Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“The story begins with a voice on the radio.” Dan Callahan, Bing and Billie and Frank and Ella and Judy and Barbra.

“Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once.” Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.

“On the edge of a typical Minneapolis coal yard in the 1930s was a wooden shack known as a doghouse.” David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

“When the Toyota Avalon bumped down the dirt road out of the woods and across the railroad tracks, Parker put the Infiniti into low and stepped out onto the gravel.” Richard Stark (Donald Westlake), Dirty Money: A Parker Novel.

“Between Europe and the great, mature civilization of China and India lies a belt of over three thousand miles, dominated by desert and stony tableland, where rainfall is relatively little, frontiers are contested, political unity has rarely existed, and where as the late Princeton historian Bernard Lewis claimed, there has been no historical pattern of authority.” Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China.

“According to legend, the first unethical science experiment in history was designed by none other than Cleopatra.” Sam Kean, The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science.

“The old man with the droopy right eye sat slumped on the witness chair pretending to be a nobody.” Matt Birkbeck, Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino.

“In the Spring of 1889, when an event whose only comparisons were biblical descriptions of the awful Last Day of Judgment came rushing into Johnstown, few people in the valley knew for certain who belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the private retreat up the mountain, with its marvelous, sparkling artificial lake.” Al Roker, Ruthless Tide: The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America’s Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster.

“I was quite young the first time I saw the river; it was probably in 1928.” Frank Dale, Delaware Diary: Episodes in the Life of a River.

“The first measurement, like the first word or first melody, is lost to time: impossible to localise and difficult to even imagine.” James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants.

“The only impartial witness was the sun.” David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

“Reporting, like detective work, is a process of elimination.” David Grann, The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.

“Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, is known for his resolute personal integrity.” Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

Posted on by rjonakait

Trump’s Uncanny Inheritance

Whenever I listen to a minute or two of one of his rallies (which is as long as I can tolerate), I admire Donald Trump’s speaking ability. This is not the speechifying of many public figures. It is not like the famous speeches we may remember. It is different from JFK’s pronouncing that the U.S. was going to the moon; different from MLK’s I Have a Dream speech; or Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The oratory of those other figures was carefully scripted, and we knew that this was a performance for a massed audience. On occasion, Trump tries something similar, but we can always tell that he is reading words written by someone else.

Instead what I admire in Trump’s rallies is his “conversational” style. He does not seem to be talking to the massed audience all at once, but to an individual. (I say “conversational” because, of course, we don’t really think he would ever have a real conversation with anyone at his rallies or perhaps anywhere.) He has the ability to make it seem as if he is talking only to you, not just to a faceless crowd.

This makes me think about something I read decades ago about the development of popular music. Before microphones, singers sometimes used a megaphone to reach their audiences, but mostly they just projected their voice so that it could be widely heard. They were singing for a massed audience without any individuals being singled out. Think opera today. I may feel thrilled to hear the soprano, but I don’t feel that she is singing just to me. I am just one of many who is hearing her at the same time.

When amplification started, the popular culture historian I read said that at first singing styles did not change. The music was still for a massed audience. Then, according to that writer, Bing Crosby changed everything. He used the microphone in a new way that felt not that he was singing to a group, but was singing to every individual in that group. Close your eyes and listen to Crosby singing about that white Christmas. He is singing to you. It is a personal experience, not a mass one.

Trump’s strength in his rallies is that he does not talk to a crowd. He makes it seem as if he is talking to everyone personally, and that has turned out to be a powerful ability to attract and keep followers.

Trump has benefited from speaking to large public assemblages in this way. He reads the room seeking laughter and outrage from his listeners, and this serves to acknowledge them. It gives them an identity when they feel overlooked and some sort of hope that he can make their lives better.

In these rallies he is an heir to a much older America where people got education and entertainment by hearing speakers and lecturers. America’s golden age of oratory was from roughly 1870 to 1925, a time before the mass media of radio and television had permeated the nation. What there was instead was an extensive railroad network. Able to appear in towns of all sizes, speakers utilized this network to entertain and inform. People like Frederick Douglass, Emma Goldman, William Jennings Bryan, and Clarence Darrow may have had other careers, but they all were on the lecture circuit. For example, Frederick Douglass edited a newspaper and wrote much, but he was perhaps most widely known for his oratory, which not only spread his views but earned him sizeable sums.

These speaking tours must have been exhausting because the speakers were almost constantly on the move. Emma Goldman, for example, made 321 speeches in a year. In breaks from the Scopes trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, Darrow road the rails to Chattanooga and elsewhere to speak, and Bryan also appeared at auditoriums whenever the trial was in recess. Wherever such speakers appeared, they gave audiences their money’s worth, speaking for more than an hour, eliciting laughter and outrage as they tried to get the audiences to adopt their views. Trump may not know who these people were (When president Trump said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”), and he certainly does not espouse the racial views of Douglass or the pro-labor, anti-capitalist views of Goldman, the true populism or religious faith of Bryan, nor the populism or agnosticism of Darrow. Even so, at his rallies he in essence shares a legacy with these and similar people. I can’t imagine he knows who they are, but if he did, he would not see them as kindred spirits; He would only despise them.