go to top

SOME OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS

In a period of crisis, the responsibilities of the President includes helping the country understand what is happening, reassuring the people that appropriate steps are being taken, and fostering hope. These were clearly among President Bush’s intentions for these speeches.

About 17 hours intervened between the two speeches, during which the frame that the President offered for understanding the tragic events shifted from "terrorism" to "war." Indeed, in comments made the following day, September 13, 2001, President Bush announced that the war on terrorism was the first war of the 21^st century, and, by the end of the week, Congress granted the President extraordinary powers, similar to a state of war.

Consistent with the "war" metaphor, the world in Bush’s speeches is divided into "us" and "them," and the conflict between them is legitimated. In a characteristically American way, the war becomes one in which "we" are good, the embodiment of civilization and freedom, and "they" are evil, cowards, and inexplicably opposed to our virtues.

President Bush assured his listeners that appropriate steps were being taken on three fronts: aid was being given to those who need it; government institutions were continuing to function in a state of increased security; and investigations were underway to identify to identify and respond appropriately to the culprits.

The attempt to frame the events as a war is made more difficult by the failure to identify the enemy. At the time of this writing (September 13, 2001), fingers are pointing at Osama bin Laden, but officials are carefully avoiding closure. The "war" is against "terrorism" and those who condone and support it.

In this context, a significant initiative was announced. President Bush declared that the United States would target those who support or shelter terrorists. "We will make no distinctions between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." In subsequent statements, government officials revealed that other nations were being asked for cooperation in this "war" and that this would be a time when our "friends" were clearly defined from our "enemies."

Both speeches were filled with promises of victory, although the shape of that victory was left fairly vague. Indications of success include preserving our freedoms, securing against further attacks, continued operation of our government and economy, and finding and bring to justice those responsible. The clear subtext of all of this was that our response to the terrorists’ attacks would not be in a legal context of trying individuals for their actions but in the context of an international war, using all of the resources of the United States’ government and its allies, including military force. Later in the week, Bush’s rhetoric toughened still more, with promises to "smoke out" the terrorists, with allusions to what we in the United States call "the old west" posters saying "Wanted: Dead or Alive."

go to top

DOES IT MATTER WHAT PRESIDENT BUSH SAID?

Of course it does. Here are some reasons why.

If you will permit me a play on words: English is a language spoken by people who don’t speak the same language. Beyond matters of pronunciation and vocabulary, there are cultural ways of communicating; these manners of speaking (and to a lesser extent, writing) are crucial in determining whether we recognize others as "one of us." (See Donal Carbaugh’s Talking American and Situating Selves: The Communication of Social Identities in American Scenes, and Gerry Philipsen, Speaking Culturally.)

When President Bush spoke, he used a style of speech that relied on certain cultural conventions about what to say and how to say it, made certain assumptions about shared values and knowledge, and worked within a complex set of rules – that neither he nor his audience could articulate – about what is good, true, beautiful, and appropriate. That is to say, he spoke "American" in a way that clearly distinguished his from the comments made by Tony Blair (the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and Yasser Arafat (leader of the Palestinian government), even though they, too, spoke in English.

So what? Well, three things. First, the fact that he spoke "American" permitted most Americans to identify with him. This is a necessary goal if he were to function, as the occasion required, as the national spokesperson. Second, his speech was shaped, limited, and facilitated by the discursive properties of American culture. For example, without the context of this culture, the easy use of the dichotomy between "good" and "evil" would not have been possible, nor would the quotation of the Psalm, positioned in the speech in a way that assumes that God is on our side. Third, by speaking "American," he reproduced this culture, extending its hegemony just a bit further. That is, its strengths and weaknesses were reinforced rather than challenged.

Note, for example, the President’ statement that "America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." While some might see the phrase "the brightest beacon…" as an arrogant nationalistic claim, references to the U. S. as a "city shining on a hill" and as an example for others have become a commonplace assertion in Presidential rhetoric. The statement that "we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world" might sound to some as if the United States identifies itself as the world’s policeman or the custodian of civilization, but this claim falls naturally on the ear when speaking American. The assertion, in the September 12 speech, that "this will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil" in which "good will prevail" not only imposes an evaluative dichotomy on subsequent events, but identifies the United States with "good" – a judgment that many Americans comfortably assume but which falls harshly on other ears.

As a speaker, the President was both enabled and limited by the necessity to speak "American." My guess is that he did not find the limitations vexing, because his message was fairly conventional. Had he attempted to do something more ambitious, he would have needed to find ways of transcending these limitations or of changing the rules in a way that would bring his audience along with him. (For a discussion of this form of rhetorical transcendence, see Robert J. Branham and W. Barnett Pearce, "Between Text and Context: Toward a Rhetoric of Contextual Reconstruction," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71, 1985, 19-36; and W. Barnett Pearce and Stephen W. Littlejohn, Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds Collide. Sage, 1997.)

For good or ill, by speaking so resolutely "American," the President invoked our currently existing cultural resources as a way of comprehending this unprecedented attack. The strain was felt almost immediately, as Secretary of State Colin Powell explained that what the President called "the first war of the 21^st century" would not be like any other war in our history.

Many people resonate with Nietzsche’s observation that he can stand almost any "what" as long as he knows "why." Human beings consistently work to construct coherent stories about their experience. But because these are stories, they cannot be identical to the experiences themselves, and often the gap between "stories told" and "stories lived" becomes distressingly painful.

The timing of the President’s speeches was forced by events, and they set the discursive context in which subsequent events – which neither he nor anyone else could predict on September 11 and 12 – will play out. Is the story he told to make this attack coherent for us sufficiently powerful? Will subsequent events shatter this story, producing a second round of confusion? Will we, as Gregory Bateson warned in his essay "From Versailles to Cybernetics" (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine, 1972), be made crazy by living in a reality that we cannot comprehend because our official stories are inadequate? Will the frame that President Bush constructed for us be sufficiently rich, broad, honest, and factual to comprehend the events that lie before us?

As I write these lines (on September 14, 2001), it is still far too early to say.

The stories we tell are crucial parts of the technology by which we make the worlds in which we live. Our own actions are chosen from within those stories. For example, our national policy will likely differ if we think that we have an exclusive and proprietary hold on what is "good" than if we take a more cosmopolitan perspective that there are many "goods" and that even our bitterest foe might be virtuous. For example, in the September 12 speech, President Bush spent a considerable part of the speech describing the "enemy" as villains. "Demonizing" the enemy and depicting them as less than fully human is a venerable tactic for mobilizing one’s own forces. However, it also prefigures some all-too-familiar aspects of war: underestimating the enemy’s virtues, including courage and resilience; treating the enemy in ways that contradict one’s own higher values; and misunderstanding the enemy’s motives and hence tactics.

In addition, the stories we tell have implications for others. Not only residents of the United States heard President Bush’s speeches. These others had to ask what were the implications for them. By "speaking American," President Bush elicited responses that will, in the ensuing days, either help or hinder his cause and will shape the future for all of us.

go to top

SOME THINGS THAT BUSH MIGHT HAVE DONE

Sadly, the violence of war, crime, and even terrorism is not novel in human society; we are quite experienced with it. And even more sadly, our "natural" response to violence is to act violently…and this usually leads to continuing patterns of violence. By promising to "win" against the terrorists, and by framing the response as a "war," Bush acted in ways that seem "normal" and hence very likely to continue the pattern of violence.

But is there an alternative?

Maybe.

In our analysis of "moral conflict" (W. Barnett Pearce and Stephen W. Littlejohn, Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds Collide. Sage, 1997), we found that people who are involved in intractable conflict often have much richer stories about their own motives, history, beliefs, etc., than appear in their interactions with others. However, the attempt to tell their "richer" stories to the other often just makes the conflict worse, because that which one side holds most dear may well be just what the other disrespects or abhors. To move forward together more productively, it is often necessary to break out of the normal discursive patterns – that is, to communicate in ways that transcend the cultural patterns that both take as "normal." If this can be achieved – and it is a very big "if" – then openings can be found for ways to move forward together that do not simply repeat the past. Using another vocabulary, transcending the rhetorical limits of the stories being told in the conflict creates the possibilities for second-order changes that are impossible to imagine from within what Kenneth Burke called the "terministic screens" of the conflict.

There is no magic bullet for transcending the limits of the discourse (and with it, the patterns of interaction) that constitute moral conflict. That having been said, it can happen. These moves carry promise of success:

2. Constructing a more systemic description what happened:

	Beyond "us" and "them" to the patterns that "we" are involved in
	Beyond "win" and "lose" to win-win outcomes

3. Facilitating an increased awareness of the roles the participants play in making the world in which they live:

	Noting their responsibility for making the patterns in which they find themselves, not just blaming the other
	Noting their opportunities for acting in novel ways, not just responding in the most obvious ways

4. Changing the context

	A new interpretation of what’s important or relevant (including "common ground")
	A different place
	A different set of participants

5. Care for the kind of energy that is involved. Following the maxim that what we pay attention to grows, it makes a difference whether the participants in a moral conflict attend to that which is wrong/missing/bad or to that which is right/present/good. These differences in attention summon very different kinds of energy and thus resources to act into difficult situations. Experience with "appreciative inquiry" show that "appreciative" energy is far more productive than "deficit" energy.

In a list, these strategies for intervening in moral conflict look very sterile. Here are some real-life examples.

Abraham Lincoln’s "Gettysburg Address:" On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln spoke at the dedication ceremonies of a Union cemetery at the location of what was already recognized as the decisive battle of the Civil War. Speaking to a partisan audience at the site of a great Union victory, Lincoln never referred to "us" or "them;" to "Confederates" or "Union;" or to "winners" and "losers." He framed the situation as a test of whether this nation or any other, dedicated "to the proposition that all men are created equal" could "long endure." Naming the specific task as that of establishing the cemetery, he claimed that the oratory of the day was less important that what "those brave men" have done here. The significance, he concluded, was to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Four aspects of this speech are noteworthy.

First, Lincoln changed the context. Instead of a partisan rally celebrating a Union victory, he located the day’s events as part of a historic exploration of the possibilities of democratic government.

Second, he constructed a more systemic description of what happened. By conspicuously refusing to "speak American" – in this instance by differentiating "us" good, successful Union supporters from "them," bad, losing Confederates – he called into being that which he was striving to achieve – a Union consisting of one nation, undivided. I don’t know if Lincoln was aware of the ironic consequence of differentiating "us" from "them" in the pursuit of "union," but his speech flouted the rhetorical conventions of his day and appealed, as he put it himself in another major speech, to "the higher angels of our nature."

Third, he focused on a positive or "appreciative" energy. Committed to honoring those who fought at Gettysburg, he called on his audience to join him in insuring that "government of the people, for the people, and by the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Fourth, the entire speech was self-reflexive; a meditation on its own circumstance and means of meeting the requirements of the situation. As such, it invited the audience to be more mindful of their own role in making the world in which they would subsequently live. Without naming the alternative, Lincoln spoke as if that future – a day in which the warring sides were reconstituted into a Union – were already present.

Immediate reaction to the speech was critical, to the point of being contemptuous. Only with some distance has this speech been identified as one of the great orations in history, in part because it transcended the divisiveness of the moment and appealed to noble sentiments in a situation that was at the time dominated by smaller emotions.

The Treaty of Versailles. Treaty of Versailles is a "negative example." It illustrates how a "resolution" of a conflict that is based on a desire for vengeance and short term benefits can create a future whose "costs" dramatically outweigh anything to be gained. In this case, the "cost" included World War II.

When the fighting in World War I stopped, the "Fourteen Points" proposed by American President Woodrow Wilson shaped the stories being told about what the future would bring. A considerable period elapsed between the de facto end of the fighting and the formal meetings at which the Treaties were signed that ended the war. During this interval, Germany created a new government (the Weimar Constitution, February 6, 1919) that differed significantly from the government that had been in place before and during the fighting. Most Germans saw the new government as a move toward a democratic republic, breaking with their past. They "imagined the program of self-determination and equality of rights originally set out in Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to be binding on both sides" (Encyclopedia Britannica vol. 8, p. 116). However, when the Treaties were presented to the Germans, the Allies imposed extremely harsh terms. When the Treaty was signed on May 7, 1919, it was clear that these were punitive terms. Among other things, the terms of the Treaty weakened the Weimar government and led to "the legend that the German Army had never been defeated but was stabbed in the back by the Republicans, the Socialists, and the Jews…" (vol. 8, p. 117).

Notice that this Treaty ignored changes in the German state from the end of hostilities to the time of the treaty. This disempowered the Germans, and, by rendering them incapable of participating in the construction of their own future, legitimated their refusal of responsibility for the conditions in which they found themselves. The ground was prepared for Hitler to rise to power on the basis of a story that they were victims of a plot and had the right to strike back at those who had tricked them. The "official story" among the Allies – at least for public consumption – was that the Treaty was fair and honorable. As a result, many people among the Allied nations were subsequently surprised by the aggressiveness of the Germans, who themselves knew quite well what had happened to them.

The Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program). In sharp contrast to the Treaty of Versailles, the authors of the European Recovery Program following World War II were aware of the role they were playing in the creation of the future, and elevated this concern above the harsh emotions that dominated the fighting. In order to create stable conditions in which the institutions of free nations could survive, the United States initiated a massive plan of rebuilding 16 European nations. The success of the plan led President Truman to extend it to many other nations as his Point Four Program, starting in 1949.

Like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Marshall Plan transcended the previous divisions between "us" and "them" and between "winners" and "losers" in the war. Through its attention to the kind of future that it was creating, it called into being previously unthinkable patterns of cooperation and productive interdependency. By focusing on the conditions that would make a better world, it unleashed productive energies that did much more than solve the problems envisioned by its founders.

go to top

 

WHAT PRESIDENT BUSH MIGHT HAVE SAID

Please accept what follows in the spirit in which it is offered: an exploration of possibilities. I’m assuming that no one wants a simple perpetuation of violence, and that many people are aware that the specific character of the United States’ response has the potential for making a tragic situation much worse.

Is it possible to deliver a speech on such an occasion that would embody some of the strategies for intervening in moral conflict? What follows is an exercise in envisioning what that might look like. Let me begin with the same first three paragraphs that President Bush used…

Today, my fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices. Secretaries, business men and women, military and federal workers. Moms and dads. Friends and neighbors.

Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.

The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.

Making all of this worse, at this moment, we don’t know who is responsible or why such savagery was directed at us. But we will find out, and we will respond.

Our first response is to prevent additional attacks. Your government, law enforcement, and military forces continue to operate, and we are taking every step possible to protect our citizens and our country from further destruction.

In addition, we are meeting the needs of those injured in these attacks. I immediately implemented our government’s emergency response plans. Our emergency teams are working as I speak in New York and in Washington, D.C. to help local agencies in their rescue efforts.

We join in grief those families who have lost loved ones. Nothing we can do is enough to console those whose parents, friends, children, brothers or sisters are missing or have died, but we can and will join them in their sorrow. We are all bereaved; we are all shocked; we are all saddened. Let us comfort and support each other in this time of tragedy.

While we protect ourselves, care for the injured, and grieve for our dead, we are also searching for those who did this horrible thing. We will find them and bring them to justice.

And, we will do more.

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a good and generous people, and so we are. Nowhere has this been shown more clearly in the courageousness of those who have rushed into burning buildings to save others; the concern of those who have given blood and donated skills and supplies; and the compassion of those who treated wounds and embraced those who are hurt and hurting.

But we live in a complex and dangerous world. And in this world there are people who are not like us; who do not like us, and who seek to harm us. Some of these people think that whatever they can do to hurt us is right.

The fires and chaos in New York and in Washington are unprecedented – and yet they remind us of images that we have seen from other places: among the Palestinians and Israelis, from Beirut and London, and, I say with deep regret, from many other places around the world.

For many years, our intelligence and law enforcement officials have successfully protected us from attacks such as we have seen today. For many of us, terrorism has been something that afflicts other people or affects us only when we travel to other countries. And we have been generous in our support for the victims of terrorism as we have of natural disasters. We have given food, clothing, equipment; many of us have gone to the sites of terrorist attacks and offered medical help. But until today, most of us had not experienced it ourselves.

But now we, too, are the victims. This is not the first terrorist attack on U. S. soil, but it is the most heinous. And it ends our ability to rest comfortably behind our own protective walls in such a dangerous world. Its sets before us a daunting task – a task different from those that confronted other generations, and one to which we must rise.

This terrorist attack, like all the other ones that have occurred during the past decades, does not come out of nothing. Our stories about the world, and about our place in the world, will have to become more complex. If we are to understand why people hate us so much, we will have to understand how the world looks from their perspective. And if we are to respond effectively to protect ourselves, we must understand those whose sense of history and purpose are not like our own.

It is tempting to see this vicious attack as the result of madmen trying to destroy civilization, and our response as a war of "good" against "evil." But if we are to understand what happened here today, and if we are to act effectively in the days to come, we must develop more sophisticated stories than these about the world, about our place in it, and about the consequences of our actions.

This is a terrorist attack. If we are in a state of war, it is a different kind of war than we have ever fought before. Terrorists are not capable of occupying our country or meeting our armies on the field of battle. They hope to destroy our confidence; to disrupt our way of life. They hope that we will destroy ourselves by the way we respond to the atrocities that they commit. Our first reaction, that of wanting revenge, to lash out at those who have injured us so, is almost surely the wrong response because it makes us accomplices of what they are trying to achieve.

Instead of the doing the obvious thing that they are trying to provoke, the more difficult task before us is to work on two levels simultaneously. First, we will identify, seek out, and punish those who did this horrible thing. As President Kennedy said in a different situation: let the message go out from this place that we will pay any price and bear any burden to prevent and punish those who make war on our citizens and our country. Let there be no uncertainty, no room for ambiguity, no doubt about that. We have enormous resources on which we may draw, and we will use them.

But no matter what we do in retaliation and prevention, it will not bring our dead back to life; it will not heal our wounds; it will not wipe the tears from our eyes. And if only our grief and our pain motivate us, we run the risk of becoming that which we hate.

Let us today renew our commitment to our highest values – what President Abraham Lincoln called "the higher angels of our nature" – and resolve that we will not defeat ourselves by becoming indiscernible from terrorists as we battle against terrorism.

So the second level of our task is to identify and seek to change the conditions in the world that call forth such hatred and permit it to flourish. Even as we struggle with our grief at the wounds inflicted on us as a nation, I call us to a renewed effort to achieve peace and justice throughout the world. The world is now too small, too interrelated, and too complex for us to hope that we can insulate ourselves from those who hate us, or to ignore the consequences of our actions that cause grief and pain to others.

In the next few days, I will set into motion two initiatives.

First, I will support the initiative already in Congress to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace. We now know a lot about peace, and we know that it is not simply the absence of war. My charge to this Department, and to the Secretary that I will name to my cabinet is a formidable one: To help create a world in which hatred and terror has no place. And I pledge my full support to this good work.

Second, to help create a world in which hatred and terror has no support or places to hide, I will ask for all nations of the world to join us in a campaign to identify and prosecute terrorists, to deny them support and materials, and to coordinate efforts to maintain the freedom of citizens throughout the world to live and move about in safety.

Almost forty years ago, a great American stood not far from where I now sit, and said that he had a dream of "the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

Today, as our nation rebounds from this vicious attack, I have a dream of the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing, with full meaning, that their country is a "sweet land of liberty" and that from every mountainside in every country, freedom will ring. And as Martin Luther King, Jr., told us:

"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, -- and, yes, Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and agnostics and all the rest -- will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!""

My fellow Americans, let us accept the task that has been so tragically thrust upon us, to bind up our nations’ wounds and to work together to create a world in which such wounds are not inflicted on anyone.

Thank you, and good night."

go to top

 

© 2001 by W. Barnett Pearce