Because I am one who frequently bemoans the lack of rhetorical education, readers may well imagine that I adore moments of national public focus on rhetorical events. These moments tend to be Presidential speeches — the only rhetorical events of enough interest to actually supersede (gasp) regular programming. (Incidentally, that, for me, is the overriding value of rhetorical events — they disrupt regular programming, turning the “viewing public” into the court of auditors, before whom the rhetors compete via the sublimely democratic agon of the speech.) So, basically, I dig State of the Union addresses and the ensuing commentary on TV, radio, and in print.
In these events, the canons from which presidents draw their allusions point to what texts, exactly, presidents believe unite the nation. These texts tend to be the speeches of past presidents and the American metanarrative of history. I wonder why more topical allusions are so sparse? It seems to me that the real textual soul of the American public lives on HBO and The New York Times Best-seller List, in the blogosphere and on iTunes. But our rhetorical events imply that all of this is perpetually relegated to the social, while the political contains only a narrative of American history that bespeak our national virtues. Admittedly, presidential speeches are highly ritualized occasions. For a president to ignore the responsibilities of allusion to the formal history cultically presumed on these occasions would be a sort of violation of his role, a transgression of his office. But is it wrong of me to wish that when our presidents address the past year of American political life their words could be enriched by a larger view of the life than the mythic political-formal one?
