The (Queens’) Speech

Last week we had some time to think about a mock election and the components of rhetoric that are employed in the media. Our group decided to take a “green matriarchy” position in terms of political stance (with the tag line, “Happy Greens, Happy Queens”), and I found that crafting a speech to be something that has taught me a lot about the way in which language functions as a vessel for conveying information.

Our group took a really systematic approach by first coming up with things someone of our particular political stance would be for and against (i.e. anti-oil, pro-environment, pro-women), and then choosing which of those should be featured in our speech. In choosing the cream of the crop, we had to think about our opponents (the Neo-Fascists) and what they might be for and against. This is a train of thought and reasoning that stems from Aristotle in that good rhetors can and should be able to anticipate a response to a rhetorical/political situation before even having a prompt to do so.

Crafting the speech was another task unto itself because we then had to think about how to sell our ideas and make them seem very reasonable and morally upright (if they weren’t already). Our proposals are quite utopian and mirror a feminist Marxist ideal, but we also wanted to implement an all-powerful ruler, so trying to craft a ‘communist’ Eden required us to think about how to “sell” the idea of an all-powerful leader without mentioning a ‘dictatorship’.

As someone who’s studied rhetoric, it was easy enough for me to say, “Okay, in our speech, we’re going to evoke bad character of our opponents, make emotional appeals, and drop a metaphorical comparison in our speech to make it moving and win our audience over”, but what I noticed was that we ended up using a lot of rhetorical devices that we (I!) haven’t formally studied when we had the goal of wanting to persuade our audience. I referenced this site: http://phrontistery.info/rhetoric.html

Which leads me to consider George Orwell’s piece (“Politics of the English Language”) more carefully: is it the case that political language, when flowery and dusted with these rhetorical tactics, is always a tool of corruption? I had to take a step back and think about our speech, the goal we were trying to attain, the message we were trying to convey, and the agenda we had in mind in order to realize that these tactics could very well be the same tactics used by the other party (who happened to take on a Neo-Fascist stance, which is a stance that is extremely scrutinized contemporarily, for obvious reasons). It also got me to think about how a person could advocate for a dictatorial power in the name of efficiency and the like.

I don’t necessarily agree with Orwell’s stance, but I do grant him the validity of his concerns over this kind of language – one could argue that Orwell and Burke (who wrote “Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle”) were talking about the same kind of ‘rhetrickery’ that Booth also warns us about in his chapter on “Media Rhetrickery”.

In a sense, having learned about and studied rhetoric has made me very aware of these devices and the way they are employed in speeches, which goes to show (at least myself) that Booth’s remedy for curing bad, deliberate rhetrickery through education is at least plausible. However, I still think it’s optimistic of him to think that this education will be used the same way that he (or I) uses it. Surely, as I have mentioned before, formally studying such devices will allow those with ulterior motives to use them in a not-so-nice way (i.e. to manipulate and to skew information). But nevertheless, I think he’s still onto something when he says more people will be able to at least recognize this deliberate rhetrickery, which may steer more people away from believing “alternative facts”.