The Decline and Fall of Political Speeches?

Are modern-day politicians just terrible at public speaking, or has technology made them this way?

Discuss.

Character and Circumstance: Biography and Memoir

“To me,” Donald Creighton wrote near the end of his illustrious career as the dean of English-Canadian national and political historians, “history is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance.”

So a letter-writer to the Walrus quotes the man whose biography of John A. Macdonald remains the high-watermark of biography in this country. Reacting to Jeremy Krehn’s review of prime ministerial biographies and memoirs, the letter-writer complains that “elite biography no longer possesses cachet in the academy,” and have been replaced with the “little narratives.” “Such ideas has overtaken the Canadian historical profession,” the letter-writer continues. But the power of personality persists. “Some people,” the letter writer quotes Michael Bliss, “have much more opportunity than others to make a difference.”

I find much to agree with in the letter-to-the-editor, but the Granatstein-fuelled complaints about small-scale social history’s prevalence at the cost of “great man, big events” history, or what is supposedly “real” history, gets more than a little bit tiresome. As Creighton’s quote suggests, no individual acts in a vacuum without the influence of outside circumstance, and external forces alone cannot determine the course of events. So why the insistence on propping up social history projects as straw men just to prove that your preferred style of history is hard-done-by? Both are valid and a full picture cannot be understood without both. After re-reading Jeremy Keehn’s original essay in the June 2008 issue of The Walrus, I think the letter-writer misses some of the subtlety of Keehn’s observations.

Jeremy Keehn begins his essay by questioning the role of politicians in society and history: “Politicians, the manager-actors of democracy, typically escape the responsibility of trying to express an era–but they are often held up as the expression of one.” Keehn sees political biographies and memoirs as “road maps” of leadership, as guides for finding the “pivotal leaders” an era such as ours require. He argues that “we look to biography in order to understand how a person and a people aligned during a given era.”

Donald Creighton’s unmatched success with John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician/The Old Chieftain is such that “the work has become a canon of one, and by unspoken law no one is permitted to publish a prime ministerial biography in Canada without acknowledging it in the introduction.” Creighton’s greatest contribution as a biographer was that his “historical imagination” gave readers “a vivid sense not only of who Macdonald was, but who they once were.”

Creighton sees Macdonald as a great pragmatist, “out not to capture people’s imaginations with grand historical sweep, but to find practical solutions to problems.” Instead, Keehn sees the grand sweep and emotional appeal of thinking of Canada “as something greater than the sum of its parts” came from Macdonald’s colleague Thomas D’Arcy McGee. In this he echoes Richard Gwyn’s John A.: The Man Who Made Us. While Macdonald appealed to the public as a pragmatic, small-scale problem-solver, D’Arcy McGee pulled on their heartstrings. Keehn argues:

This oft-declaimed posture, Gwyn says, reassured Canadians that Macdonald was just like them. And indeed, leader who downplayed bold ideas as a basis for leadership were the preferred fashion for decades afterward. It would be some time before Canada was ready for a prime minister who embodied both Macdonald and McGee.

That prime minister, of course, arrived in the form of Pierre Trudeau. Love him or hate him, Trudeau, Keehn says, “demonstrated not only that he was in tune with the evolving morals of the age, but with its evolving media as well.” Trudeau biographer John English writes: “The times appeared to be perfectly tailored to fit Pierre Trudeau.” This comment echoes something Keehn opened his essay with:

Obama, [Andrew] Sullivan argued [in The Atlantic], is the right person for the times, not so much for his abilities or his rhetoric, but because of his identity as a sincerely spiritual black man who opposed a war most Americans regret and the world loathes.

Next, Keehn turns to the biography’s lesser cousin, the memoir and hits on a couple important points that subtly distinguish the two genres. He concludes that “Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939-1993 is more insufferable than most. The offence is all the more grievous because, as Peter C. Newman’s formidable counterweight, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, shows, the man is one of the country’s most psychologically compelling prime ministers ever.”

Keehn offers perhaps one of the better definitions of political memoir: “No political memoir is designed to offer a ready and open account of a life, of course. It is an argument for a legacy, a celebration of allies and an excoriation of enemies, and a recounting of a few good yarns–all, ideally, in brief.” Most often than not, the author forgoes “the writer’s task of acknowledging and exploring complexity.”

What makes Mulroney interesting, Keehn argues, is the Mulroney formula for politics: “encounter a political problem, be affected by it, and then respond fast. Then, once finished, argue loudly and at length that you’ve done the right thing–even when you haven’t.”

His “bull-headed ambition,” Keehn writes, “allowed Canada to confront a difficult moment in history.” Keehn argues that Newman understands Mulroney well: “his approach seemed to arise not just from a desire to govern well, but from deep inner drives that carried with them a tragic flaw.”

Whether entering the national political stage out of pragmatic ambition, or a sense of philosophical mission, politicians past and present are a perfect example of history remains an encounter between personal character and external circumstances.

The letter-writer also mentioned a few of the best political biographies out there: Maurice Careless, Brown of the Globe; Peter Waite, The Man From Halifax; Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden; Michael Bliss, Right Honourable Men. I was aware of these–though I haven’t read any of them in depth–and can include notes on these volumes that I’ve taken from various sources over the years.

Uses and Abuses of Political Biography

With the Democratic National Convention underway, here comes the oft-repeated question of why Lyndon B. Johnson is so frequently excluded from the pantheon of the party’s great leaders.

Two Quotes

I read Sylvie Simmons’ decent biography Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes (Da Capo Press, 2002) years ago, but these must have really stood out enough in my mind at the time for me to think them worth recording in one of my notebooks.

Quoting Jane Birkin: “Serge would go to buy the newspapers every day just to see if we were in them. We were in them constantly. He adored it. He used to say, ‘Nous sommes mythiques’ – we’re mythological – therefore  what people say about you, what they get right or wrong, doesn’t really matter as long as you’re there, and the lies are probably better than the truth half the time.” (pg 61)

“(As [Serge] once told Actuel magazine, showing the journalist around his house with its framed pictures of Marilyn Monroe on the walls, his fixation with the actress had come about ‘because she is dead’ and thus could never be corrupted or spoiled).” (pg 64)

Writing Obituaries

On final tidbit worth sharing from my research on Gordon Sinclair describes Sinclair’s youthful days on the city desk, where he’d often be called upon to investigate obituaries to try and uncover deeper human interest stories.

It reminds me a lot of my time at the New Brunswick Legislative Library when I researched and wrote biographies for every politician elected to the provincial assembly from 1784 to the present day. I took very seriously that every individual made an impact on the world (or at least the people around them) in some way, and did my best to uncover a story, anecdote, achievement–something from newspaper clippings, hansard records, local histories, or any other resource available at the library–about everyone that made them stand apart from the others.

Perhaps the practice ran the risk of over-emphasizing something that the individual themselves might not have dwelled on, but but it was a sincere effort to humanize all of them when often the majority of available information was limited to the dates of elections, appointments, or resignations. It also mirrored the practice of Sinclair and other Star reporters seeking to find an interesting nugget of biography to expand on the bare-bones of obituary. The following comes from Scott Young’s Gordon Sinclair: A Life…And Then Some (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1987):

Much that engaged Sinclair in his earliest Star days was exciting and fun, partly because it was all new to him. However, the other side of the coin was obits. Everybody had to do them, but cubs like Sinclair and people who were in the doghouse got the most. Forms were filled out by people wishing to insert notices in the Star’s daily Deaths columns, and each included a spare copy, called a flimsy, for the newsroom. An assistant city editor would distribute these, a handful here and a handful there.

Reporters were expected to fill spare time by telephoning relatives or friends of the deceased and finding out more about them: any medals, awards, interesting achievements, or crimes; why the dear departed lived such a long time or such or short time; whether he or she had any famous relatives or was a member of any clubs or lodges. Two or three paragraphs might be printed under headings such as “Fought at Vimy” or “Father of 17″. Sinclair did his share.

It was boring work, but to ditch a handfulof obit flimsies meant taking a chance that the Telegram would turn up a good story that the Star had missed.

 

 

Life, Peanuts, and All That

When I was a kid and would read Peanuts, I used to wonder, “This is funny?”  

As a child, I preferred Family Circus for knock-you-over-the-head lame one-liners.

But I now I realize why I kept reading whatever library-borrowed or second-hand Peanuts anthologies I could find. Peanuts comics contain every life lesson someone could ever want to frame their own (moral) character around: Charlie Brown’s dogged determination to keep trying every time Lucy pulls away the football; the power of imagination in Snoopy’s adventures against the Red Baron; and countless others. The timelessness of Peanuts comic strips lies in the depth of its characters. I don’t know the origins of the following, but when I came across the following note posted on a friend’s Facebook page, it’s clear that the strength of character of Charlie Brown and his friends came from Peanuts creator Charles Schultz himself.

Charles Schultz’s Philosophy
 
You don’t have to actually answer the questions. Just read straight through, and you’ll get the point.

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.

2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.

3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America Contest.

4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.

5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress..

6. Name the last decade’s worth of World Series winners.

How did you do?

The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.

Here’s another quiz. See how you do on this one:

1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school.

2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time.

3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.

4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.

5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.

Easier?

The lesson: The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care.

In The First Person

In The First Person is a searchable database of thousands of personal narratives, oral histories, letters, and diaries from around the world. According to the site’s description: “Here you can search and explore the personal thoughts of thousands of individuals from all walks of life and through hundreds of years of history. It’s a unique tool that can search such a broad swathe of human thought so easily. ” Haven’t poked around yet, but once I do, I’ll almost certainly have something more to say. (via Metafilter)

Boozing Foreigners

An interesting article at The Walrus on ex-pat bars and the allure of drinking with strangers while travelling the world. One thing that never really made it’s way into my masters was the role of ex-pat bars in identity formation abroad. A timely read because I just re-watched Casablanca last night.

“The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.”

– George Orwell

Learning From The Worst Practices

I stumbled across this review of Joe C.W. Armstrong’s Champlain (Macmillan of Canada, 1987) while researching something completely different in the March 1989 issue of the Canadian Historical Review. The reviewer, John A. Dickinson, balances what makes a written biography good or bad. He begins by speaking broadly:

Biography is an exacting discipline which requires keen critical abilities and a solid understanding of the period in question. The author, while being necessarily sympathetic to the ‘hero,’ must remain sufficiently detached to put events in perspective and be able to evaluate opposing views. Retelling a well-known story adds the additional problem of findind new and original details that will make the exercise worthwhile.

The rest of the review is pretty scathing:

Unfortunately this latest biography of Champlain by Joe C.W. Armstrong meets none of these criteria. This book is burdened by all the faults of poor biography: too close adherence to and acceptance of one point of view, lack of perspective, ignorance of the historical period, hyperbole, inconsistencies, unsupported speculation, and errors.

Dickinson later adds ignorance of the recent scholarship to the biographer’s list of crimes.