Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:
>
> > At 09:55 AM 2/12/2010, SA wrote:
> >
> > Michael Pollak mentioned the impact of Pete Seeger earlier. What would the
> > sixties have been without the music (even though a whole lot of it hasn't
> > aged well)?
> >
> > If it's just talking I don't know. Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky droning
> > on with no interruption doesn't do the trick I don't think.
> >
> >
> I've listened to Democracy Now! on and off for some time and I can say with
> great surety that her delivery's not my favorite part of the program
I've though about this general topic the last few days since Joanna, responding to shag, listed lack of good public speakeers -- and now I think both Joanna & this post are incorrect.
The other night an ISU student, a member of the National Guard who h ad seen combat in Afghanistan, spoke to an audience of abour 40 at Wesleyan (Illinois, not Coinnecticut). His voice casued truble for me personally & I couldn't follow too well. And he, more or less, could be described as " droning on with no interruption." But he did know his material -- and he held that audience. No wiggling, whispering to each other, and even though the question period went on too long, with a couiple stupid speeches from the audeince, no one left early. Lincoln Steffens describes Lenin as not much of a public speaker who nevertheless held audiences well during the summer and autumn of 1917. Someone from this list who listens to Chomsky or Goodman probably already more or less knows the material and agrees; she may be looking not for information but excitement, and doesn't getit. So she assumes a general audience, new to the material, won't get excitement either!
The same thin is wrong, for the most part, with speeches at rallies. Nothing new in the content to the audience. Boring. But those same speakers may well be quite exciting to an audience just getting their toes in left politics and excited by the material! And this would be particularly the case for intelligent people who can't really get information from reading. It would be mind-blowing for them to gtet real substance orally, no matter how the speaker just droned on. I've never listened to Goodman, but I've had people around here on the fringe of the left actually bubble when they encountered her on cable.
But no one seems interested in exploring my suggestion that very large numbers of people need to get their information and ideas orally; that reading (and not just for the syslexic) is, as it were, an 'unnatural' activity, enjoyed only by those with some quirk in their make-up, and that we are outrageously misjudging the intelligence of those who having no source but books are ignorant.
Carrol