WHERE ARE THEY?

 For the last couple of hundred years the world has been carried away by captivating speakers. There were men on all continents and in many countries that used the simple power of their voices speaking their words to change the world and while much of it ended in misery and destruction surely some good must have come out of it and I contrast that with the lame and dismal public speakers I see running America and most European countries where English is like a native tongue and I am far from captivated by their laboring, lame and mostly bucolic addresses to their nations. Speaking frankly, they suck at public speaking and I just wonder, how did they every con people into voting for them without cheating like all Hell?

For all his many fine qualities, President Trump is damned near inarticulate and his awful speeches are punctuated in all the wrong places. He simply never learned to speak publicly. Starmer in the UK is hopelessly inept at public speaking and so too has been every one of the last 9 Prime Ministers. They all suck.

I have to admit I really enjoyed listening to Nigel Farage back when he used to tear strips off the leadership of the EU as an EU Member of Parliament but even now he too has dwindled away into lame and labored speeches that neither uplift, amuse nor entertain. They certainly aren't believable.

I suspect public speaking in a communist Hell is not even a tertiary requirement for leading the masses but I imagine that if Xi opens his mouth and speaks, as with Putin, people listen. They pay attention. They might have noticed that at least one of those two and Donald Trump don't speak lightly and do mean what they say. I suppose that's something.

Is it possible that we no longer need the great orators like Hitler and Churchill or were they overrated? I don't really think they were overrated myself but it is possible. Have you noticed that it is actually quite difficult to actually find those speeches made by Herr Hitler translated into English? I wonder why....

It is hard to imagine a Frenchman rallying the people with the power of the voice and great oratorical skill but there must have been someone other than Napoleon that could do it over the last 200 years but it sure wasn't any of the men running the place in my lifetime and I don't recall that any of the 19th or early 20th century Frenchmen were considered skilled speakers. 

Spain had Franco and there may have been something to his rallying speeches but I suspect it was mostly finding the kind of cold blooded killer one could expect to turn up in a place like Spain. I suspect that almost nobody alive recalls that if you stepped outside a Spanish city back before the EU it was like stepping back 2 centuries in time. My first visit there included taking a bus from Rota to Cadiz and back again and it was amazing how, shall we say, rural, Spain was back then. I'm sure it's much better now.

Here in our own country I see almost no sign of anybody who can speak the birds down from the trees. I used to hear the speeches of Martin Luther King but to be honest, nobody has ever come close to replacing him and his appeals to a reason that he alone seems to have seen and understood and despite the eloquence and meaning of his words, it is like they bounced off the heads of most here. That whole 'content of their character' which means so much to me was treated with enormous disdain and even hatred by just about every liberal and POC in America. Not one of the men who tried to step into his shoes ever came within shouting distance of the power of his voice, words and reason. Too bad, really.

Words may be too heady for the modern age of instant mass communication but if that was true I would not have seen the appeal of Mr. Farage and if it was true there would surely be some of the liberal persuasion who would wonder how they managed to get an inarticulate drunken idiot as their nominee in the last Presidential election. Mr. Farage has built a party from scratch in Britain that out polls both the Tory and Labor parties combined. He did that with what appears to be an innate ability to speak on his feet about the topics that matter to people. [Despite what I said above, he can still captivate and it doesn't hurt that the Tories and Labor leaders are the very worst lying and thieving scoundrels in history.] 

I can see where it could be very dangerous now to be an orator who gets up in front of crowds and attempts to bring them to share one vision but I believe that was once the sine qua non of democracies and republics. We were persuaded by reason and rhetoric and the spoken word backed up by the written words that laid out the case for change. There used to be two such men in any decent democracy or republic both standing for a competing point of view.

I wonder what happened to all that.... The current crop are so damned insipid.