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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Speeches

Rioting in Understatement

22 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

American History, Gore Vidal, Government, Henry Clay, Isolationism, politics, Speeches, State of the Union

“The two parties, which are really one party, cannot be put to use. They are the country’s ownership made carnival. Can the united action of individual citizens regain some control over government? I think so. But it won’t be easy, to riot in understatement. Attempts to cut back the war budget — whether the war be against communism or drugs or us — will be fought with great resourcefulness. When challenged with the billions of dollars wasted or stolen from the Pentagon, the establishment politician’s answer is clear: Abortion is against God’s law. He promptly changes the subject, the way a magician does when he catches your attention with one hand while the other picks your pocket…

Our political debate — what little there is — can never speak of the future except in terms of the past. I shall, therefore, present a formula to restore the Republic by moving boldly forward into the past. I wish to invoke the spirit of Henry Clay. Thanks to our educational system, no one knows who he is, but for political purposes he can be first explained, then trotted out as a true America Firster who felt that it was the task of government to make internal improvements, to spend money on education and on the enlargement of the nation’s economic plant… This does not seem to me to be too ambitious a program.”

__________

Pulled from Gore Vidal’s classic “Notes on Our Patriarchal State,” which is taken from his “State of the Union” speech from 1990 (embedded below). To get the full effect, flash forward to minute twenty-six and listen to this section. The text can be found in his collection Gore Vidal’s State of the Union.

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Douglas MacArthur: Will We Find an International Peace?

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches, War

≈ Comments Off on Douglas MacArthur: Will We Find an International Peace?

Tags

Address to Congress, Air Force, Armageddon, army, Balance of Power, combat, Congress, Douglas MacArthur, history, international relations, League of Nations, Military, navy, Old Soldiers Never Die, peace, Speeches, War, World War Two

Douglas MacArthur“Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war.

The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”

__________

General Douglas MacArthur, quoting himself in his “Old Soldiers Never Die” Speech to Congress on April 19th, 1951.

Douglas MacArthur

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Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

Tags

American Founding, American History, Bill of Rights, Conservativism, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Freedom, Gore Vidal, Government, Law, liberty, Life, Patriarchy, political philosophy, politics, Pursuit of Happiness, Speeches, State of the Union, The Nation, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny

Gore Vidal Portrait Session

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

__________

From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

  • Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
  • Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
  • The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

Gore Vidal

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Your Mind Is All You Have

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Your Mind Is All You Have

Tags

Death and the Present, dreams, Fulfillment, happiness, mindfulness, neurology, neuroscience, Philosophy, psychology, Sam Harris, Speeches, thought, Waking, Your Mind Is All You Have

Sam Harris

“Whatever you can possibly notice – in your body, in your mind, in the world – has only one place to appear: in your conscious experience.

Now I’m not saying this is all just a dream, but as a neurological matter it is very much like a dream. It is a dream that is constrained by inputs from the external world. And the dreams we call dreams at night are dreams that are not constrained by the external world — and that’s why you seem to be able to get away with everything.

But your mind is all you have. It’s all you’ve ever had. It’s all you have to offer other people. And this might sound calloused to say when there are maybe many other aspects of your life that seem in need of being addressed… But it’s still true. If you are perpetually angry and depressed and confused and unloving, it doesn’t matter how much success you have or who’s in your life, you’re not going to enjoy any of it.

I suspect you could all make a list of things you want to accomplish – of things that really need to be changed about your life. What is the significance of everything on that list? Each thing on that list seems to promise that if you could only do it, you would have reason to just be happy in the present moment. We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment, and good enough reason to just be happy here…

And again, I’m not saying that everything on your list is absurd, or not worth accomplishing. But how dissatisfied with the present do you have to be in order to prepare a satisfying future? If you’re constantly ruminating on what you just did, or what you should have done, or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. You’ll fail to connect with it. You’ll fail to connect with other people.”

__________

Sam Harris, speaking in a section from his heavy and highly persuasive speech Death and the Present Moment.

I apologize for the record-breaking hiatus: I have been under-the-weather, and traveling, and just plain busy.

Read on:

  • Harris reflects on why exactly it’s so tragic that we waste our time
  • From his TED Talk: Sam argues about what societies get wrong about female sexuality
  • As a non-theist, Harris wonders about whether there is a deeper, more spiritual way to find fulfillment

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The Dignity of Every Life: Viktor Frankl’s Powerful Speech to a Concentration Camp

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Speeches

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Adolf Hitler, D-Day, Dachau, history, Holocaust, Holocaust Remembrance Day, hope, Human Dignity, Inspiration, Life, Man's Search for Meaning, Nicholson Baker, Robert Jay Lifton, Speeches, Third Reich, Viktor Frankl, World War Two

Viktor Frankl

In the middle of Viktor Frankl’s tour de force chronicle of his survival of the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, there is a particular moment when existence at Dachau goes from dark to pitch black. It is the winter of 1944, several months after the D-Day invasions and thus the point in which Hitler’s Third Reich, sensing the writing on the wall, ratchets up the noxious gears of its Final Solution. The markers of this period are evoked by arresting phrases like Robert Jay Lifton’s “wild euthanasia” and Nicholson Baker’s “human smoke,” and can be seen crystalized in Schindler’s List, when an initially puzzled Liam Neeson sees ash fall from a clear sky as he wanders amidst children playing in a bourgeoisie town square.

For Frankl and his work group, these portents are worsened by the fact that they are being incrementally starved after refusing to identify a fellow prisoner suspected of stealing potatoes from a camp store house. Several days into this deprivation, the men have gone from emaciated to skeletal, as have their hopes for survival. As they lie on their dark bunks one evening, Frankl, only thirty-nine years old and one of the most respected men in the group, is asked by the barracks leader to give a speech.

The following is Frankl’s recollection of his words. It is one of the most beautiful and life-affirming speeches I’ve read, and one of several scenes I would have most wanted and hated to witness in the entire human drama of World War Two. Without fantasy or sentimentality, Frankl testifies to the force of life amidst terror and reaffirms the innate dignity of each human being in the face of whatever degradations he has suffered. I highly recommend a few moments of reading and reflection. The passage starts just as Frankl is called from his bunk:

__________

Concentration Camp

“God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons — to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever.

So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society — all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future…

Then I spoke about the future. I said that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival. I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. But I also told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. Even if we could not expect any sensational military events in the next few days, who knew better than we, with our experience of camps, how great chances sometimes opened up, quite suddenly, at least for the individual. For instance, one might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working conditions—for this was the kind of thing which constituted the ‘luck’ of the prisoner.

But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again I quoted a poet — to avoid sounding like a preacher myself — who had written, ‘Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.’ (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours — a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God — and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly — not miserably — knowing how to die.

And finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning. Those of us who had any religious faith, I said frankly, could understand without difficulty. I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that.

The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life, then and there, in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation. I saw that my efforts had been successful. When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping toward me to thank me with tears in their eyes. But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I the inner strength to make contact with my companions in suffering and that I must have missed many opportunities for doing so.”

_____

From Viktor Frankl’s psychological chronicle of the Holocasust Man’s Search for Meaning.

Related reading:

  • Cornel West’s testimony: “… Every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity: a value that has no price…”
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s moving “Who Am I?” letter from a German prison
  • A section from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel speech, “A World Split Apart”

Viktor Frankl

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Calvin Coolidge on Taxes

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, Speeches

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

America, American History, An Economy in the Interest of All, Budget, Calvin Coolidge, economics, economy, Freedom, Government, politics, Presidential Speeches, Prosperity, Speeches, taxes, U.S. history

Calvin Coolidge

“We are often told that we are a rich country, and we are. We are often reminded that we are in the best financial condition of any of the great powers, and we are. But we must remember that we also have a broader scale of existence and a higher standard of living. We have a freer Government and a more flexible organization of society. Where more is given, more is required…

Our own Constitution requires that revenue bills should originate in the House, because that body is supposed to be more representative of the people. These precautions have been taken because of the full realization that any oppression laid upon the people by excessive taxation, any disregard of their right to hold and enjoy the property which they have rightfully acquired, would be fatal to freedom. A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude.”

__________

From President Calvin Coolidge’s speech “An Economy in the Interest of All”, given on June 30, 1924, just five years before the onset of the Great Depression. Find it in Amity Shlaes’s excellent biography of Coolidge.

Read about another moment in American history where budget negotiations took an urgent tone:

Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

How Jefferson Fostered Compromise on the National Debt

For left-wingers, check out a post which I wrote about how the imperial project threatens our financial standing.

Mideast Iraq One Year On

The Engines of America’s Endless Wars

And for the libertarians/conservatives out there, read one of the best modern formulations of the philosophy that taxation equals tyranny:

Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick on Taxation

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The Top 10 Speeches of 2013

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2013, Oration, speech, Speeches, Speechmaking, The Top 10 Speeches of 2013, Top 10

Bookshelf

The top 10, in order:

1. Ted for Robert — Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother, given two days after Bobby’s death

“He gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing in time of happiness. He will always be by our side…

Those of us who loved him, and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us, and what he wished for others, will some day come to pass for all the world…”

2. The Mountaintop — Martin Luther King’s final speech, delivered the night before his assassination

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain… I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land…”

3. Victory or Death — George Washington’s rallying speech to the Continental Army on Christmas night, 1776, the night they crossed the Delaware to attack the Hessian forces

“Tonight, our mission, our duty as a free people, is to stem the tide of these atrocities, to retake what is rightfully ours and rid this great land of the plague of the mercenaries… And when the hour is upon us fight for all that you are worth and all that you cherish and love. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct that you show…”

4. Again I Pause to Remember — Christopher Hitchens’s Daniel Pearl Lecture on Anti-Semitism

“… I once wrote that anyone who wanted to defame the Jewish people would, if they were doing so, be defaming my wife, my mother, my mother- and father-in-law, and my daughters, and so I didn’t think I really had to say anything for myself.

But I did add that in whatever tone of voice the question was put to me — whether it was friendly or hostile — Was I Jewish? I would always answer Yes. Denial in my family would end with me.

But, of course, there was the most acute possible test of that question faced by the young Daniel Pearl, in the most appalling circumstances, and again I pause to remember how proudly, and how bravely, and how nobly he refused any sort of refuge in denial…”

5. The Rustle of a Wing — Robert Ingersoll’s eulogy at the passing of his young brother

“He added to the sum of human joy; and were every one to whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave, he would sleep tonight beneath a wilderness of flowers…”

6. A World Split Apart — Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 speech at Harvard University

“If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature… It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it…”

7. The Opening of the Nuremberg Trials — Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson’s introductory remarks at the Nuremberg tribunal

“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason…”

8. The Awful Grace of God — Robert Kennedy’s impromptu speech upon the shooting of Martin Luther King

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country…”

9. The Defense of Freedom and Peace  — Winston Churchill’s address to the British people on the eve of World War II

“… People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now…”

10. How to Write — Sebastian Junger’s lecture on how to write with style and clarity

“… You are not more interesting than the world is. Your writing is not more beautiful than the world is. You don’t want the facts of the world to serve as a platform for your skill as a writer. It’s the other way around. The relationship goes the other way. Your skill as a writer serves the world.”

Honorable mentions: College, Life by yours truly; Let Us Plant Our Trees this Afternoon by John F. Kennedy; Consider the Great Problem of Women’s Bodies by Sam Harris; What Art Tells by Saul Bellow; The Highlight of the Election by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama

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