More on the poetics of the President. I know this looked like a snide comment, but the more I thinnk about this, the more entrancing it becomes. The idea of poetic persuasion in politics, following also upon the article Juliana posted, had me turning to the Greeks and a lecture I heard at UCSC on the history of the Greek polis. The gist of it was, pre-democratic Greece was ruled by a kind of folk oratory, wherein the Homeric epic and the virtues it extolled went a long way to informing the thought of local people, who were fractured into provincial households, something like the situation described in Yemen. But somewhere in the 7th century, the city itself started forming around a central meeting place, which became a venue for a new kind of oratory. Here's how the text for that class (Vernant's "The Origins of Greek Thought") described it:

"Speech was no longer the ritual word, the precise formula, but open debate, discussion, argument. It presupposed a public to which it was addressed, as to a judge whose ruling could not be appealed, who decided with hands upraised between the two parties who came before him."

So the picture emerging is of a move from the one-sided narrative of Homer, to the dialectic of Socrates. It's a glib history (which is my fault for being lazy) but it has me stuck on something: It doesn't look like we're doing debate anymore in politics. You or I might have knock-down arguments from the heights of reason about health care reform or foreign policy, but our representatives merely spit out platitudes. And crucially, it's not the most reasoned platform that wins, but the most poetic. That's a dirty way to use that word, but it's in line with the original critique of the poets levelled by Plato: that they reason softly, and worse, are complicit to moral atrocities by singing the songs of the powerful without critique.

Now I'm not saying that characterizes poets today (or even necessarily that it was accurate then), actually just the opposite, as contemporary poetry puts narrative into question and most certainly does critique. The thought that got me excited is this: political philosophy is now out of the loop. You can't have a policy debate with Dubya because he's not doing policy, in the sense of reasoned discourse about the best and most just way for our nation to proceed- he's doing poetics. But is it possible to have poetic debate with him? Is it possible that the best people to take on the rhetorical juggernaut that is the incumbent-terible are poets? Maybe that's not revolutionary and you've already thought of it. Maybe it's just dumb. I don't know- it's what I've been thinking about.