Words and Music
Bookworm on May 16 2009 at 12:59 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
I have an idea to throw out for you guys to chew on. Laer, at Cheat-Seeking Missiles, in an email asked why Jindal’s speech, which looks great on paper, got such a bad reception. The reception was bad on both the Left and the Right, so its being dissed wasn’t just a matter of media bias. Here’s my response:
Maybe I’m hanging around my two little budding musicians too much, but I think a lot of it has to do with rhythm. Did you know that, when you videotape families in action — say, in the kitchen — and then play those videos back without sound, it turns out that the happy families move with the same rhythm, while the unhappy families’ movements are out of synch? Jindal sounded choppy. His rhythm was off.
When Obama has a speech memorized, his natural rhythms are good and appealing. Put him on a teleprompter, with his head swinging back and forth between the left and right screens, and he ends up with no rhythm at all or, at best, a robotic, unnatural one.
Speech is a form of music, and our conservative politicians have not mastered it. I think Reagan was a great communicator, not just because of his content, but because his speech patterns triggered the same pleasure sensors in the brain that music does. (And conversely, think about the heat that both Romney and Gore have taken for their unnatural speech. It’s not their words, it’s their music.)
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5 Responses to “Words and Music”
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Although I despise the man for the damage that he has done to black people and our country in general, I have to admit that I am fascinated by Jesse Jackson’s grasp of cadence in presentation. He has taught me a lot about the poetry of presentation.
Only one way out of this quagmire…Singing lessons.
Jesse’s style is a throw back to the ‘call and response’ of black churches. His pauses are placed strategically, so that the congregants have the time and opening to feed back to the minister.
Good sermons or great speeches require the ability to learn how to breath properly like any good singer of any venue. To expel the sound from the diaphragm gives the word/s the depth and the listener their attention.
I remember reading somewhere that in languages that are very lyrical, like Italian and Arabic, the content is not as important as the delivery and the sound. So it is possible to spout gibberish, but listeners will swoon if you say it right.
Jesse Jackson has always struck me that way. I hate everything that creep stands for, and I detest his oily slickness, but I will stop what I’m doing to listen to him just to enjoy a lesson in how to speak interestingly.
Learning from your enemies provides two significant advantages. 1. whatever you think you can do will only matter against an enemy; all others are of peripheral importance or consequence, so thus it makes sense to compare your abilities against your enemy’s. 2. It is only by overcoming the obstacle of a foreign or alien viewpoint, that of your enemy’s, that you truly gain cosmopolitan understanding and enlightenment.
The Left believes that you can understand someone by not learning about them. They, the Left, believe that if they hold themselves up as paragons of virtue and morality that this means they are not required to learn about AQ or become more like AQ. But learning about others unavoidably makes you more like them. It is impossible to stop, for true comprehension melds the thoughts and behaviors of human beings, not just a pure intellectual satisfaction.
The only way not to become more like your enemy is to refuse to learn anything from your enemies. And through that path lies ultimate defeat. While the Left would say “don’t learn from Jesse Jackson, don’t learn from AQ, don’t learn from Saddam or other terrorist thugs or you will become just as bad as they are”, I would say those that refuse to learn are intellectually stunted and not worth the time of those with higher comprehension scales.
AQ learned a lot about us and learned how to exploit our weaknesses. Have they become more like us? Did Zarqawi come to be more democratic when he understood that people could vote and worship whomever they pleased? Did Osama Bin Laden become more American when he learned about the American way of life? Did the various 9/11 hijackers learn to become more American when they went to Vegas and strip joints? Did they, all in all, become just as “good” as us? If not, why then would we become “just as bad” as them? Intellectual vigor is not something Leftist lawyers, judges, politicians, or “workers” know about, because they don’t care to know. Learning requires motivation. All the Left are motivated by is the entertainment value of seeing helpless women and children slaughtered by their chummy dictators and death squads.
Reality is harsh medicine for the Left. I wouldn’t recommend you take any proscription advice from the Left concerning reality. They may just give you a placebo.
What it sounds like to me is that not only can white men not jump or dance, they also can’t speak…!