Silverstein - Talking Politics

8/9/2019 Silverstein - Talking Politics

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Talking Politics:

The Substance of Stylefrom Abe to W


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No doubt about it. Abraham Lincoln gets theprize among United States presidents for the sheerconcentrated political power of his rhetoric. When heset hisactual, ownmind to preparing his text, hecould come up with gems such as his SecondInaugural and, of course, his 272-word Dedicatory

Remarks at Gettysburg. Even his extemporaneouspublic and private talk, transcribed, shows great verbalability. Now Mr. Lincoln had no Yale or Harvarddegree as a credential of his education. But he under-stood the aestheticthe style, if you willfor sum-moning to his talk the deeply Christian yet rationalistaspirations of Americas then four-score-and-seven-

year-old polity. Striving to realize this complex style,he polished it and elaborated its contours. He embod-

ied the style. So much so, that Lincolns great later

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2003 Michael SilversteinAll rights reserved.

Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC5629 South University AvenueChicago, Il 60637

www.prickly-paradigm.com

ISBN: 0-9717575-5-0

LCCN: 2002115993


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seemed not quite successfully to be hiding something.These days his paranoid Oval Office ravingsrepletewith loads off- and n-words!circulate in public,transcribed from tapes slowly seeping out of anarchival sewerful of I-told-you-so conversational

sludge (the shit has hit his erstwhile fans, as it were!).From Lincolns Gettysburg, flash forward

another seven score years. Like language itself, presi-dential communication styles do change. HeresGeorge Walker Bush, a.k.a. Dubya:

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemi-spheric in nature because it is a product that we canfind in our neighborhoods.

Dyslexic? Just stupid? Out of his league?HisLeague is the Ivy one: this man has bothYale andHarvard degrees! (Want a refund, Poppy?) And,notwithstanding his actual installation as President in2000 by a 5-4 vote in the U. S. Supreme Court, he didmanage to garner a certified 47.9% of the popular

vote, all throughout the heartland of America. By

2002, he even managed to develop wartime presiden-tial coattails stumping to win a Republican Congress.He must be communicatingsomethingattractive to alarge fraction of the electorate (besides merely Being

There in 2000 as a non-Clintongore alternative).That something is clearly not Lincolnesque, however,much as our voting contemporaries seem to respondto his message. And if certain folks have reacted

with supercilious or nerdy disdain, not to say late-

night comical guffaws and doctored jpegs on the net

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texts, like the late, great man himself, now belong tothe ages. They form part of the liturgy of whatRobert Bellah has termed Americas civil religion.

And Americans ever since have at least offi-cially identified masterly political accomplishment

with public stylistic communication in the shadow ofLincoln: FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan, for example,in the twentieth century. Each was memorable for ini-tiation or mastery of a signature public communica-tive style. No matter what went on in private, no mat-ter what the policy failings and scandals of theiradministrations, their genres of address developed thistradition of presidential style in certain ways. Andpresidential style, as opposed to other things, doestrickle down to influence all the levels of politicsand layers of American government.

By contrast, who can be comfortable with thenotion that a great president would not also be agreat communicator, especially when speechifying inperson and on broadcast media? Political figures likethis are puzzling; those who rate and rank formerpresidents have trouble deciding where to put them in

the list. Observe the jitteriness that pop historianshave about Eisenhower, whose best speech was proba-bly his televised farewell address a couple of eveningsbefore the Kennedy era. (He had had eight years torehearse this grandfatherly valedictory.) Or Truman,

with his reputation for schmoozy, street-smart vulgar-ity displayed right out in the open. And observe therevulsion that still counteracts what admiration people

may feel about Richard Nixons accomplishments, thispresident who in his public address style always


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Communicating the Message

vs. Inhabiting Message

The substance of it all, I would contend, is

style. The technicians of political communication havetheir own term that gestures toward it: message, asin being on message or being off message orsticking to [no the] message. As an insiders tech-nical term, message is moving from what we call acount noun, that denotes a specific individuable thing,to one that denotes a locus or place in a containingspace, realm, or condition of being. (Think of the dif-ference between the [telephone] call you made last

evening and [being] on call.) Message is inhabitable:my message is like my house. Thats key.

Those not attuned to politicoglossia may atfirst think that someones message is the topic, ortheme, or central proposition he or she is trying tocommunicate. You might identify itin fact, the pro-fessionals hope reporters and others will misidentifyitwith the point of an occurrence of communica-

tion. You could paraphrase someones point as a kindof assertion that such-and-such is the case aboutsomething-or-other.

You would be wrong. Professionals want, infact, tosuggestthis to you. (Frequently the profession-als are just able to rely on the flat-footedness of print-media reporters; they were focused in journalismschool on finding and paraphrasing actual statementsin an objective manner, and so they continue to lookfor them.) But media professionals also want you to be

(see below), I maintain that the W style is fullywithin the culture of political communication the huffycritics and winking satirists intuitively understand andengage.

Rather than getting upset, we ought to pause,

take an analytic view of the matter, and put thisPresidents communicative performance into context. Ithink this will make understandable why he just mightnot be a mere aberration but a slight readjustment ofthe terms of politics the country has operated on allalong! The current President, then, just might be the

very cynosure of what now sells, pointing in thedirection as well of political communication to come.Goodbye Lincoln, hello Dubya! And after W, theend of the alphabet of politics.

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etc.]. We implicate a description of things wheneverwe get agreementor at least do not get disagree-mentto a claim weve communicated about themthat such-and-so is the case (or was the case, or mightbe the case, etc.). (The claim is frequently in relation

to something else, already described or presumed tobe known.) [Examples: (Your horses namehere)would have been running at The Preaknessnext week; (Your name here)will not have a hardtime understanding this; etc.]. Understanding eachother in communication is really coming to suffi-ciently common focus on what these descriptions,explicit and implicated, are and apply to.

So officiallywe describe things and states-of-affairs so that others can also identify those things andstates-of-affairs. The official message is the complex,identifying descriptionthe information structureweachieve over the longer haul of paragraphs and wholedisquisition-sized chunks of verbiage by using wordsand expressions linked one to another by grammaticaland other rules.

Of course we have to know certain grammati-

cal rules of sentence-formation. That, for example, inEnglish descriptions at least, an expression that explic-itly describes a thing (John) precedes an implicateddescriptive expression for it (...went to the store.). Weknow a myriad of such grammatical rules relating tothe structure of sentences, phrases, and the like.

But additionally, there are principles based indeveloping information-structure itself, distinct fromthe grammar of sentences, that determine whatexpressions we can and do use at various points in

wrong in your hasty attribution, because that willmake it harder to figure out the trick to the magic: didhe say so or didnt he? (Did he promise not to raisetaxes or didnt he? What did he claimor just lead usto believeabout that woman?) Message, we can

discern from the study of political communication, isreally much more complicated than that. If successful,a person comes to inhabit message in the act ofcommunicating. And if the peopleand their presscorpswant to think that it is what someone actuallysaid, thats theirproblemand its our politicos suc-cess at messag[e]ing. Let me explain, by way ofdescribing the several ways we communicate usinglanguage.

One part of us intuitively feels that the lan-guage we use consists of the words and expressions wespeak, write, or otherwise get across to our addresseesalong some channel of communication. We recognizeourselves to be sending and receiving such languageforms. In order to understand message, however, wehave to think about the several different kinds ofmeaningfulness always presentthough not always

recognizedwhen language is used. We have to lookat other principles that organize our communicationsto see what is central to message. But lets start with

words and phrases.In our own intellectual tradition of under-

standing how people use language, the most salientthe officialwhat of communication lies in how

words and expressions describe, or in technical terms,denote. We explicitly describe things by naming themin category [Examples: ...table; five-cent cigar;

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one another, each interlocutory partner contributingsome bit of information to the emerging whole.

Whether in a single instance of communication orover a chain of instances, then, people can use lan-guage to construct collectively reached and collectively

consequential knowledge, opinion, and belief about allmanner of things. In principle descriptive languagecan be fashioned into a tool or instrument for con-structing sharable knowledge in the very event ofcommunication.

But, having mentioned both grammar andinformation structure, is there anything else to com-municative use of words and expressions? Are thereother factors that explain why we use one expressionrather than another at any given momentary phase ofcommunication? For example, why do we characteris-tically use one word or expression that might describesomething and altogether avoid another one that

would, in principle, be equally descriptive? (Did he saythe Democraticproposalor was it democratic?ordid he call it a Democrat one?) It turns out that inevery discourse a large number of extra-verbal contex-

tual factors leave their determinate traces in the formswe usewhat are termed in the trade indexical(point-ing) traces. These traces inform us about, they pointto, the who-what-where-when-why of discourse bysubtle loadings of the how, the actual forms, of dis-course. (Democratic or Democrat? RepublicanParty operatives these days teach their politicians toavoid the first, older and official name that ends with-ic and to use the second form, without it. For polit-ical partisans, remember, there is real danger that the

communication. As everyone knows, while communi-cation proceeds, sender and receiver can rely moreand more on what has already been communicatedabout a topic, information about it that cumulatesbetween them. Based on this growing intersubjective

pool of information, fluently deployed descriptions ofthe very same thing can differ in form, depending on

where in a text they occur. What earlier in discourse-time one may have described as a large, brown bearone describes, a bit later as it or the beast or eventhe thing I was just writing aboutthe large brownbear I focused you on, that is, even in the absence ofan actual critter to point to! However unconsciously, acareful talker monitors the flow of text-in-progress, ifonly at the level of knowing that he or she is makingnot only grammatical sense on a sentence-by-sentencebasis, but also informational sense over the longerhaul. Demanding addressees expect no less of ourinformation-packaging.

In this way, discourse is always being evaluatedas description for how it achieves a kind of cumulativecoherence as information. Under the umbrella of this

kind of meaningfulness, people can actuallyinform oneanother about the things and states-of-affairs theycommunicate about. Our talk can cause others toreach, with us, an intersubjective identification ofthings. And not just identification, but identification ascategorizedaccording to our particular descriptive lan-guage at a particular moment in discourse. We cansuccessfully use language to inform others even if ourinterlocutors had previously had some other ideasabout these very matters. We can even mutually inform

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social arrangements as consequences of using theseforms; we bring new social arrangements into being.In the most smoothly executed cases, all parties justimplicitly understand and act upon the consequentiali-ties of how we communicatesometimes even in ways

that violate normative expectation.When we are brought together by communi-cation we depend on the fact that we are alwaysalready socially arranged one with respect to anotherin an intuitive sociocultural categorization. All of usare identifiable as being of one or another kind, to oneor another degree, both enduringly and momentarily.Even to get communication started with othersdepends on making certain assumptions about

whomi.e., what kind of personwere communicat-ing with. (Think of identities constructed and imag-ined on the internet.) We expect certain kinds of com-municative forms to emerge, certain kinds of uses oflanguage and such. Butimportantlythe act of com-munication itself, that is, the emergence of certainindexically potent message forms, can always trans-form the intuitive classifications we apply to one

another, new ones suddenly pointed to as now opera-tive and consequential for an interaction.

What indicative signs or signals, for example,were you relying on in your aunts talk when you con-cluded, the other day, that she was stressed? Afterall, she didnt describe herself that way by actually say-ing something like Im working under a lot of stressthese days! or I feel under a lot of pressure. Yet yougave her uncharacteristic latitude in your conversation.

Again, how did I come to know that the prospective

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-ic form would simultaneously convey the meaningof the lower-case d-word, democratic, as what thoseother guys are about! So adhering to this rule whilespeaking self-identifies the very speaker of the form asbeing in one political party category rather than the

other.) Indexical values of language forms locate andidentify the parties to the communication where theyare used the way a good pantomime gives the impres-sion of taking place in a comprehensible surround.

These indexical factors in language seem tocrosscut the information structure always emerging viagrammar and denotational coherence as speakers addto the words and expressions in a text. Masters ofpolitical message, just like other users of languages,have intuitively known all along about the indexicalpower of the words they use, and especially about thecumulative indexical poetry of properly arranged

words. Such masters have had a knack for indexicaldesign that has shaped each eras political communica-tionat least as much as the descriptive content of it(if any)thus creating a true rhetoricians art form.Even the great message master, Lincoln.

In this way the actual forms of language in useconcretize both the momentary and the more endur-ing arrangements of us people engaged in communi-cating, the ways we arrange ourselves in space-timeand categorize each other in social life. And doubly so.In communicating we certainlyrely on social arrange-ments already in place, and the expectations we canthen have about what form talk should take betweentwo socially locatable individuals. But as well, eachtime we deploy specific forms of language we create


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bled together with what we recognize as the descrip-tive structuring of language. A recurrent sighing tim-bre of the voice. (Do we have a special sign in the way

we would write this down?) A particular pronunciationpattern of certain consonants and vowels. (All we write

with an alphabet is a sign for the identity of the conso-nant or vowel.) So we tend not to recognize these ascentral to communicationuntil, perhaps, they areremoved, as in much early computer-generatedrobotic speech, and we realize that the message werehearing no longer sounds human!

Second, all of the institutionalized technolo-gies of language have cumulatively reinforced thisintuitive difficulty of explicit recognition by concen-trating on its descriptive functions. Grudgingly, theother stuff may be added onas art! By institu-tionalized technologies I mean everything from the

writing and printing conventions to the personnel andparaphernalia of enforcing standard languages: dictio-naries, thesauruses, grammars, manuals of style, andthe people who create them and insist that they areauthoritative. Such official biases about language have

a kind of feedback effect on how we view what is thereal language and what is unimportant or periph-eralgood for art, perhaps, as it tries to imitate life,but hardly the stuff of lifes serious communication!

The biases, built into our institutional forms acrossthe board, keep telling us to discount what is actuallyindispensable to normal and effective human commu-nication.

Indeed, official views of communication centeron book larnin (as it is ridiculed). They hyper-

student in my office last week was gay? He did notannounce this to me as a self-description, explicit orimplicit. He just talked aboutdescribed, in the sense Idiscussed earlierwhy he was interested in a particu-lar educational degree program. These kinds of infer-

ential processes go on constantly in interaction, as weall know, on the basis of indexical signals that worklike gestures in pantomime.

In essence we continuously point to our ownand, relationally, then, to our interlocutorstransientand more enduring identities. Interactions as eventsdevelop these relational identities as consequences ofcommunicative behavior. The clarity of identitiescomes in phases, punctuated by shifts over interac-tional time: what-you-and-I-are in a moment of inter-action strives to become what-you-and-I-will-be. Weeffortlessly factor all this in to the conversationalimport and impact of talk we engage in, just as we tryto do so for talk we observe and analyze as social sci-entists or students of rhetoric, or for talk we createand represent as novelists or playwrights. We havealways operated with these effects as unremarkable but

essential truisms of talk, yet linguists have onlyrecently brought them into sharp and analytic view.

Why?These demonstrations of and inferences about

identities are very much the usual and other busi-ness of communication. Yet they have been largely outof the aware consciousness of communicators, for tworelated reasons. One is that the most obvious signalsof inhabitable identity seem to be un-language-like,even though in actual communication they are jum-

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interlocutors. Carefully analyzing this, we can get anidea of the ways that identities are being drawn uponand fashioned without ever being explicitly described.

Over multiple indexical channels, then, therecomes into being a kind of poetry of identities-in-

motion as the flow of communicative forms projectsaround the participants complex patternslets sayimagesnot onto Platos cave wall, but onto thepotentially inhabitable and then actually inhabitedcontext. So there is image. There is style. There ismessage. Image is not necessarily visual; it is anabstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulat-ing patterns of congruence across all manner of index-ical signsincluding visual onesthat addressees andaudiences can imaginatively experience, like a holo-gram. Stylethe way image is communicatedhasdegree and depth of organization; it may be consistent

within an event, or over a series of them, or evenacross a whole biography. Whole institutions come tobe embodied in particular communicative styles.(Remember The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit?Remember the late Dave Thomas of Wendys

Restaurants?) Message, then, strategically deploysstyle to create image in a consequential way.Message stylists want good (that is, effective) ones tobe cumulative and lasting among a target set ofaddressees. They see message as potentially enhanc-ing somebodys chances in a market that validatesthat somebodys worth in a desired and expectable

way. Message projects out from the communica-tional here-and-now were experiencing as it is beingcreated. It seeks to connect us with someones desired

emphasize the use of language for descriptive pur-poses, sometimes foolishly and vainly attempting todisregard the inevitable, simultaneous use of languagefor inhabiting identities. And, of course, just such waysof fashioning inhabitable identities in communication

give our messages whatever life-like appeal they mayhave.There are many ways we go about indexically

defining relevant identities. The register of languagewe use, in respect of words, phrases, sentence lengthand range of grammatical structures. (Did we emptythe container of its contents or get the stuff out?)

The fluency and sheer amount of language we use in aturn of communication. The paragraph-sized struc-tures of coherence we build up over time, like rhythmsof other bodily action. In spoken language, our toneof voice, as people term a range of things from stressand intonation patterns that depend on phraseology,all the way to characteristic pitch range, melodious-ness and other dynamic qualities of phonation.Gesture, movement and stasis of body regions,dynamic face-work, etc., micro-synchronized, as we

have discovered from film and videotape analysis, withthe flow of descriptive language forms. Gesturalactions performed while communicating verbally, or,sometimes equivalently, simply by communicatingnonverballylike making the Sign of the Cross withor without a simultaneous blessing of someone orsomething. A careful student of communication wantsto record all of these kinds of things, laboriously andin detail. They constitute the additional material along

with which purely descriptive language flows among

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The Dream Machine is a Magnet for Issues

Debate the issues! Debate the issues! somepeople constantly scream along with the print presscold type no doubt fancying itself the embodiment of

steely reason in the media age. Are these cries forissues reaching the stubbornly deaf ears of the indif-ferent (i.e., leading or successful) pols and their mediamavens? Issues are supposed to be the thing, no? Not

just a ploy laid on by an invisible, message-lessloser? Sure, they are vital matters in which we sever-ally have stakes, that we can rationally focus upon bythe use of expository communication, language that

lays them out in some denotationally orderly way fordeliberative decision-makingright? Right?In todays politics, just asit turns outin

past political life, expository communication can playas large or as little a stylistic role as is required by theimage ones message needs to create. At oneextreme, fringe candidates of both the left and theright seem to rely too much on civics-book imagery of

The League of Women Voters (no gender affront

intended!). And not only because they are generallylosers in the political process. Taking such manuals

with a bloodless literalism, they always rely on discus-sion ofas they are called in politicsthe issues.

Minutely laying out their positions, they treat the vot-ers to displays of long-winded disquisitions anddebaters points. They insist on retracing all the stepsof the argumentespecially for the convinced faithful,

who get a recharging buzz out of this old-time, from-

futurities in which we and they will play a role.So being on message contributes to that

consistent, cumulative, and consequential image that apublic person has among his or her addressed audi-ence. A really powerful message ascribes to meas

opposed to describesmy reality. It allows my audi-ence to image-ine a whole set of plausible stories inthe fictive universes of the must-have-been, the could-be, and, especially, the sure-as-hell-will-be (Ill votefor that!). Votes are such stuff as dreams are madeonand vice versa.

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issues that have that first-principles, wordy-disquisi-tional ring to them. For example, Mr. Clintons more-or-less admitted philandering was an issue in the2000 presidential elections. Republican interests hadlong since defined his bimbo eruptions in the

Arkansas Democrat[ic] tradition of GovernorWinthrop Rockefeller and Representative WilburMills for message-relevance. They were offensesagainst traditional marriage (not, for example, mattersof abuse of power crossing gender relations, a left-lib-eralas in Hey! Theirguy!issue). It was all butdeclared that that Womens Libbernow SenatorHillary Rodham Clinton seemed somehow to deserveher errant husbands behavior. So Republicans theatri-

cally professed moral outrage to all media who wouldlistenas they whispered all the rumored names anddates to all available Special Prosecutors.

It is not surprising then that in the 2000 elec-tion the Democratic presidential candidate sought toemphasize the self-distancing, countervailing mes-sage demanded as much by his own side as by theother one. To be sure, when repeatedly asked point

blank about the matter, assuming the allegations wereall true, Mr. Gore, then the sitting Vice-President to

Mr. Clinton, had to cast clear, if gentle, aspersions onthe Presidents morality. But thats merely a somewhatquote-worthy one-liner of judgmental discourse. Bycontrast, who in the television audience of theDemocratic Convention can forget Mr. Gores sur-prise appearance, violating the tradition of the nomi-nees seclusion, as he went rushing to the podium togive his own actual wife a long, passionatemarital!

first-principles liturgy. And they hope to appeal as wellto whoever will listen among outsiders to the faith,evangelizing them. It can be a Naderesque (orChomskian!) argument against documented influenceof big corporate interests, inexorably moving from sta-

tistics to interpretative hypothesis to hortatory plat-form plank. Or it can be an Alan Keyes findingScriptural bases and other truly first principles to chal-lenge our merely practical patchwork of case-basedlegal precedents on abortionon which he will alsodemand that other candidates be equally clear anddecisive.

In both cases, the message being conveyedis, in actuality, the speakers rigidity, narrowness, and

myopia. What gets conveyed is a noncompromisable,theory-driven perspective on the world. Its positionson the issues have clear implications for whatpurely rationally within that worldviewto do and notto do. In todays politics, certainly, such issue-con-sumed figures can easily be seen as lacking messageentirely, or at least confusing it with the actual set ofissues they endlessly discourse about. When the

public searches for message with these folksas itinevitably must, say Ithe best it can do is to use thelabel single-issue candidate, discerning perhapssome one generalized issue through the interpretativelens of message, no matter how many actual sub-stantive issues the candidate may have attempted tobring up and address.

That is not to say that message cannot bebuilt around issues; it always is, or at least must bemade to seem so. Just not usually around the kind of

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But how does one get from one of these issuesto the next, so that by this form of associative steppingfrom stone to stone, the lot of em can be seen to forman available pool of targetable issues? If this can beachieved, then any one of them, deployed on some

occasion, summons up the rest, andread through thetotalityprojects into inhabitable image? How doeswhat impresses us as the very height ofillogichave aprocessual logic of its own, such that successfulpoliticians discourse respects this logic? And wherecan we see these processes at work, where issues getlumped and turned into message-operators availablefor stylistic fashioning of image? How does a politi-cian fashion message as a kind of magnet for some-

times randomly assembled issues, that clump to itlike iron filings arrayed in its magnetic field?

Interestingly, there is in this something ofwhat the great Russian (i.e., Soviet and Jewish) psy-chologist Lev Vygotskij termed thinking in com-plexes. A complex, Vygotskij maintained, differs froma full rational or scientific concept, though both arediscernible in psychological processes of grouping

things, of classifying them as the same, or asinstances of some principle of equivalence. Wemight be able to lay out a series of things lumpedtogether via thinking-in-complexes so that, taken two-by-two, each pair of them will show at least a localfamily resemblance in some respects, but the wholelot of things might still be very diverse overall, espe-cially so for things at distant remove in the process.(Of course, this is what we find in nature with mem-bers of what are termed species in appearance, phys-

kiss after she gave a speech? A moment, clearly, to beon message in relation to an unspoken (as well asboth unspeakable and unmentionable!) issue.

Floridly and publicly inhabiting suchas wemight term itzipped fidelity fits into a larger set of

message-worthy issues that Mr. Gore and his cam-paign were clearly sensitive to as they sought routes tohis own message of fundamental personal distinct-ness, if not radical policy difference, from Mr. Clinton.Republicans, of course, have more generally been mer-cilessly beating Democrats with issues of this kindsince the 1960s, as the newly Republican Sunbelt andthe Christian right-wing became focal to their electoralstrategy. They have been lump-summed as captioned

social issues for strategic purposes of messageappeal (and for a systematic and large-scale diversion-ary conspiracywhile S&Ls, Enron, and WorldComburnespecially to keep the traditionally Democraticpolitical left permanently occupied in federal court,burdened with huge legal expenses to litigate beforeincreasingly Republican-appointed federal judges).Indeed, to the contemporary Pat-and-Rush segment of

the politically aware, Bill Clintons moral offenses, asmessage-relevant, were part of a package of issue-emblems, standing for everything bad from equity fem-inism,Roe v. Wade, and gay liberation, to lack of com-pulsory school prayer, government intervention bybanning (guns) and planning (economies), socializedmedicine (a 1950s AMA expression brought out ofmothballs by a desperate George H. W. Bush duringthe 1992 election campaign!) and thenceof courseto Communism (now perhaps Islam).

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and so on, sometimes over very large stretches of talk.At each such jump, the characters and things and situ-ations are, willy-nilly, lined up in a kind of direct orinverse parallela kind of equivalenceto those ofthe previous segment of discourse. Trading experi-

ences informally with others, we all engage in this allthe time, the cohesive principle over which is the like-ness or structured transformation-of-likeness from onesegment to another. Shooting the breeze or what-ever one calls it when we dive into conversation withThat reminds me of: the exemplary people,things, and situations of such wandering narrativesimplicitly grow as chained analogues. Such thought-about but unfocused narrative relations, if seized upon

by a pregnant captioning label or image, suddenlymake the whole analogical series take on a definitiveidentityin fact retrospectively a necessary identitythat we now recognize as so many examples of oneunderlying principle, conceptually implicit, evenimmanent. So thatswhat it is!

Even the Anglo-American case-law traditionoperates this way, as the late Attorney-General

Edward H. Levi long ago noted. The finding ofprecedentas though discovering a set of furtherinstances of a scientific covering lawfor concluding acase under adjudication is the name of the game. Itrequires that a brief or a decision create a deductiveargument about analogues across a (historical) chain ofother, already settled cases that, one claims, are to beunited under a single principle, the one that must beapplied to this case, here and nowa principle which,at the so-called growth edges of law, may have never

iology, and life-course, the biologists phenotypecharacteristics. And certainly with any examples ofsocial and cultural phenomena.)

Psychologically, then, complex-thinking is aconceptual process that results in classifying things

together that may be related one to another by analo-gies and other kinds of term-by-term similarity. Butafter the fact, we are sometimes hard-pressed toextract what holds this complex together, except that

we have created it by jumping from one thing to thenext. Do you know that game where you start with aspelled-out word and then change one letter at a timeuntil you have transformed the original into a wordthat makes a striking meaning contrast with the first

one? S-I-T > S-I-N > S-U-N > R-U-N. Taken inpairs, the terms in the game looks very, very similar,

yet the ones at the two ends of the chain are very, verydifferent. Vygotskij thought that children go throughmore and more stable and encompassing forms ofthinking in complexes, readying the developing mindfor true conceptual use of language. He observed thateven for us thinking adults, most of the expressions of

our private, fantasy discourses have chain-complexmeanings, rather than fully conceptual onesas does agreat deal of our own and others everyday use of lan-guage.

Indeed, listen to someone thinking out loud incomplexes, sometimes even about very serious matters,rather than in scientific (i.e., fully rational) conceptualterms. One hears, step by step, the way that in thenarrative a particular point begins to morph withrhetorical liquidity into the plot of another narrative,

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Plains and Prairie territories opening up to Euro-American settlement. How to Americanize anddomesticate the frontier became one of the fronts forthe slavery issue. Year after year, a series ofCongressional tugs-of-war cycled around it. These

struggles strained the very fibers binding the countrytogether. Religiously inspired, evangelical moralistswhipped up sentiment for abolition of slavery on theone side, even as their equally pious counterparts onthe other side scripturally affirmed the justness of per-petuating it.

In his own political self-alignment, first Whigand then Republican, Lincoln came out clearly againstslavery, but stopped far short of the religious fervor of

those on the Abolitionist extreme. As a rising Illinoispolitician in mid-century, he became very visible onthe national stage by his 1858 senatorial run againstStephen A. Douglas. Publicly, Lincoln fashioned hispro-Union arguments in the more strictlyConstitutionalist terms that would see and call theDemocratic Partysand especially Douglaspoker-game legislative tactics over the new territories. He

advanced these issues as fronts for thesl-word (utter-ing which too clearly in the 1858 Illinois race againstStephen Douglasand perhaps sounding too muchlike the Abolitionist extremistsmay well have been afactor in Lincolns loss). Lincoln was clearly on recordas what we would term today a white supremacist;nonetheless, he committed himself at minimum tocontain slavery territorially as an embarrassment oflong standing, and certainly to sanitize the new

Western territories from it. Ultimately, he argued, this

The Dash to Message in the Age of

Telegraphy

Of course in the 1860s the media cycles soessential to message worked at a slightly slower pacethan ours. No remote-location videocamera broad-casting. Events (even stenographic transcripts ofspeeches) could be reported to headquarters via teleg-raphy, and then circulated by newspapers and maga-zines and such. Editorially shaped, they circulated byprint dissemination of news and opinion about them.Lithographic images of events and personalities,broadsides, and cartoons and caricatures were an

essential part of mass print media. (Cartoons reallycame into their own, in fact, in the 1860 and especially1864 campaigns.) Adjusting for this, we can learnmuch about the enduring substance of style from how

Mr. Lincolns only fitfully successful message got anew birth at Gettysburgand defined him just in timefor the impending (North-only) 1864 presidentialelection cycle!

It was no big deal that Mr. Lincolna savvypolitician from frontier beginning to martyred enddid, in fact, shift in the weight he accorded to specificissues over the course of his political career.Circumstances demanded no less. The biggest issue

was, of course, slavery, which had been driving apartthe sectional interests of the country for severaldecades. (It was the elephant in the Republican Partystent.) By dominating political parties, sectional inter-

ests competed to capture for themselves the newer

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Awakenings and the mid-nineteenth centuryEvangelical denominationalisms. The sometimes fierypreacherly talk associated with them led ordinarypeople into irrationality: merely feeling Gods pres-ence in exuberant manifestations. But this provides to

many a template for the effervescence of participationin the civil religion to which Lincoln at his messagebest still calls us. A mystical patriotism of feeling,called forth in spectacle by virtuoso deployment of

verbal and other presentational styles.Lincolns actual physical voice was not an ora-

tors; it was apparently somewhat thin, reedy, and rel-atively high-pitched. He was, if not actually uncom-fortable in extemporaneous speaking, not at what he

thought to be his best on such occasions. AsPresident, he demurred from a great many suchrequestseven on the evening before the Gettysburgtriumphpreferring to read aloud from his carefullycomposed and reworked written texts or even havingthem read out for him. And after a speech was deliv-ered, he closely managed its editing and transmissionin print. In his younger days he was known to hover

over telegraph and newspaper desks whence emanatedthe texts to be circulated to his public.It is clear that Lincoln was something of an

intellectual, if only self-taught in the craft aspects ofthe gentlemanly arts of the well-bred still easily mis-taken for deep thought. Even so he managed to con-stitute a message of the quintessential Americanthe forthrightly plain spoken rail-splitter, honest anddirect; this voice speaks with a knowledge of the

sacred texts of both Christian and civil religion. He

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word made fleshof American civic morality. Out ofthe very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown,as Boston Brahmin James Russell Lowell had termedhim, Lincoln the autodidact frontiersman hadmatured into the plain-speaking, practical Evangelical

Christian preacher of and for this special nationsindissoluble, transcendent moral unity under God.He, the natural Everyman of American soil, was ulti-mately to save America from itselfthat is, from the

wicked, unjust ways into which at least some of thebrethren had fallenthrough his own determinedself-sacrifice.

For many people, then, Lincoln embodied inhis lifeas he does more universally in the everlast-

ing civic life that is his deaththe true Americanvoice. It is a voice that, in his turn, Carl Sandburgwas both to characterize and to recapture for a latergeneration: a sacred voice of civic plain-spokenness,inspired with Christian reason and able to articulate

with conviction what is right and what is wrong in theworld around it. Plainness, that anti-high-churchvirtue of so much of American Evangelical

Protestantism, means also not being carried away bypomp of occasion or of high office in institutions ofpower. In our civic life, later generations have reveredLincoln for these embodied qualities, as they havealso liked Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan for thesame reason (whatever trouble they have had withGive-em-Hell Harrys style of its expression).

The downside of this message, at least forthe rational elites, is the kind of anti-intellectualism

that Richard Hofstadter traces to the Great


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that once the larger public could read the transcript inthe next-days newspapers, it began to steal Everettsthunder. (How ironic, too! This was for a second time:in his oration Everett declared that he himself hadbeen misguided in a politics of appeasement before

the 1860 electionhaving run against Lincoln as theVice-Presidential candidate of the Constitutional-Union Party, the party advocating any compromise

whatsoever to get the Rebels back from the brink!)But Lincoln knew a message opportunity

when it presented itself. He had sought to be presentat the solemn gathering, since he understood morethan anyone how mired he was in political controver-sies relating to the first foundering, then merely stum-

bling Union military campaign, to his having sus-pended habeas corpus, to the unfair and unpopular mili-tary draft, to widespread war profiteering, and to arunaway economy, among other difficulties. General

Meades 4th of July non-loss at Gettysburg, and closeupon it General Grants brilliant success at Vicksburg,

were, by contrast, important to re-emphasize in late1863. There was a blistering firestorm of criticism in

the opposition and foreign press, Honest Abe,Uncle Abe, Father Abraham images notwithstand-ing on the part of loyal media. Lincoln sensed howprecariously perched he was in relation to the upcom-ing 1864 elections in which one of his former com-manding generals, George McClellan, was alreadysure to be the Democratic candidate, and his own cab-inet member, Salmon P. Chase of Treasury, was vigor-ously anglingonly one among manyto supplant

him as the Republican one. (Neither appeared at

church. (Lincoln actually plays upon this Eucharisticchiasmus, the figure of the cross, as upon Christsandall Christian, let alone Hellenicmartyrdom, in hisspeech.) Similarly, for generations Americans have re-read and re-cited The Gettysburg Address like a

creed; in this, we reaffirm and transformatively renewand enhance our own incorporation into the Americannation-state.

It is almost embarrassing to speak of this 270-odd-word text as an address, though Lincoln did,indeed, address his audience at that sad place on 19November 1863. It was only a little over four monthssince the Battle of Gettysburg had concluded on the3rd of July that year. (Note: it was a series of attacks

by the Confederate forces that the Union had repulsedjust in time for the 4th of July, whose sacred text isthe Declaration of Independence!). The principal ora-tor of the day was Edward EverettSenator,

Ambassador, Harvard president; Ralph WaldoEmersons role-modelwhose spellbinding, classicallyHellenic funeral oration of two-plus hours the worldhas little noted nor long remembered. (Everett, the

main act, took the lead in printing his oration as apamphlet in early 1864, with the Presidents remarksas part of the additional material. The Everett text isaccessibly reprinted as Appendix III.A. in Garry Wills1992 best-seller,Lincoln at Gettysburg[Simon &Schuster].)

By contrast, the Presidents dedicatoryremarks (as the program listed Lincolns address)constitutes a ritual poem so perfectly on message

even beyond the ritual space in which it was recited

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beyond that time and place. Think of the text of aritual like a weddingthe sum total of what is said byparticipants, what is played, danced, sung, how it is allmoved through space-and-time, displayed, etc. Thetext gets its transformative effectiveness or oomph as

a function of a dense, internal arrangement of mean-ingful symbols as they are experienced together andrefract off one another. Ritual texts project an air ofself-sufficiency about themselves, as though emergingdensely and fully formed from realms not of this usual

world and context. Thats both necessary to, and partof, the magic.

Not that rituals actually are divorced fromtheir immediate and more remote contexts; quite the

opposite. Rituals are completely creatures of the con-text in which they take place. (Rhetoricians speak ofthis epideictic quality of ritual speech, for example,but do not seem to know how to explain how it

worksor why in fact all language is epideictic!) Butritual texts manage to draw the context into them-selves, because every symbol in a tightly structured rit-ual gets its specific, this-ritual loading for special

effectiveness from the overall structure of the textitself. What was externally only wafer and wine areBody and Blood within the ritual spacetime; and, inturn, they constitute sacrificed Lamb of God, thesacrifice being instanced in their consumption.Ritual symbols, then, areto borrow the sectariantermtransubstantiated from merely ordinary stuff,be it a word or expression, a color, a melody, a move-ment of peoples bodies in a laid-out space. Drawn in

from everyday experience to be part of an organized

Gettysburg, though both had been invited by thesponsoring multi-state Board of Commissioners forthe Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg.)

The cemetery dedication was shaping up as avery Republican event, orchestrated by the prominent

Republican head Commissioner, Judge David Wills ofGettysburg, in a state of a very loyal RepublicanGovernor, Andrew G. Curtin. In fact, sensing that this

was the equivalent of what today we term a photoop in front of a friendly audience, some of the presscriticized it as nothing more than a campaign show,Patriotic Gore, indeed! Still, only a rather offhandinvitation came to Lincoln at the beginning ofNovember: asking him, as Chief Executive, to make a

few appropriate remarks after the main funeral ora-tion. (For this, to draw a crowd they had first securedthe services of Everett, whose busy schedulenotLincolnsset the actual date). Even to secure theinvitation for Lincoln, the Illinois Commissioner,Clark E. Carr, had to argue against widely shareddoubts about his ability to speak upon such a graveand solemn occasion as that of the memorial services.

That Lincoln used the solemn ritual occasion toadvantage for his message is, of course, an under-statement. Even the viciously critical among the press,in dismissing it, understood in their negativity that itsolidified the terms of Lincolns political persona

what we would call his message.Now any ritual occasionnot only a cemetery

dedicationis one that participants feel is transforma-tive. It envelops people in a bounded spacetime where

something magical happens, with effects lasting

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of the ritual. Both words and spatiality are central tothe original Lincoln text. Lets look at how they

work.The verbal text of the Gettysburg Address

operates, not at the level of syllables, as in poetic dog-gerel, but in two other features of composition. (Iattempt to lay this out visually in the accompanyingstructural chart of its poetics.) One is the syntacticconstruction of the sentences. Lincoln accomplishes akind of incantation by repeating simple forms. Thisresults, cumulatively, in long chains of parallelism,repetition of key words and sets of words that serve ashis operant ritual symbols. A second, cumulativeeffect comes from creating a fractally repeating

structuredoing the same thing at level upon levelupon level of textual form. The text breaks in themiddle, at what I have labeled segment [4], It is alto-gether fitting and proper that we should do this.

This comments, in essence, on the propriety of sayingand thereby doing what the speaker, Lincoln, if suc-cessful, is in fact doing together with the other peoplepresent: dedicat[ing] a portion of [the Gettysburg

battle]field as a government military cemetery.(Lincolns early draft of segment [4] is, This we may,in all propriety do. Pretty lame, though it does serveto break the wonderful repetitive rhythms of [1-3]and [5-6]. The rephrased sentence, with its formulaicaltogether fitting and proper and its do this empha-sized in a subordinate clause at the very end, remindsone of Christs injunction to do this for me.Lincoln takes up, in parallel, what it is for us to do

in the very complex sixth and final major segment.)

design, the symbols become design elements in anoverall figurative portrait or picture (the technicalterm is diagram) of what the text is supposed to effec-tuate in its particular context.

In this way a ritual text paints a picture of whatit accomplishes in relation to that context and

canchange our experience of the contextto the degree weaccept the picture. And we accept it emotionally as

well as otherwise. Recall my earlier discussion ofVygotskij here. A ritual symbolically creates contextu-ally experienced chain-complexes of ideas; how a ritualcauses this in those who experience it, even at secondhand, is its measure of effectiveness. And it is impor-tant to recall that these are intuited ideasladen with

affect or emotion as they hit usof how people,things, and situations fit together one with another,how they ought to fit together, and how, mysticallyspeaking, they are destined to fit together. Rituallyspeaking, doesnt every marriage ceremony in our ownday turn what began as a chance meeting into predes-tined wedded couplehood?

In the ritual medium of words in particular,

uttering them over speaking time paints the ritualpicture. It is just as in music, where the measured(metrical) organization of tones, singly and inchords, constitutes a rhythmic poetry over the dura-tion of a piece. Or, consider the medium of spatialarrangement of people and things. Here, a ritual pic-ture is painted in two ways. First, by the two- orthree-dimensional static relative positions of rituallyrelevant people and things. Second, by their dynamic

relative movements in space, if any, over the duration

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challenge and destiny that are the cruces of the text.Here, the birth/death/re-birth of the political nation(whose shaky government of/by/for the peopleLincoln happened to head) and the eternalendur[ance] of the nations soul (Liberty or free-dom and equal[ity]) are the issues Lincoln bringstogether in parallel at the focal point. Yet there at thefocal point stands the unpronounced I at the centerof his enunciated we: summoning all the copartici-pants in his text, those named as well as those present,to what the speaker, Abraham Lincoln, stands for inthe way of unfinished work. Because of this doublecontextualization that Lincoln built in to the perfor-mance, the printed Gettysburg Address still speaks to

us with a power rarely equaled in American publicrhetoric. As a textually robust ritualization in words,it can even be extracted from its context with its mes-sage intact. Certainly Lincoln thought so; he contin-ued to refine the text with minor re-wordings after theeventmaking it even better as a poetic ritual textashe several times supplied new handwritten copies forlater commemorative distribution.

Lets turn to the mechanics of the text-in-con-text. First, the internal metrical organization of theverbal material, and then how the features of contextcontribute to these metaphorically chained symbolicequivalences in the overall message event.

In Figure 1 I give a diagram of the structures Iam talking about, in order to allow you to follow thetext and its analysis. I have numbered and lettered themajor segments of the text that Lincoln spoke accord-

ing to the tiered organization of clause-like units of

As I noted, ritual text is, at once, completelydependent for its effectiveness on the context in whichit occurs, which it pictorially attaches to and trans-forms in some appropriately experienceable way. Atthe same time, principles of dense internal organiza-tion of its symbolic elements give ritual text a sem-blance of self-sufficient autonomy from its physicalcontext. At Gettysburg, Lincoln anchored his actualperformance first to the immediate and proximatecontext of the cemetery dedication and second to theremoter context of the history and destiny of thenationat that time under a cloud of uncertainty (justas was his own political future). Seizing on the uncer-taintyindeed, making it the overall to-be-or-not-

to-be themehe incorporates in his verbal textAmericas fathers, its current honored dead, veter-ans and soldiers of the battle, as well as his (still living)audience of (perhaps waveringly loyal) other

Americanstogether with himselfas a totalized rit-ual we. He speaks of [the] nation in both historicaland mystical time: four score and seven years ago tonow in the first part of his remarks, [the] larger

sense of its futurity being on the earth underGod in the second. In this way, ordinary space andtime of history in segments [1-3] are made parallel tothe mystical Christian realm in segments [5-6].

Lincoln uses the physical arrangement of theritual site to organize the relations of all the peoplenamed as well as summoned to dedicatory effort. Atthe schematically apical top-and-center of the site he,Lincoln, that nations Chief Magistrate and

Commander-in-Chief, stands to call his audience to its

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.1] we CANNOT DEDICATE

.2] we


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.1] here TO BE... DEDICATED TOthe great task

.1] remainingbefore

us .a]

thatfrom these HONORed deadwe TAKE increased DEVOTION TO

that cause

.1]for which

they GAVE


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simple sentence-subject and simple predicate (with orwithout a preceding temporal adverbiallike fourscore and seven years agoto set up the time frame).

Most of the sentences conclude not with a simplenoun, but with an appended object or complementconstruction to which are appended additional modi-fiers that prolong the basic, simple sentence. As a sen-tence unfolds in time within the complements or mod-ifiers, a yet further modifying phrase hangs onto modi-fying phrase in a structurally very rhythmic arrange-ment that creates a cascading series of memorable,almost autonomous phrases of greatly resonant power.

For example, right in the initial segment,marked [1] in the accompanying figure, we have the

simple clause [Subject:] our fathers[Predicate:]brought forth a new nation. To this Lincoln adds thecomplex and parallel modifiers explaining what kind ofnation they created relevant to the message of thisoccasion. It is a nation, Lincoln declares, [1.a] con-ceived in liberty (passive participle followed by preposi-tional phrase), and one [1.b] dedicated to the proposi-tion (again, passive participle followed by prepositionalphrase). But which proposition? Another modifierexpands, this one a full clause that quotes Mr.

Jeffersons immortal text in the Declaration ofIndependence: the proposition (or truth, we might say)[1.b.1] that all men are created equal. This structurerolls along from beginning to end, unfolding in a wayby adding deeper and deeper levels of grammaticalstructure.

But this principle of composition even intensi-

fies as Lincoln moves from beginning to end. By the

sentence-structure. At the same time, I have orga-nized the component unit-sized words and expressionsof his prose into vertical columns to emphasize what Ibelieve are the remarkable verbal parallelisms, repeti-tions, and progressions that operate according to theirown special effects, much as in poetry, music, andgraphic art. Chains of such elements are lined up ver-tically (as syntax allows), linked by being given similarfont and diacritic treatment, to indicate chain-complexequivalence or identity or, for various pairs and triadsof terms, special effects like chain-complexes of oppo-siteness () or complementarity ( ), or semanticcrescendo () effects. (Theseoperate as well at the level of clauses, of course, as

marked.) Nevertheless, the chart attempts to preservethe customary left-to-right and top-to-bottom printingconventions so the text can be read normally frombeginning to end. Where the rhetorical structure dic-tates, some material has had to be charted out of thespoken order of denotational text. Accordingly, threedots (...) appear in the place where a word that is else-

where plotted actually occurs in Lincolns text (it cangenerally be located in my chart immediately beforethe marked gap or, rarely, as the following word in thesame clause). The structure will become clearer as wefollow along.

Lincoln organizes the whole text into a FirstPartPauseSecond Part structure, like a conical fig-ure of two nappes meeting at their vertex (segment[4]). He structures each sentence internally to givemaximal rhetorical presence and force to the important

concepts. Every sentence starts out, basically, with a

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another symbol that he places in parallel to it, makinga balanced pair at a relevant position within theirrespective grammatical phrases: thus even within thefirst segment, our fathers [agent subject]all men[patient subject] and brought forth [active]are cre-ated [passive] are two pairs in tandem, like mirror-images nicely rounding out the two full clauses of [1];conceived (in)dedicated (to) participial phrases usedin describing the United States; libertyequal[ity]each as its phrase-culminating value we get from thenations founding fraternity.

More importantly, note also what we can termLincolns cantillation with tremolo on particular ritualpoints central to his messagehis elaborate, decora-

tive emphasis of them by repetition (that we can see inthe vertical columnar array of Figure 1). Through rep-etition-with-variation, the basic principle of poeticparallelism, Lincoln highlighted certain words andphrases as the vehicles of the central symbols of thisritual (a new nation [1] > that nation [2.a.a.1.a]anynation [so conceived ] [2.a.a.1.b] > that nation[3.b.1.a.1]; thisnation [6b.1.b.2]. (Here, also note theculminative progression, a > that [parenthetical any] >that > this, getting ultimately to the ritual here-and-now nation that matters.) In several places, Lincolnrepeats exactly the same linguistic forms with poeti-cally new meanings each timepunning in a way thatseizes our attention: conceived in [1.a] vs. so conceived[2.a.a.1.a] plays on the senses of reproduction vs. ratio-nal thought, figuratively making the key point about

what differentiates this nation from others. Again,

dedicated (to) [1.b; 2.a.a.2.b.2] vs. to dedicate [3.b.1;

texts finale in segment [6], Lincoln lays out in seg-ments [6a] and [6b] the things for us the living to be(here) dedicated to accomplishing so as truly to dedi-cate the cemetery. Here, his text gets very deeplyembedded in syntactic complexity, level after levelafter level, the last unit [6b.l.b.3.c] resulting from five-fold nesting of phrases within phrases. The unfinished

work in [6a] of those who fought at Gettysburg isspelled out in [6b] as ourgreat task remaining and it isenumerated in multiple parallel formations, for exam-ple [6b.1.a] parallel to [6b.1.b]; within the latter,[6b.1.b.1] parallel to [6b.1.b.2] and to [6b.1.b.3]; andso forth. As each phrase occurring at some level of thecomplex structure seems to come to completion, we

are treated to yet another example of the same princi-ples of composition all over again, as what we thought

was the last word bursts open with yet another con-struction to complete the thought.

So, even considered as a denotational text, astructured message in the informational sense, the

whole has what we would now call a fractal beautyof structure. Think of the kind of aerial fireworks that,shot up high, bursts open in sequential stages as itsremaining parts float down in the sky, each array ofcolor hanging in the air for a moment to dazzle us andthen in turn bursting into further, similarly dazzlingcolor. It is the ultimate stuff, placed toward the end ofevery one of Lincolns rhetorical segments, that givesthe central symbolic oomph to the whole segment andto its import for the whole ritual text.

At the same time, Lincoln develops for each

important symbol its proper emphasis in relation to

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5a.a.1] plays on the difference between goal-orienta-tion vs. ritually setting aside or consecrat[ing] [5a.a.2;5a.b]. Observe how the two senses are merged and fig-uratively equated, with passive construction, inLincolns twice calling for us to dedicate ourselvesthat is, for us ourselves to be dedicated to [6a.1;6b.1]the unfinished work of the great civil war andthus of this nation. He also uses whole series orsequences of words and phrases closely related inmeaning to create the framework of overall metaphorsin which his ritual theme is established: (the nations)birth in history > (for humans,) actual or (for thenation,) threatened death > rebirth in orto (human)immortality or (national) cosmic eternity.

Lincolns progressions of nested repetitionsfirst zoom in relentlessly within the spatial realm, likea camera focusing us down, down, down; it is a field ofmeaning made orderly in the very textual order of theritual: this continent [1] > a great battlefield [3.a] > aportion of that field and a final resting place (i.e.,graves) [3.b.1] > here [3.b.l.a]. In this first half of theritual text, he is tracing events in historical time as

well, first the founding of the nation on a principle orproposition; then the testing of that principle orpropositionnote how an exception proves, i.e.,tests, a rule or timeless generalizationby the warthat is the ongoing reality; then the actual immediatepresent of the occasion itself, face-to-face with thedead and with each other. What to say or do now?

Quite brilliantly, in the second half of the rit-ual, Lincoln precipitously zooms out again, though

always anchored in the here-and-now he shares with

his addressees, until he makes the physical groundpart, in the larger sense, of the cosmic eternal ofGodsnot merely humanitysearth: this ground[5a.a] > here and it [5a.b.a] (> 8 times here or equiva-lent) > this nation under God [6b.1.b.2] > the earth[6b.1.b.3]. Lincoln starts from the here-and-now hehad reached at the end of the first part, and draws itup not into mere human futurity, though to be sure heappeals to his audience in terms of what it is for[them] to do after the ceremonial occasion. His call is,rather, for the rebirth of the freedom articulated in theDeclaration of Independence, that is, for the sacred

futurity of an eternal principle. This abstract value willnot perish from the earth nor will this nation, under

God, in that sacred order if the audience will onlydedicate themselves to carrying on with the great taskremaining before us in the temporal order. The audi-ence will thereby join in the cosmic category he cre-ates in this very ritual text, one that includes theRevolutionary Era fathers, the Civil War Era dead sol-diers now buried here, those (here) still living, andmost of all the very individual who is grammatically atthe center of and focused upon by the little inclusive

word we: the speaker, Abraham Lincoln himself,their Commander-in-Chief, their Chief Magistrate,their Executive, their President.

We can note these poetic progressions inde-pendent of any overall logic rhetoricians want tofind in the textits technically merely an exhortationto greater resolve in the war effort, now figuratively

wrapped in eternal principle. The whole emergent text

moves through two familiar orders, the temporal and

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[5.a.b] in each sub-part of [5a] draws a contrastbetween us, the living, more this-worldly, and thedead, now become eternal (buried, they have joinedour fathers). As a higher-level unit, [5a] as a whole,dealing with these specific actors in the nations pre-sent moment, is contrasted with [5b], which is framedby how the worlda generalized actoris presumedto evaluate the contrast in [5a]. The significant differ-ence the world will understand is between what we sayhere [5b.a.a], feebly trying, with words, to dedicate anearth(l)y memorial, and what they did here [5b.a.b],succeeding, with deeds, in consecrating it for eternity.

Segment [6a] takes up the theme of [5a] oncemore: since our words alone will not succeed in dedi-

cat[ing] this ground [5a.a], rather we must dedicateourselves, i.e., we must be dedicated [6a.1], to com-pleting what they who fought here [6a.1.a.1] struggled[5a.b.2.a] to do. This specific unfinished work [6a.1]

which the crowd, in context, must have understood tobe the cause of the Unionis in parallel fashion ele-

vated in [6b] to the great task remaining before us[6b.1] in a generalized eternal realm. Being dedicatedto the specific is, in parallel fashion, equated to beingdedicated to the generalto the cosmic fate of thesedead [6b.1.b.1], of this nation [, under God,][6b.1.b.2], and of a principle of government [6b.1.b.3],all of which Lincoln anchors to the very site: here,

where we, the living make the dead immortal.Within the last segment [6b.1.b] that calls Lincolnsaudience to purposive resolve, note yet again thethree-part crescendo of abstractness in the parallelism:

[6b.1.b.1] is a resolve to redeem the specific fact of the

the eternal, manipulating symbols that draw peopleand events in the first order together with forces anddestinies in the second. So we can see why certainthings are constantly repeated and embellishedthrough the whole text to show that they retain theiressence in both realms. Such are, for example, Liberty[1.a] and equal[ity] [1.b.1] at the initial, conceptual anddedicatory founding moment of the new nation.

These are recuperated in the cosmic realm of eternityat the very end by our resolution to give a new birthto freedom [6b.1.b.2].

Again, note the fractal structure of repetitionsin positioning expressions for the United States, itshistory, its destiny. In segment [1], a new nation, a

specific thing, is dedicated to the equality of all men[1.b.1], in the realm of general concepts; in [2], pre-cisely parallel, the fate of that nation [2.a.a.1a]spe-cificis linked to the fate of any nation [2.a.a.2b]generalsimilarly conceived and dedicated. The

whole first part, the historical recitation of events,concludes with Lincoln, using the modal might, mak-ing contingent the continuing life of that nation[3.b.1.a.1], the one whose history has been recited inoutline from founding to Civil War to the Gettysburgbattle to the precarious now. Here is the crux of themoment to hand.

Then, in the second part, where Lincoln isspeaking in the larger sense of futurities of thesacred and eternal, he repeatedly uses exactly the samestructure of contrasts of specific and general. In [5a]and [5b], this same opposition is twice nested. We in

[5a.a] and the brave men (who struggled here) in


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piece sections of graves for the various states dead invarious stages of completion or in-process freshness.At the radial center of this semicircular array was aflagpole, temporarily in the position where a large warmonument was later erected (dedicated, 1869), barelybeyond the closest-in circumferential lines of then-

fresh graves. Slightly higher up, on the grounds of analready existing cemeterythe site was known asCemetery Hillthere was set up a platform for speak-ers and dignitaries, leaving room for the audiencebetween it and the new National Cemetery. In effect,on the surface of the hill all this comprised a some-

what lengthened and inverted (convex rather thanconcave) amphitheatre, all oriented to a high center-

point of interest, where the speakers and dignitariesplatform was set up. The speakers looked out fromthat center to the audience and beyond, to the placesof burial of the dead. In the converse direction, thedead lay beneath the earth at the backs of the audi-ence, who faced forward toward the center whereEverett and Lincoln and others spoke to them andenjoined of them dedication to the completion of theunfinished work which they who fought here [lyingbehind the audience; constituting their background]have thus far so nobly advanced.

We can note in the address the way that thesystem of what are technically called deictic cate-goriesthe way one uses thises and thats; the way onespeaks of a past, a present and a realm of futurity;the way one refers to what is here and to what isthereis masterfully used by Lincoln (who even

revised the text after the fact to make it better, that is,

ing, as he takes the passive form and returns it to itsritual or performative meaning. Observe the changedorderings: It is for usratherto be dedicated here to [6a.1] vs. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to [6b.1]. As in the service of the Eucharist, we mustbecome transformed and mysticallyset aside to (andwithin) [the] causethat is, incorporatively dedicatedto itby tak[ing] increased devotion (like wine and

wafer transubstantiated) from the martyrs who gavethe last full measure of devotion. Thus, our highresol[ution] to make it so that they martyred them-selves for ourcausethe cause of this nation, underGod and its new birth of freedom (a re-birth recuper-ating 1776), this cause that we can here-and-now

make immortal and eternal, never perish[ing] from theearth.

Indeed, there truly is a quality ofShakespearean seriousness to Lincolns puns and playson words! He was a highly gifted miniaturist in wordsas he moves across the realms of meaning that a single

word-form can have, and as he plays upon the signifi-cant differences of the various grammatical forms ofthose very words.

But to appreciate further this masterpiece ofmessageing, we must imagine the scene on thatNovember day. (If youve been to the site recently, you

will know that the cemetery has now been envelopedin large-scale Gettysburg Battle tourism that decreasesthe contemplative sacredness of the site, insteademphasizing the battle itself.) Imagine an open-fan, asemicircular-shaped cemetery sloping down-and-out

from near the top of a knoll or ridge. Imagine pie-

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actions of the fathers of a new nation at the far end ofthe time interval of 87 years before the moment ofspeaking. In [2], a present form of an inherently con-tinuous verb, are engaged in, describes the ongoingframe of a great civil war, implicating its habitualnessor surround of the moment of speaking, hence now.

In [3], a present perfect, are met/have come, describ-ing a resultative state of an action, brings us, still

within now, to here. Observe that in this first,recitational half of the text, each time something isintroducedfor example, a new nation in [1], the nexttime Lincoln holds it up he does so with that, the dis-tal demonstrative appropriate to setting things out forcontemplation at a distance.

In his text-dividing sentence, [4], Lincoln usesa present tense and the verb do this, with the proximaldemonstrative, that substitutes for the whole complexphrase of [3.b.1] (to dedicatemight live).

Then in the second half, in [5] and [6],Lincoln moves out from here and now into con-tingent futurities, futurities that depend on our orient-ing ourselves to the deontological lessons of therecitation of the first segment. At this point, Lincolnswitches entirely into the proximal deictics, here,this/these, we; he has now brought everything hedenotes inside the ritual precinct. So, we start fromthe impossibility of really doing this, i.e., dedicating,consecrating, or hallowing thisground by merelysay[ing] something (as opposed to the soldiers havingdone something!). We learn that we can in effect dothis by ourselves being dedicated to joining Lincoln in

the we who will bring about actual futurities, all

tighter in its ritual poetics of deixis). The nationalpast, the bloody and immediately deadly present, andthe destiny Lincoln and his audience (and successors)

will shape is verbally put into correspondence with theshape of the physical array in which the address isdelivered: fathers metaphorically rolling up from the

mythical past; honored dead, lying in graves justdownhill and all around behind us; us the living,arrayed inside the concentric rings of the cemeterybeing dedicated; and the focal point we all seek in thenations future, starting behind the audience andmarching up to the high-ground top-and-center pointof the audiences gaze where Lincoln himself stands,speaking to them. As in any good sacred ritual, the

cosmic axishere, leading us to redemption by(re)dedication and rebirthruns right through theposition that Lincoln speaks from, so that the futurityis indeed the mystical futurity of that larger sense in

which we are here [very much on this ground as wellas, in mystical nationalist time, on this continent andthe earth] not so much to dedicate, as to be dedicated,punning on the official-collective ceremony vs. thepersonal-spiritual meaning of the ceremonial transfor-mation. Compare here again the Eucharistic service,in which, inscribing the figure of a crossTheCrossin ceremonial action, one incorporates thesacred Body and Blood so as to be mystically incorpo-rated into the Body made institutional in the churchand among its congregation of worshippers.

We can now appreciate even more the subtletywith which Lincoln uses such deixis. In [1], a past

tense verb, brought forth, describes the founding

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The Myth is the Message

As I observed, [t]he world will little note, norlong remember what Edward Everett said in hisGettysburg Oration. But the mythology surrounding

Lincolns Dedicatory Remarks celebrates them as arhetorical triumph of the quintessentially Americancivil-religious voice, and it celebrates Lincoln as thepeoples evangelist for the Union cause. As this veryconstructed message had already been helpful to hisinitial election, it was all the more definitively elabo-rated at his death. Each of the various mythologicalstrands indicates something interesting about themessage-worthiness of the Gettysburg Address.

There are various myths about the texts com-position. The one I was told in elementary school wasthat Lincoln quickly jotted it on the back of an enve-lope while waiting at the train station, or while on thetrain to Gettysburg. There are variant details: that it

was composed after dinner in the Wills house the nightbefore its delivery; or, early in the morning before itsdelivery; or, partly in Washington and partly at

Gettysburg. Or even that the text was only partiallywritten out, the rest coming spontaneously fromLincoln in an inspired burst of feeling at the dedicationceremony itself. The absence of a definitive readingmanuscript in Lincolns hand that matches the steno-graphic record of a reporter reinforces the sense ofthese words as more or less divinely inspired and spo-ken by a priest if not prophet. These accounts, to dif-ferent degrees, imbue the text with the sincerity of

wonderfully laid out as such in parallel future con-structions that are thus made ritually equivalentanemotion-filled chain-complex of idealsin [6b.1.b]:that [the dead] shall not have died in vain = that [theU.S.A.] shall have a new birth of freedom = that [theprinciple of democratic government] shall not perish

from the earth. The proximal demonstrativesthis/thesehere combined with implied and actualfuture forms give us a presentational effect, holdingbefore the ritual participants the very outcomes of asuccessful performance.

E l h h l

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Even earlier, when the war was in its initialphases, Lincoln had sent a message to a special sessionof Congress on 4 July 1861, in which many of thephrasings of the Gettysburg remarks can already benoted. Addressing the Confederacys secession,Lincoln argues that

this issue embraces more than the fate of theseUnited States. It presents to the whole family ofman the question, whether a constitutional repub-lic, or democracya Government of the people bythe same peoplecan or cannot maintain its terri-torial integrity against its own domestic foes. Itpresents the question, whether discontented indi-viduals... can... put an end to free government upon

the earth.

Lincoln rhetorically asks why, in contrast tothe ideals for which heand, he hopes, Congressstand, the Confederate declaration of independenceomit[s] the words all men are created equal, and

why their constitution omits the phrase We, thePeople: Why this deliberate pressing out of view ofthe rights of men and the authority of the people?

And he concludes by remarking that even [a]s a pri-vate citizen, the Executive [=President] could not haveconsented that these institutions [of popular govern-ment] shall perish; and much less can he do so asPresident.

So it was not merely the issues that wereLincolns to articulate; the very images of a messagehad long been forming themselves in phrasings that he

ultimately put together in the brilliant poetry of his

inspired, spontaneous words-of-the-moment that, likeall good poetry, are supposed in a kind of Romantic

view to come to the inspired poet fluently and directlyin an inspirationlike the feelings of religious conver-sion and ecstasy that they allude to.

But in actuality, Lincoln had long since formu-

lated the general metaphorical structure of theGettysburg text: the providential delivery of the Unionto us on the 4th of July, the birthday of the nation,upon principles of universal human rights (notwith-standing the later Constitutional compromises aboutslavery). Already on the evening of the 7th of July in1863, just a few days after the Gettysburg and

Vicksburg engagements, Lincoln extemporaneously

spoke to a crowd outside the Executive Mansion onthis subject. His words were stenographically reportedas follows:

How long ago is iteighty odd yearssince on theFourth of July for the first time in the history of theworld a nation by its representatives, assembled anddeclared as a self-evident truth that all men arecreated equal. That was the birthday of the United

States of America....[A]nd on the 4th [just passed] the cohorts of thosewho opposed the declaration that all men are cre-ated equal turned tail and ran. Gentlemen, this isa glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, butI am not prepared to make one worthy of the occa-sion. I would like to speak in terms of praise due tothe many brave officers and soldiers who havefought in the cause of the Union and liberties of the

country from the beginning of the war.

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f N b 1863 Whil h h

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text of November 1863. While that text may have got-ten a final pre-delivery polishing in the days beforethe 19th, it certainly was in far advanced draft by a

week or so before, when Lincoln was studying the lay-out of the cemetery and reviewing the text of Everettsoration.

Then there is the myth of the audiencesstunnedor indifferentsilence at the dedication,and of Lincolns sense of the immediate failure of thespeech. Just as the myth of whole-sprung, inspiredcomposition (or extemporaneity) hints at the mes-sage of Lincolns powerful evangelical fervor, so thisone constructs the image of the overlooked treasureperhaps like Christs disregarded message?proffered

to an initially uncomprehending world. (But the worldultimately discovers its treasure and grants immortal-ity to the message.)

Actually, upon delivery, the speech was inter-rupted five times for applause, at what we can see areall right places, as well as receiving sustainedapplause at its conclusion. The Associated Pressstenographer notes applause after [1], when Lincolnquotes the Declaration; after [5a], for the consecratingacts of the brave men who struggled here; after [5b],contrasting what they did here to our mere verbiage;after [6a], noting that the combatants have thus farnobly carried on the nations unfinished work[changed to nobly advanced in later, post-deliverymanuscripts]; after [6b.b.1], resolving that these deadshall not have died in vain; and at the end, after shallnot perish from the earth, the correspondent noting

long continued applause. All these noted, in spite of

recollected memories of silence, whether hostile,uncomprehending, or whatever.

But of course the myths tell us somethingabout the folk notion of the differences between theplain- and brief-spoken Lincoln, President of the peo-ple, speaking in language for the people, hoping to be

reelected by the people, and the distinguished andBrahmanical public servant and Harvard president,

Mr. Everett, who represents the gifts of elite artistry inthe heroic Hellenic mold. (The very next day,

Ambassador Everett wrote compliments to Lincoln,saying, I should be glad if I could flatter myself that Icame so near the central idea of the occasion in twohours as you did in two minutes. To this, the gracious

Lincolnever the master of compactly witty wordsreplied, In our respective parts yesterday, you couldnot have been excused to make a short address, nor I along one.) When successful message wraps themessage-bearer in its folds like a draped flag, the mythbecomes the message. Lincolns dedicatory remarksbecame The Gettysburg Address and this aspect ofhis messagewhat was at stake in [the] largersense in both the war and him being Presidentwascompletely off bounds in the particularly rough politi-cal season ahead. The verbal and cartoon attacks onLincoln from the militant northern Abolitionist sideor the side of compromise with the Confederacy weresustained and vicious until the 1864 elections andbeyond. But he had managed to inhabit a message atGettysburg that, in his eventual martyrdom-to-thatcause down to the present, seems not [to have] per-

ish[ed] from the earth.


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attempting to grasp things whatever they are with

71

[Its] time for the human race to enter the solar

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attempting to grasp thingswhatever they arewithhis whole being. What has been really trying to theconceptualizing elites who criticize him is thatDubya has successfully projected, and successfullycontinues to project, determination, really trying.(When his candidacy first surfaced, it seemed to me

that Dubya in fact combined attributes of both RonaldReagan and Dan Quayle. He was like mellow Reaganfor projecting principled determination, though with-out the clarity of Reagans global anti-Communist slo-gans Dubya has had only free-enterprise, anti-govern-ment slogans to captivate the Reagan Republicrats

while doing the bidding of corporate interests in oil,energy, etc. who have invested in his candidacy and

then administration. He was like youthful Quayle forlowering expectations to those of the C-minus legacychild, though in a more robustly acceptable way in itsnew, Texas version.)

When he was tapped by the RNC to rush ThePresidency (bigger than Yales Skull and Bones butunder Dubyayet more secretive!), he was probablyreassured that he himself would not have to faceintractables like Middle East foreign policymuch

less the twin rubbleheaps of a physically attackedAmerica and a gutted American economy. (But dontworry; the servantsDick, Rummie, Condie and allwill take care of it, as they always have.) So in thecampaign the important message was to hold outthe promise of change of administrations fromsmooth, Slick Willie, the in-yo-face Know-It-All.Reverting to the uncouthness from whence he sprung,

Pimp Willie succumbed to the fleshly temptations of

[It s] time for the human race to enter the solarsystem.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

Well, I think if you say youre going to do some-

thing and dont do it, thats trustworthiness.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend towardmore freedom and democracybut that couldchange.

If we dont succeed, we run the risk of failure.

This stuff looks like political parody, scripted

perhaps for Saturday Night Live. It ranges hilariouslyover the whole gag kitbag. Double-talk, malapropisms,the worst hack bromides, logicaldenotationalnon-sequiturs and redundancies, semantic ignorance of oneor another sort, and on and on. At times, the speaker

wants to correct himself, but, like verbal slapstick, getsbollixed up even worse. And yet it is very appealing inits own way, is it not? It is, I shall argueor, rather,the man speaking it ison message in the sociopo-litical context in which this conceptual drosslike thestuff of the bumper stickerhappens.

But theres the key point. Its conceptual dross,to be sure. But it has been consistently delivered witha manly tone of conviction, even aggressiveness; with afirm-jawed, non-sissy Texas style of pronunciation thatPoppy never really mastered; and with a facial and

whole bodily posture of earnestness that has got to

make our hearts go out to the guy: hes really, really

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his position of power For a long drawn-out time the

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Control over detail is precisely what middle


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his position of power. For a long, drawn-out time thestate of his affairs became the embarrassing center-piece of our affairs of state. And poor Al Gore, bycontrast, turned himself into Mr. Know-It-All-

Without-(Extramarital-) Lust-in-His-Heart. ForGore, it became increasingly difficult even to keep

people convinced that he had the fire-in-the-belly aswell. But George W. Bush: earnest in his sincerity, soseemingly ingenuous in his platitudes and gaffesas

well as deflectively proclaiming born-again Christianredemption from sex, drugs, and rock n rollhe

wasand, when on me

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Silverstein - Talking Politics

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