The Evidence of Things Not Seen
In quieter times, in more balanced times, speakers have had at their disposal allegory, anecdote, whim, flourish, illumination, metaphor, abstraction. The speaker could be expansive, tangential, even explosive, going out on that limb of orotundity knowing that decorum, even politesse would allow for a soft landing back in the literal world. A story told, a point made, a bit of context cut out and illuminated for the purposes of instruction, even persuasion.
Decorum and politesse were, in times past, considered so important as to be codified. They provided rhetoric with a pause to take a deep breath so that ideas could be completed, digested later in their entirety, to be weighed on merits rather than ownership. A time when argument's purpose was to change the nature of truth itself.
The speaker had all these things at his disposal, but the most important thing she would have going for her: listeners.
There is an art to listening; listening requires effort. The audience must assume some responsibility for interpretation. The audience should have the knack of recognizing fact from abstraction, should keep near enough to the beginner's mind to avoid conclusions that come too quickly.
There is responsibility on the speaker's part as well: to speak without knowingly imparting falsehood and to know enough about the subject matter to minimize the unknowing.
In short, both the speaker and the audience must have at least short-leap faith that there's a greater good to be had by participating in the whole process with copious good will. And here, I'm taking a page from the King James Bible, Hebrews 11:1, in defining faith: "The substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen."
There seems to have been a deadly frustration built up in the 1990s by the Right in this country, trapped as it was between the over-companionable past of the Ronald Reagan "I got mine, you get yours" dogma and the then-present of a Clintonian America which had the Democrats changing what the Republicans had always wanted them to change: their fiscal behavior. The Demos spent less than the Reaganites; the Demos built an economy that had wings.
Instead of applauding the Democrats for having learned from them, the Republicans stomped their feet and cried thief, demanding that the Democrats stop co-opting their ideology.
The frustration built such that the legions of the uneducated, the unprepared, the un-understanding took it upon themselves to target every little bit, every little word, every little—dare I say it—nuance, set it apart out of its original context, subject it to the harsh interrogation illumination of a single bulb, and broadcast to the world that it had found proof of Hell Incarnate.
Clinton goes down for having been gone down on (I know, none of it makes sense to me, either), the result of a Cleansing Hunt by the Right. I blame Clinton, too, not for having had a hummer or twelve, not even for lying about it. I can understand why he answered the way he answered: he knew that the truth would be too much to take for the American public, because they wouldn't just hear it once in his testimony, they'd hear it over and over and over again, taken out of context by the so-called Liberal Media, taken out of context and twisted into something of Doomsday magnitude by the likes of Fox News and the legions of not-intellectually-up-to-it conservatives out there thinking with their stomachs.
No, Clinton had the chance to play the Trickster here. He is certainly charming enough to have stepped up instead of stepping around, smart enough to have figured out a way to be a flawed and human man and still be Presidential, clever enough to have pulled the collective stick out of America's ass and gotten us all to have moved on.
But then again, would anyone have been good enough? With millions of armchair deconstructionists sadly lacking any literary abilities beyond literalism, I doubt that even Clinton could have done what I just attempted to give him credit for.
The art of argument is lost because the field of play has been overrun by those who should have stayed in the stands. Death by a million bombasts whose main tack is to bog you down in the minutae of single words while they counter with broadly vague statements about Good, Bad, Nature and Design.
Thing is, I'm certain that this isn't the first time in the history of the world that Rhetoric has suffered at the hands of rhetoric, that Argument has devolved into arguing. The big question here is, how in the world did the world get back to statesmanship from brinkmanship last time around?
I have no idea; I don't (yet) know enough about world history to take a guess. But then again, "knowing enough" means remembering you can never know enough.