Of course some events can be difficult to spin in this way, namely war. This is why communication with the public is important. If a country has to announce that it intends to go to war, the public need to know why. At this point, the PR machine goes into overdrive, its cogs cease to function. It has to be oiled. But unfortunately for us it’s always the same oil : the banal, derivative,cliched oil that greets us when war is announced.
But war is the not the only circumstance in which this will occur. In fact, it appears that most public speeches feature these tired cliches.
It seems that most of the events which go on to shape our social history have always come in conjunction with prominent speeches; Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech was the soundtrack to the civil rights movement while President Obama’s Yes We Can provided Americans with the hollow promises they craved. But the funny thing about both of these speeches is that they share fundamental similarities, not just because they were both delivered by African-Americans but because they were riddled with cliched language from start to finish. Something that, at the end of the day, we’ll just have to accept.
Repetition, repetition, repetition appears be the chosen MO for any public figure attempting to pander to an audience and Obama and King(or certainly their speech writers) knew this. Throughout King’s address in particular he used the titular phrase eleven times in total, suggesting that he either quickly ran out of things to say or he just felt very strongly about the nocturnal wanderings of his subconscious. Although it’s likely neither of them, mind. No doubt the speech writing bible would settle for a more rational explanation - something like: “The use of repetition helps to emphasise the importance of the point and continually enforces the singular ideology throughout.”
Speaking of repetition, one man who used/abused this feature to great effect was the late Winston Churchill. “Never give in, never give in, never never never.” he said. One can only assume that he was talking about bowing to the atrocity of actually creating an original speech - neverless, he was one of the first ones to exploit the feature in this way - so I’ll let him off.
Speaking of exploiting features (a segue you always want to hear) Churchill often used repetition in a much more interesting way. In his famous ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ he continually repeats “we shall fight on” followed by your ‘insert place here’ afterwards phrase. A much more original use of the feature with closer kin to parallelism, although I say original ,this use is largely derivative of Shakespeare’s and Dickens’ work.
Aside from repetition ,of course, there are features used in speeches which are also part of the cliched speech vernacular that we mustn’t forget. Antithesis or putting two directly opposite phrases together seems to be a favourite of American presidents in particular . Our friend, the aforementioned Barack Obama, used this feature heavily in his inaugural address. “We do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly” is just one instance out of the six times he used this feature. His personal PR machine(speechwriters) probably said something along the lines of “use antithesis, it doesn’t bore the audience, it contrasts, excites and entices. Entices. Sorry I’m repeating myself so you remember. ” No wonder these speeches are so cliched. Another American President, George Bush Sr, liked this feature saying things like “ While the world waited, Saddam Hussein raped, pillaged and plundered” Talk about contrast...
Its in war speeches when speechwriters most obviously reach for the cliches - almost like it gives the public a greater sense of assurance in preparation for the mass amounts of death they are about to experience. Looking at Bush Sr’s 1991 Gulf War speech is like reading a parody. Particularly because of another cliched feature: hyperbole( gross exaggeration) something that if hear one more time I swear the universe is going to implode in on itself. He used this feature to chastise Saddam, as if the American public don’t know a villain when they see one - even if he does have chemical weapons sticking out his trouser pockets.
It looks like Obama and a war speech could form a lethal combination if they ever came into contact, as if potassium and water would react to explode into mushroom cloud of cliche. No doubt he would say something like ‘We do not fight, fight, fight to endanger civilians, we fight, fight, fight to uphold American values, the most important thing in the world”. Let’s hope that for all our sake’s that Mr. Assad doesn’t try anything.
“We must not fear for our lives, we must fight for them” is at great line, or it would have been had I not just made it up. You can judge all you want about my speech writing abilities but I don’t think that’s fair given that I just plucked that claptrap out of the air in the last few minutes. The fact of the matter is that the cliched line is the foundation of a any speech, good or bad and there’s no way of avoiding that because for all intents and purpose all great speeches are extremely derivative and they’re better for it too - there I finally said it...
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