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 28, 2004 10:45 PM
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Comments
"He's telling us about a hypothetical mother. This sort of stuff loses me. It goes all sentimental. I can't tell if it works. It just makes me wince."
That's right! And don't forget that a mother's grief can never be an argument against war. Anyone who would suggest otherwise is just being tendentious.
What is it with you and mothers anyway?
Posted by: daniel luke | July 29, 2004 02:25 AM
Daniel, for the nth time: What I said in the post you're referring to was that a mother's (or father's) grief can't be an argument against a specific war, but it can be an argument against all war. And for the nth time, here's an explanation: Wars by their nature mean young people are going to die and parents are going to grieve. That can be a reason to be a pacifist, and I respect that, having been one for many years. But saying "I'm against this particular war because parents grieve" is to say "This particular war is unjustifiable because soldiers die in it." If the death of soldiers means war is unjustifiable, all wars are unjustifiable. Unless you're a pacifist, the real question about a war is whether it's a cause that justifies killing soldiers and civilians.
Where I'm wrong in this: Showing us grieving parents may bring home the reality of all wars to us and make us think that this particular one isn't worth it. I assume that people aren't so spectacularly callous that they need this, but apparently I am wrong about that. It can work as a rhetoric, although it doesn't work as an argument, IMO.
Now, to the point I was actually making in my comment on the Edwards speech: Trotting out a _hypothetical_ mother really didn't work for me. As I said, I can't tell if it works for others.
Posted by: David Weinberger | July 29, 2004 07:48 AM
"Showing us grieving parents may bring home the reality of all wars to us and make us think that this particular one isn't worth it."
Exactly, and it is the single most important thing, IMO, to give us pause whenever they want to give a war.
As an aside, I must say that I do object to the term "war" since we are not really fighting a "war". Of course, I realize that such a term must be used because it serves as a stong appeal to the current crop of male fetishism--the uniforms, the trucks, the show of dominance, etc. that has sprung up, naturally enough, as a result of the general humiliation we endure daily in our regular lives. It is what I think of as the GI Joe syndrome, if you will. It would have been foolish to think that SUV's alone could shoulder this burden. They were and are useful, sure, but nothing to compare to the very seirous and profound white-male identity reaffirmer that war can be.
What we have in Iraq though should never have been described as a war--it is more properly described as an aggression. When you beat a sick and dying man over the head with a club, and you exclaim that he had his cane to defend himself, you haven't been in a fight not matter what has happened. Rather, you've committed a crime. The term "war" suggests, however tangentially, I think, some rough level of parity, and that was obviously absent in Iraq. War is hell, as they say, but it does offer an opportunity to be heroic and noble, but how can you be either when you've committed an aggression?
In this case, then, I would argue, a mother's grief is quite tragic indeed for the Americans, and the Iraqis, and a very good reason to end hostilities.
Posted by: daniel luke | July 29, 2004 02:54 PM