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January 25, 2005
Errors on the big stage...
"America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling." --George W. Bush
I like this sentence. It represents for me all that's good and ugly about Bush's second inaugural address. I've already dealt with some of the ugly. Today I'll deal with some of the good.
You may notice that Bush makes an error. The pronoun "our" should be "its." But, like so many stylistic conventions in English that masquerade as rules of grammar, this error is hardly worth getting upset about because no meaning is lost. In fact, it's doing interesting rhetorical work; it's making meaning; it's intended.
Bush teams "America" with "our" throughout the address--not all instances break the pronoun reference rule.
I'm torn about this next one. Read one way, it could be a mistake. Read another, it's perfectly acceptable:
"For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders."
If America is something separate from we the people, or more than we the people, then the rule is not violated. But looking at it that way would violate the rhetoric of the other instances. Bush is specifically reinforcing the equation America = We The People. And he's quite willing to break stylistic conventions to do so.
I like that. I like the message and the image. It fits what I believe about America, and it fits the traditional purpose of the inaugural address: to unite the country following a divisive (they're all divisive) election. I like it because, beyond the political message, it says that rhetoric wins in the battle for meaning and persuasion over stylistic rules. That's an empowering idea for speakers and writers of English dialects other than the academic standard.
Get out your red pen and give that address a close reading. You'll find more "errors." Here's another one:
"You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs."
This sentence is not parallel. The final clause should be "and courage is triumphant." But following the stylistic convention creates a political problem. We haven't triumphed yet. We're in the middle of the triumphing process. So Bush chooses the verb instead of the adjective. Perhaps he learned his lesson with "mission accomplished."
Correction: Get out a green pen (the color I use most often for grading). Red is fascist. Red accepts the ridiculous notion that errors are always wrong and unintended, that errors do no work other than to destroy meaning or make the writer appear uneducated. These examples I've cited are not errors. These are intended because they do rhetorical work. While I find this address on the whole a poor effort considering the gravity of the moment, I admire the willingness of the writers to break the rules on the biggest stage in the world.
Posted by acline at January 25, 2005 9:55 AM | | Spotlight