notes toward a Biden rhetoric
Last week, in remarks before signing the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022, the President kept getting words wrong, halting in frustration to correct himself. Perhaps old age has worsened his lifelong stutter. But his whole narrative of the legislation, given in a halting half-whisper, was muted and strange. Speaking of how he “spoke directly to the CEOs,” he said that
I spoke to the CEO of JOANN Stores, Wade is here, Wade, stand up so everybody sees you [applause]. Wade Miquelon. And by the way, my sympathies to your family of your F…. uh… your… pff… your CFO who dropped dead very unexpectedly. My best to the family, that’s tough stuff. But you know what he told me? He told me his shipping cost rose by 100 million dollars. More than the company’s entire profit margin.
Grief inserted like a coin, an adage among stray facts. He says dropped dead very unexpectedly like a bedtime story. Sedate and bizarre, he might as well be announcing door prizes at a nursing home.
The mourner-in-chief muddling death with bureaucratic details is perhaps the inevitable end to a rhetoric that has always believed too much in itself. It’s something the previous President, who believed in nothing, wouldn’t have even tried. Trump never cared about anything enough to mourn its passing. Even his statement on his brother’s death is cold and impersonal: He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again. Just a mirror of his farewell speech: Have a good life, we will see you soon. Never solemn. Life and Death in America—one stupid, grinning deferral.
Trump’s language, his cadence and syntax, remains familiar to us. For those four long years, think-pieces abounded. The need to diagnose his presidency aesthetically was a need to understand what was happening. Was this an anomaly? Was this America? What was going on? Why does he talk like that?
There is little discussion of this for the current administration, save arguments over how senile the President is. No close readings of Biden’s rhetoric, no Biden equivalent of the word Trumpian. Maybe the reluctance to do the same with Biden is because he is too familiar, his presidency too doomed, or because we already know what he is—a man diminished, insisting on a decency that he cannot find proof of.
But here, I’ll give it a shot: to watch Biden speak is to witness the advanced decay of American earnestness. MAGA was a manufactured mass nostalgia for bigotry and impunity, a whole vile carnival of slogans and strange language. Biden’s nostalgia is his own meek fondness for a bygone workplace that few left alive can even remember. His language is the same it’s been for decades, just slurred and out of breath. Trump repeated things because he was obsessed with chants; he knew he could whip up a frenzy with the dumbest chunks of language. Biden repeats things because he has nothing else to say. He clings, perhaps honorably, to gravitas and dignity. But what can he do with them?
One thing Biden repeats frequently is poetry—though he only ever seems to quote bits of W. B. Yeats or Seamus Heaney, two non-contemporary poets he recently confused. Mainly it’s the same abridged section from Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles’s play Philoctetes. At his inauguration, Biden recorded two stanzas for a video. At the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, Tom Hanks introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda to read them over Zoom:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
[…]
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Maybe it’s telling that the stanza he always leaves out has to do with actual people—“The innocent in gaols / Beat on their bars together […]”—but his history is the dreamy, arc-of-the-moral-universe stuff of old establishment Democrats. Like Nancy Pelosi reading Bono’s limerick about Zelenskyy, it is a doddering sincerity that has become indistinguishable from blitheness. Like the mass emails imploring us to vote like our lives depend on it, the encouragement to hope is really a request to accept as progress an endless deferral of action. It’s a politics that turns poetry into moralism. As William Carlos Williams wrote, “morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.”
Trump has a favorite poem of sorts, too. Beginning on the campaign trail, and as recently as last summer, Trump would read the lyrics of “The Snake,” a song popularized by Al Wilson, in which someone cares for a dying snake only to be killed by it. From a 2016 rally: “I read this the other day, and I said, Wow, that’s really amazing, that’s really incredible. And it’s ‘The Snake’ lyric.” In Trump’s twisted telling, the song is a parable for why we shouldn’t trust immigrants. The song goes:
I saved you, cried that woman
And you’ve bitten me, even why?
And you know your bite is poisonous
And now I’m gonna die.
Oh, shut up, silly woman, said that reptile with a grin
Now you knew darn well I was a snake
Before you brought me in
“The Snake” was in fact written by Oscar Brown, Jr., a musician and civil rights activist. In Trump’s hands, it is something to corrupt for his ends, to wave around like a prop. The real point is the lead-up and the cheers:
Who has heard the poem called “The Snake”? [applause]. So I have it here, does anyone want to hear it again? [applause] You sure? [applause] Are you sure? [applause] Okay. So let’s dedicate this to General Kelly, the Border Patrol, and the ICE agents for doing such an incredible job. [applause] Right?
The rhyme the vehicle for invective.
But what is Biden’s bleary, stale promise that hope and history rhyme? Also a prop. The difference is that Trump sees language as something trivial to manipulate and Biden sees language as something with gravity to wield. But both types of language are attempts to fill a fundamental lack. Trump’s was a total, frightening void that absorbed everything into its dark ironies. Biden’s is that of impotence and old age, his inability to fulfill his fantasies of bipartisanship. His inability to come up with a different scrap of verse after 30 years of the same. Williams: “The predominant picture of America is a land aesthetically satisfied by temporary fillgaps.”
Words on tilted glass scroll away. Biden finishes and walks to a desk to sign the legislation, passes the pen behind him. Somewhere, a string quartet starts playing “God Bless America.” A reporter heckles him and he looks around, bewildered.
The glass teleprompter, which debuted at the 1956 Democratic Convention, was made to hide signs of reliance, to be less clunky than the monitor beneath the camera. A monitor embedded in the stage is reflected in glass panels so the speaker can read the text while pretending to regard the audience. But at Biden’s bill signing last week, the reliance was painfully clear. The problem wasn’t that he was using a teleprompter, but that it didn’t seem to help.
Trump’s rhetoric was disingenuousness delivered from a position of strength. Biden’s rhetoric is sincerity given from a position of weakness. We hang on his words because we want him to read the cue card to the end. We want him to prove he can finish his sentences. We want him to continue not because we care what he has to say but because we fear his silence: an emptiness, a gap, an end.
Trump, for his part, clearly hated reading from a teleprompter. You could always tell when he was using one. Visibly bored, sighing and shifting his weight on the podium, excited to get through whatever incoherent list of patriots his speechwriters had assembled and on to the good stuff: crowd work, boasting, grievance. The teleprompter some obstacle. Language a thing to knuckle under.
In a 1968 staff memo addressing Richard Nixon’s preparation for the televised and teleprompted presidential debates, one of his speechwriters wrote that the performance has “got to appear non-calculated, incomplete—incomplete, that’s it, the circle never squared, the random gobs of attitude.”
Incomplete, that’s it. These are the twilight voices. They mutter and bluster. Philoctetes: “All that you say / Is like a dream to me.”
ben tapeworm