"I mean, look...." 2008 Presidential Candidate
Comes now the blogger....
After the events of the past week, the last thing I want to be now is a blogger.
In other news, is debate -- and it's cousin, extemporaneous speaking -- dead?
I thought I had safely emerged from the Beijing Olympics smorgasbord of "I mean" openers to every interview. Then, I waded through two weeks of political conventions -- I watched all of it, both sides. I finally stopped counting the number of times media pundits and political talking heads dragged out "Look" and "Listen" to avoid answering a question against their interests.
No doubt, vitriol spewing and spitting greatly interferes with good sentence structure.
I was trying to listen to a Saturday morning financial panel this morning while I wait for college football to begin. I was holding steady emotionally until a "consultant" appeared in a segment and yelled "Let me tell you what" at me --four times in three sentences. She didn't answer the question and began a personal attack on a political figure that wasn't even part of the subject. I'm left to believe that she only took the airtime to wear her candidate on her sleeve.
When I was a student at USC, I watched the Trojan Debate Squad "practice." My future husband was on the team, and I was intrigued to observe the construction of arguments and rebuttals. Their time limits didn't leave much room for clock-eating parenthetical phrases, colloquial jargon, or anything else that would deter their responsibility to frame an issue and cleanly communicate it.
I wonder if the people who would be willing to agree to disagree have been wrung from our current process by a diminished, hyperbolic, sound bite-limited media environment. I know....no, I hope....they're out there somewhere.
1 comment:
Interesting post! My daughter, now a junior in college, took up debate as her "sport" in high school. She actually debated last year at the college level, and won Nationals with her partner in "Crossfire" team policy debate. The time limits are even more severe in that type of debate.
My current high schooler, a junior, has also taken up debate as his sport of choice.
And yes, they both cringed, as they heard interview after interview of less than eloquent athletes during the Olympics.
It gives me hope in the positions my children take, when they are able to compete in the National forum.
My eldest is a senior this year, and although an athlete, spent years in the Youth Leadership Program sponsored by Toastmasters, International. You'd think more people would use programs like that to at least decrease their children's use of what we call "filler words"!
My 13 year old, is also an athlete, but he too has participated in speech, and this year he will debate. Last year he was eloquent enough to be quoted in the newspaper up in Santa Rosa.
Why don't people consider this a mandatory subject for their students?
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