On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 15:57:19 -0700 (PDT) andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> The Federalist Papers? The Lincoln-Douglas Debates?
> Granted these are high points. But the framers
> expected ordinary artisans to be able to follow
> arguments in political theory that leave graduate
> students flummoxed, and the L-D debates, vastly
> attended in backwoods Illinois, aimed extremely
> complex constitutional and practical political
> argument at illiterate (but apparently very smart)
> farmers and small town inhabitants.
I suspect that most of the ordinary artisans of the late 18th century proabably could not follow all of the arguments over fine points in political theory, and the good farmers of Illinois probably could not follow all the details of the complex constitutional and political arguments that were brought up by Mssrs. Douglas and Lincoln in their debates in the 1858 senate race. However, they apparently did expect their political leaders to discourse in just this manner and they would probably have felt insulted if their leaders had attempted to provide them less than that. So that is a significant change since the 19th century.
> In fact, if you
> just talk something relatively short Lincoln wrote,
> like the Second Inaugural setting aside that he is a
> great master of American prose, and focusing on just
> the vocabulary and syntactic complexity, which was not
> unusual, it was very demanding. Though Word gives it a
> grade level of 11.8, ha! Still something happened.
> Mass media probably,
Perhaps. If one compares old Hollywood films from the 1930s with more contemporary Hollywood films one notices quite a significant difference in dialog. I remember once watching the 1938 film, "A Yank at Oxford" on TV once and was struck how much more sparkling and witty the dialog of that film was compared with most contemporary film comedies. Of course it didn't hurt that much of the dialog for that film was written (uncredited) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was doing that sort of work at the time, while he was boozing himself to death. However, clearly the movie moguls back then thought that was the sort of thing that the American public would be willing to shell out money for. Now a days I don't see any equivalent expectation on their contemporary counterparts. So that is a significant change from back then.
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > > But, turning to more important matters, I doubt
> > there ever was a time
> > when U.S. political discourse wasn't infantilized.
> > "Ma Ma Where's My
> > Pa? Gone to the White House Ha Ha Ha"!
> >
> > Doug
> > ___________________________________
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