Inaugural rhetoric sets the ball rolling

Harish Khare

RHETORIC has been a critical element of leadership throughout the ages, from Ancient Rome to modern days. No politician can become an effective leader without the gift for inspiring and motivating his followers. Winston Churchill’s soaring eloquence during the dark days of the Second World War bucked up a near-defeated nation into a fighting force, determined to roll back Adolf Hitler and his forces. In the post-World War era, the American presidential rhetoric has become an essential yardstick by which to judge the character and political accomplishment of a White House incumbent. And, the Inaugural Address sets the ball rolling.

The Kennedy speech on that day — January 20, 1961 — became a part of the mystique and aura that surrounded the man and his memory, after Lee Harvey Oswald used to deadly effect a telescopic rifle to bring the President down. Also, Kennedy’s Inaugural Address raised the standard for his successors, a bar that was cleared only by a few. Of Kennedy’s successors, only Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama can be said to have come anywhere near the JFK benchmark.

And, Donald Trump did not come within a mile of the Kennedy performance. Nobody has accused Trump of being an eloquent man, in the manner of a Barack Obama. But still, the Friday night Inaugural Address was so un-elevating and so uninspiring that once again a listener was left wondering at the collective wisdom of the American people — what possessed them to put their faith in this man who is now the rightful squatter in the world’s most powerful office.

The comparison between the Trump show and the Obama inaugural eight years ago was sharp and total. Obama was like an Amritsari kulcha — seasoned, nuanced, layered with a clear suggestion of application and diligence, a superior lingering after-taste; Trump was just plain, if crisp, chapati, something basic, adequate but unexciting. Eloquence came naturally to Obama; Trump’s forte seems to be some kind of staccato jerkiness. 

As a matter of fact, Trump’s entire inaugural speech sounded like a series of Tweets, perhaps a collection of all those provocative messages he had sent out from his Twitter account during the campaign. There were no literary flourishes, no historical invocations, no philosophical insights, and no hint of a vision. Only an invitation to the Americans’ baser instincts. And the clenched fist at the end was a reminder that Donald Trump the campaigner would take time to realise that he now had new presidential obligations of restraint and reasonableness. 

ON Saturday, many newspapers had printed a photograph of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee touching President Pranab Mukherjee’s feet at a public function in Kolkata on Friday. A rare show of humility and respect from a chief minister for the head of the republic. 

This public gesture on the part of the mercurial Mamata has to be juxtaposed with another event in Kolkata in August, 1997. The occasion was the Congress Party’s plenary session, and Ms Banerjee had chosen to steal the show by calling a press conference of her own, where she denounced the Congress leaders as “old bandicoots.” Every political reporter knew that the abuse was meant, primarily, for Pranab Mukherjee and, secondarily, for Sitaram Kesari, the then Congress President.

Ms Banerjee was on the warpath because she found it difficult to share power and limelight with the others in the Bengal Congress — Pranab da, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, Somen Mitra and others. She thought all these oldies were in cahoots with the CPM leadership and, therefore, had no will to fight back the Marxists and their empowered goons. 

Soon thereafter, she walked out of the Congress, formed her own party, the TMC, and has since prospered politically, sending the Marxists packing into wilderness. So, now with a second victory tucked in her sari, she is self-assured politically and personally and can afford to make the magnificent gesture towards an old antagonist, Pranab Mukherjee. For a leader who was being reviled in the “mainstream” electronic media as an implacable confrontationist, this one act has redeemed her. 

ON the day Trump was to take oath of office, many people around the world were bracing themselves to the arrival of a perfect maverick, a perfect outsider at the White House. Diplomats around the world are as befuddled and confused as are the Americans themselves. For example, MSNBC, one of the most popular television channels, is running an advertisement campaign, with a tagline superimposed on a full-page image of Trump: “What will he do? What won’t he do?” 

On the day of the Trump inauguration, a Mandarin-speaking German friend of mine forwarded me a message going viral on the Chinese social media. The message, rather a Zen thought for the day, read: “Only fear it’s not chaotic under heaven”. The suggestion was that the Chinese suspect global chaos in the wake of the Trump Presidency. We are in a period of perfect chaos. The President of the United States, who for six decades has had the institutional responsibility for preserving some kind of global order, is trying to give the impression that as far as he was concerned the rest of the world could go and jump out of the window. The Europeans, too, suddenly seem to have come unhinged about their collective existence and individual national fates. 

In this context, I found it rewarding to read an interesting book, presented to me on New Year Day. The book is simply entitled: Nonsense. Its sub-title is equally intriguing: The Power of Not Knowing. And, as probable theme, the author Jamie Holmes quotes, of all people, John Wayne: “I don’t trust ambiguity.”

Holmes reflects on the human need to make sense out of nonsense — ‘nonsense’ being uncertainty and ambiguity, created by new information and data, new discoveries and knowledge. Ordinarily, Holmes argues, we all feel assured in our everyday rituals — mundane routines such as the newspapers being delivered at daybreak, the school bus picking up our kids, the trains and flights leaving on scheduled time impose a sense of order and predictability on our daily lives.

The problem arises when we get confronted with new information. And, this glut of new information is the blessing — or the curse — of our age. Holmes suggests that 90 per cent of the world’s data has been created in the last five years. That means, “we’re drowning in information, a reality that makes even the simplest decisions — where to eat, which health plan to sign up for, which coffee maker to buy — more fraught.” 

While individual lives get complicated because too many personal choices become available, it is in the political domain that a surfeit of information and facts and data overwhelm the citizen. That is why many Indians sit every evening in front of their television sets in the hope that ‘talking heads and wise anchors’ would help them make sense of a maddening world. The Indian politician is a particularly unscrupulous animal, pretending one day to be believing passionately in this leader or party and the next day quietly and nonchalantly walking over to the rival set-up. The political drama and its dramatis personae remain exasperatedly unpredictable. 

And, now we have an added headache — the phenomenon of fake news. No one can be sure of the authenticity of what is being dished out in the social media. That simply makes the citizen’s life more complicated. 

How to deal with the flood of information, doled out quackishly night after night by programmed anchors? Interestingly, Holmes’ argument is that “being able to handle ambiguity and uncertainty isn’t function of intelligence.” He insists it is an emotion challenge. “Today’s puzzle is to figure out what to do — in our jobs, relationships, and everyday lives — when we have no idea what to do.” 

And, if I may add my two pennies worth: when in doubt turn to The Tribune and a cup of hot coffee. 

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