The Juntoo

Though we count only few, there are some painful wounds to which even time itself—that patient panacea of most all disease, that quiet medicine for near every person and age—offers but little relief. Insensitive to the salve of time, these are the injuries upon which the subtle, persistent hands of the clock have neither a healing effect, nor an improving influence. While we await the ascent of one sun, to the fall of that by which it’s succeeded, and the transition of the climate from the autumn to the spring, we feel, with sharpened acuity and unsparing pain, the force of their impact through every hour of life.

These, as we might call them, are the non-healing wounds of life, the marks by which an age long, though not always happily lived, is forever spotted. They are the chronic ulcers on the ankles, the ageless bruises on the skin to which time, despite the noble efforts of its minutes and constant industry of its weeks, has failed to offer a real remedy. The body, never for lack of trying, has yet to have completed the re-absorption of these assaults, by which the natural hue of life and ruddiness of vigor take their signal to return. Throughout time’s long duration, it works at this task, for which greater time still is always needed.

These wounds afflict not just the mortal, but the national body as well. Like that of the citizens by whom it’s populated, or that of the generations by whom it’s sustained, the body of the nation is susceptible to damages atop which scars often fail to settle. Absent the cicatrix for which they cry out, the wounds of the nation’s body remain open, and they shriek with discomfort at the approach of another year’s cruel touch.

This nation’s greatest, and by far still freshest wound, is that which was delivered nineteen years ago, on this very day. It was nearly two decades ago, at the youthful, radiant start of a September’s morning, that radical Islamic terrorists executed their unprecedented strike. It was a terrible punch for which this supposedly vigilant, and enviably strong nation was completely unprepared. Three planes over which the terrorists gained full control crashed into their intended targets: The World Trade Center buildings—with which the very skyline of Manhattan was for so long, synonymous—and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The one plane over which their seizure was, thankfully, incomplete, in whose cabin, the very epitome of valor both fought and flew, was brought down, heroically, into the blood-soaked turf of a Pennsylvania field.

This day, more than any other, is the national wound with which we, as Americans, continue to suffer. The passage of time, to which, as of today, nineteen years have now contributed, has done little to relieve us of this deep, insurmountable pain. No scar atop it has formed, and no closure is yet forthcoming. Still, despite the discomfort, it’s a day upon which I often reflect, to whose immediate aftermath, I frequently return. I do so in order to gauge the distance by which that moment and this are separated, during which so much has transpired and the unity of our national spirit has been lost.  

For one, I direct my thoughts toward the nature of terror, on the various lineaments of its carriage, and the frightful varieties of its current use. Now, it seems, the threats by which we’re cruelly afflicted, the anxieties by which our sleep is nightly detained, are rather domestic than foreign. The enemy of whom we’ve become so recently wary, into whose obscure and dark origins, our curiosities have since begun to plumb, are to be found not across distant expanse of the seas, but within the close reach our cities; not in barren, rugged hillsides, between whose arid cracks, terror networks tend to slip and take root, but in bustling centers of finance and trade, around which our twirling economy spins; not in ancient and benighted Arabia, to whom the notion of equality between the sexes remains a radical and fatal idea, but in progressive and new America, to whose likeness the rest of the developing world still strives to affix itself.

The figures by whom our nightmares are visited, to whom our leftist politicians have agreed to prostrate themselves, aren’t the turban-clad, machete-wielding, Hadith-quoting terrorists of old. Though an undying species (killers motivated by political ideology, enflamed by religious zeal, and guaranteed the gifts of an eschatological time to come, will forever remain the nuisance of the world), this is not a group with which, at the present moment, we’re concerned. Such menacing characters, to whom the last twenty years provided so large and inviting a stage, have been replaced in this summer of our disquiet, this annus horribilis that we’ll never forget, by purely homegrown enthusiasts of the most repulsive time.

These are people, caught on the continuum between Bolsheviks and Nihilists, Communists and Anarchists, who are bent on causing destruction, toppling our confidence, inspiring fear, stifling discussion, and physically bludgeoning every opponent with whom they disagree. These are the people, Jacobins from the first to the last, who are determined to intimidate residents, crucify clerics, shatter dreams, burn edifices, stomp out businesses, shoot the police, transgress civility, and oust an incumbent president upon whom, to my great surprise, they’ve not yet ventured a fatal attempt.

They go by two names: Antifa and BLM. The former is unapologetically oriented toward terror and violence; the latter, furtively so. Both cloud their antics in the semantic ambiguity of their seemingly noble names: Anti-Fascist and Black Lives Matter—could anything be more unexceptionable? Could one be so indecent as to object to the former and its resistance to fascists, or to the latter’s demand for the confirmation of the vitality of black life?

As it turns out, both employ for the identity of their respective organizations phrases to which, in assessment of their actions as opposed to their titles, neither one honestly subscribes. The Anti-Fascists are anything but; they’ve adopted the techniques of those by whom, if only in opposition, they speciously sought to define themselves. All they lack is a charismatic Mussolini, a twenty-first-century Il Duce, around whom they might flock, and a bundle of sticks surrounding an ax, by which the symbol of their collective strength might be brandished. The Black Lives Matter advocates seem only to care about an exiguous number of carefully-selected “Black lives”, many of whom, often justifiably, were killed by the police. The plight of all Black lives, it seems, isn’t a problem about which they’re very deeply concerned, only those who succumb to the violence of the cops.

During the month of September, in the year 2001, the police were targeted for veneration. Now, nineteen years removed from the trials of that age, they’re the targets of censure, murder, and every species of abuse. Back then, though still in the comfortable innocence of my youth, I remember vividly one scene, perhaps above most others with which I came into contact. That was the ubiquity with which “NYPD” hats were to be found in every segment of society. Every politician, every athlete, every celebrity, every workaday woman and man proudly adorned their heads with this universal, reverential cap. It was a sign of national cohesion, resilience, gratitude, and pride. If not that, then they wore one emblazoned with the letters “FDNY”, or otherwise demonstrated their support for the state’s intrepid first responders in some other sartorial way.

Today, such a scene, and such a wardrobe of dress, would be unimaginable. It would be thought an unenlightened, obsolete, and deliberately provocative display, as if it were an instance of backsliding into an un-progressive and un-woke past. It would be asking for trouble. Indeed, anyone caught wearing such a hat, in a city or town in which such expressions of one’s fidelity to law enforcement was considered passé, might expose him to aspersions, bullying, or—as has become increasingly common—open and gratuitous violence. Instead of thanking these brave police officers, who ran into burning buildings smoldering with jet fuel and flesh, we’ve deemed it wise to defund them. Instead of exalting them, we’ve emasculated them.

While not quite the entire lifespan of a nation, nineteen years is indeed a long time. So much that’s transpired during the course of those years has left me, robust and an optimist, discouraged and chronically ailed. Time, as we know, hasn’t the ability to alleviate all pains. If it did, we’d numb ourselves with idleness and patience. And though the wound of 9/11 will never fully heal, we’re adding to it a masochistic barrage of self-violence. These cuts, while not equally deep, are more numerous and frightful.

I’m not so sure, nineteen years hence, they’ll form the ability to scar.

Perhaps the respect I feel for the police, the quiet veneration I hold for a group of men and women by whom, in the distance of my observation of them as they go about their work, I seem to be overcome, is filial.

My father, you see, was a police officer; my grandfather, an officer of probations. Before him, I lose sight of the lineage from which I descend, but I’d not be surprised to learn of my great grandfather’s professional involvement in the enforcement of the law. Such is the work, after all, toward which so many generations of young Irishmen have tended to be inclined, particularly those to whom the enclaves of the northeast and the coasts of the Atlantic were called home.

This made me, much to the relish of my youthful fancy, and the warm contentment of those Hibernian-American forbears out of whom I sprang, the proud inheritor of the title, “trooper’s son”. I was, not only in their eyes, but in the light of my own, a veritable law enforcement protégé, a kid destined to be a cop, if ever one was born.

Though a job from which my father has since retired, and from which my own ambitions and wanderings have decidedly turned, it was—for the dominant part of my youth—the vocation by which many of his nights, some of his holidays, and all of my dreams were occupied. Regarding the first two, I remember them well, as his absence defined the length of their hours. Those were times during which my mother and sister relied on one another and busied ourselves, awaiting each morning the joy of his return. Back then, as it is today, that was the sacrifice a father paid for the comfort of a family experiencing growth, dreaming of wealth. Material betterment was, and still is, an endeavor to which both time and perseverance were owed, and we paid for them, and he for us, with his absence.

As for the last, the dreams of which his work was provocative, I recall to mind their vividness less well. This speaks not to their deficiency of color, nor to their proximity to the realness of life, but to my awful inability of retention. Few are the dreams that I can remember. Yet I can say with confidence that I sensed them, nightly, dancing before the sleepy eyelids of my soul.

Nevertheless, it was a job, and—more importantly—he was a man, of which and of whom I was fully enamored. He was, as every father to a child should be, a man in the vibrancy of whose image I tried to color my own, a giant against whose looming example, I measured every inch of my skin. It’s unlikely, then, that the favorable impression that an adoring son has for so beloved a father (and the occupation in which, for the better part of his life, he was employed) will become, in the later reflections of his more mature years, a bias of which he’ll be disabused.

And so, you see, my reverence for the police, inextricably linked to my reverence for my father, is quite deeply ingrained. My analysis of the profession, therefore, might be understandably clouded by my devotion to the man by whom I was sired and raised into the stature of a man. I’ll not hesitate to admit a bias out of which I couldn’t hope, and, frankly, wouldn’t want, to disentangle myself. And so, you’ve been honestly warned.

But first, a bit more on him, as a more thorough explanation of his work will inform your opinion of my thought. He toiled at his work in the notoriously inviting state of New Jersey, the densely-populated, southerly neighbor of New York into which, thanks to the permeability of their shared border, and the venality of its morally impoverished politicians, many of the Big Apple’s criminal misfits were hospitably received. Its sordid reputation, of which all Americans join in making fun, was unfortunately deserved, but there were many qualities by which New Jersey might find herself redeemed. One such quality, I thought, was her long-established and highly-distinguished institution of law enforcement.

Her police officers, I was told, were the crème de la crème, an elite crop of law enforcement professionals to which no other state could produce a superior. They embraced a professionalism by which, in contrast to those cursory appointments of town deputies and local sheriffs of which lesser states made so hasty a use, they found themselves distinguished, and a fidelity to the public’s safety above which they placed no greater priority. That, more than anything else, was the consuming subject of their concern. They were honest, rugged, indefatigable men, uniquely upright and selfless characters to whom the lures of mischief and the bait of coarseness offered but little attraction. Onto these hooks, seldom did they bite. To them, virtue was never an inconvenience, but a constant standard of behavior from which there was no departure. These weren’t great men, but very good men—the type of pillars around whom a community can be built, and by whose continued presence, that same community might be protected and sustained.

I very much doubt, in the days and years to come, that police departments—such as that of which my father was a member, among whose ranks, I once dared to imagined myself —will continue to enjoy the admission of so many good and honorable men. The once esteemed police force of New Jersey, imminently, will be debased. Those of the forty-nine other states will follow suit. The job of a police officer, after all, in the boiling violence of this terrible moment, has gone from respectable, to unenviable, to impossible. Now, it simply can’t be done, and it sadly shows no indication of circling back to the first position from which it’s since fallen. It’s unlikely anytime soon to become, once again, respectable and proud.  

The plight of the police officer, as currently it exists, is as follows:

He’s assumed, without the burdensome accompaniment of proof, to have acted in every instance with malign intent. That’s his original sin, an inescapable demerit from which there’s no remission. A priori, he’s deemed evil, without any opportunity to demonstrate himself good. A cop is never guiltless, after all. He’s to be charged with every crime of which he’s in pursuit, and punished for every offense to which our society has given license.

There’s neither benignity nor caution in the tread of his approach, but an intention to do violence, only. The protestations in defense of his humanity are shouted in vain, as he’s dismissed outright as a barbarian, or worse. More than likely, the categorizations to which he’ll be subject include such titles as sub-human, troglodytic, or bestial, and those by whom said names will be given would rather see him, more than the grunting ape or the snapping crocodile, behind the steel of unbreakable bars.

His every defense, if permitted to be heard, is either inaudible or artificial to the ears of the incurious rabble by whom, ironically, his protection is most needed. Never, in their opinion, is his story to be believed. He’s thought to be a fabulist, a terrorist, an author of horrors uninterested in the tender cries of the sanctity of human life. Any report he gives, even when buttressed by the evidence of film, is categorically to be dismissed. His facts, when unconducive to the growth of the narrative under whose shade we now rest, are to be diverted, suppressed, and ignored.

The presumption is that he’s not just ruggedly callous, but deliberately cruel. He’s thought to be a predatory beast, a blue-emblazoned tiger to whom all life—but especially that dressed in the hide of brown or black skin—has neither meaning nor value. Upon them, he’ll pounce with the breeze of a sniff, the flicker of a sight, if only to devour whole the delight of their bodies. The badge by which his chest is adorned serves only as a concealment of this savage heart. The belt by which his waist is girded restrains the fires of his murderous bowels, insatiably seeking for the nourishment of a kill. The night stick by which his thigh is rubbed incites a primordial, sexual arousal, and the gun for which he too eagerly reaches is but the culmination of his tumescent desire to slay.

While he’s never to be welcomed, all promptitude is expected of him in the event of a crisis. He’s at once banished and demanded, excommunicated and beckoned, as if both devil and saint. He’s the figure upon whom curses are rained, of whom, just a minute later, salvation is expected. Those rioting for the elimination of his livelihood will, the very instant a belligerent comrade falls, call immediately for his presence and the solicitude of his help. They’ll bludgeon with bricks those protesting in defense of his value and then, once the tables have turned, retreat behind the protection of that same authority for which they’ve hitherto shown nothing but contempt. He’s the scapegoat of the politician, the pariah of the community, the persona non grata of the rioting class, yet all depend on his service every single day.

The same Black Lives Matter advocate, after confessing to his spellbound listeners his desire to put police officers “in their graves”, will, upon the endangerment of his own person or property, call for those same officers’ posthumous help. Should his worldview succeed, their return of his call will be somewhat unforthcoming. A number of Chicago gangs, in what appears to be a joint-pact of lawlessness, if not a murderous manifesto, have announced their intention openly to target the police. Members of that same cabal, in the bullet-torn exigencies of a troubled moment, will be just as likely as any to forget the sincerity with which their original commitment was made, and dial those three familiar numbers, 9-1-1.

The most populous, “progressive” cities of which this nation was once so boastful, from which it now averts its gaze, have declared their intention to “defund” the police. Often, the term is used with deliberate ambiguity—a tacit acknowledgement of the distaste with which, when described to the suffering residents whom it’ll most intimately affect, it’ll likely be met—but always involves the re-allocation of funds away from the police. The cities by which this “defunding” agenda is to be effectuated include Austin, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and—of course—Portland. Others are adding their names to this list. Yet still, as they do, those very same legislators by whom these initiatives are enacted, to which they hope to attach the advancement of their careers, go out and enclose themselves with—you guessed it—none other than hordes of disrespected city police. It would be madness, after all, to walk outside among the rioters (whom they represent) without the endless security of their vigilant presence.

Openly, I confess my bias—I’m sympathetic to the police. There’s nothing implicit in the frank acknowledgement of my feelings, no shade by which my true sentiments might be concealed. And so, I can’t help but pity their current situation, while dreading the future into which they’ll be pushed. By so many forces—be they gangs, BLM activists, Antifa rioters, or myopic and hypocritical politicians—they’re being hastened to the edge of a cliff. Cops like my father, and my grandfather before him, will no longer risk their lives, nor sacrifice their tranquility, to protect and serve a city from which they receive no support. They’ll jump off that precipice, never to return. They’ll neither pledge an oath, declare their fidelity, nor commit their allegiance to a people by whom they’ll only be relentlessly prodded and condemned. Worse individuals, if any individuals at all, will replace them instead.

These are my thoughts, though few and ill-formed, on the state of the police.

Few are the subjects upon which, without abusing the patience of the reader, or the charitable goodwill of a dear friend, I’m able to expatiate. While I might talk extensively on any number of topics, to which the paucity of my competence is almost always unequal, I do so meaningfully on only a few. One subject to which the former camp is home, over which I feign no mastery and onto which my narrow abilities can’t hope but grip, is the cinematic work of the estimable Christopher Nolan, the English-born, Hollywood-beloved artist by whom the recent film Tenet was both written and directed.

I’ll not here attempt an exegesis of a film whose stated intention was not to be understood. To do so would be folly, and those critical writers committed to so airy a task are putting their pens to the winds and scribbling in vain. That Nolan wished Tenet to be unintelligible and, for that reason, incompletely enjoyed, was quite clear from the outset of the film. From that point until its end, the action was vigorous but desultory, the dialogue intricate but inaudible, the plot partially developed, the score wholly overwhelming, and the characters frankly superficial. Not even the intrepid “protagonist” (literally titled as such) proved a figure into whom much emotion could be invested. Such was the experience of an audience member who, in desperation, was looking for solid ground on which to stand, and a tangible character with whom to connect.

While equally as ambitious, it was far more circuitous than his prior work, Inception, with which, for obvious reasons, it’s been widely compared. The comparison, in some ways, is apt. Both films play, more or less successfully, with the theme of time. In both, its ephemerality is suspended, as it comes to be manipulated in the hands of a degenerating, fighting humankind. Both force the viewer to think in a dimension into which he seldom brings himself, yet out of which, upon reflection, he never fully steps. However, its treatment in the earlier film, Inception, must be judged the greater achievement of the two. Tenet dealt with its mergence and simultaneity as the past, with malign and nefarious motives, approached the present, and the present ambled near a future toward which it hesitatingly stepped. Inception relied on the strange a-temporality of dreams, deadly fantasies into which, clouded by an unarousable stupor, its cadre of heroes and villains slipped.  

Tenet ultimately lacked the novelty, cohesion, strength of cast, and unity of action for which Inception—though inscrutable in its own right—was so feverishly celebrated. Tenet may, for those reasons, fail to inherit the plaudits of which its predecessor (released, much to my disbelief, an entire decade ago; the time does fly!) was undoubtedly more deserving.

My sincere analysis of the film, my terse and honest criticism of Nolan’s latest work, must end with that thought. However perfunctorily pursued, and ineloquently stated, that’s all I have to say. It’s not a lack of interest that compels me to abort so prematurely the daunting nature of this theme, but an exhaustion of those meager abilities beyond which, as you can tell, I can’t ascend.

I will append, however, one final note. It pertains to the trite way in which villainous characters are generally cast. In Tenet, Nolan employs as his antagonist the loathsome Andrei Sator, played by the Shakespearean Irishman, Kenneth Branagh. Sator, as his Sovietized name, predilection for strong drink, and coarse accent combine to suggest, is a Russian oligarch of the worst kind. He’s like modern-day Putin, but more combustible, or a resuscitated Stalin, but far more murderous and savvy. Aside from being a dastard son of that flagitious state, Sator is an arms-dealer, nuclear -promulgator, sadist, misogynist, and time-traveler—the eastern menace of whom our diverse lot of heroes are in so constant a pursuit. While the part is played frighteningly well, and the depth of Sator’s turpitude is never completely plumbed, I found myself at once frustrated and bored by the sight of yet another Russian malcontent bent on destroying the world.

Has this figure not yet exhausted his time on the stage, well-spent, doubtless, especially during the height of the Cold War and the perilous aftermath to which it yielded? Have we not seen one bad-guy after another, paraded before our eyes, emerging in sequence as if just released from an annual politburo meeting? Have we not come to associate, as if trained by the eminent Pavlov himself, the sound of a Russian accent with malicious, world-conquering deeds? Those eponymous dogs, whose behavior was conditioned by the sage scientist, knew no better; irrational beasts, they salivated unconsciously with the bell’s every ring. What excuse have we as humans, in whom the sound of a Russian speaker now incites a thoughtless reflex to cringe?

Although Russia persists in the sphere of international relations as a bad and contemptible apple, as a kind of geographically expansive persona non grata to which no Western country wishes to be seen as a friend, so far as the US is concerned, it’s long since forsaken its place as a primary existential threat. Though still bad, it’s far from the worst. New countries, namely China and—to a much lesser extent—Iran, have stepped up to fill that role. It’s time, I think, that our class of filmmakers, daring artists as they proclaim to be, begin to reflect in their movies the reality of this fact.  

I know the reasons why they won’t, as does every viewer whose eyes have become decreasingly glued to the screen. The Russian villain is predictable and hackneyed. We’ve become desensitized to his long-forgotten evils, and he’s no longer a source by whom we’re genuinely intimidated. But the Chinese autocrat or the Iranian mullah? They might very nicely do the trick. When will Hollywood replace our tired Russian with the fresh Chinese despot or the Iranian thug, one whose crimes in this world far exceed those that can be imagined and formatted for a DVD? When will it steel itself to Asiatic criticism, accept the unprofitability of its “offensive” choice, liberate itself of foreign censorship, and draw villains as they ought to be drawn in the current age?

I was hopeful that Tenet might do exactly that. Instead, like all other American films of which the past two decades have been productive, it traveled back in time, yet again, and chose as its villain yet another Russian. Let us, instead, move into the future, boldly into an exuberant and free age, and cease cowering at the threat of the Orient’s genocidal, fascistic, communist regimes.

Of the varieties of speech with which we, a population of great talkers, concern ourselves today, there are but two: persuasive and instructive.

The latter, frankly, is susceptible to the unfortunate epithet of ordinary—a term from which even the most “average” of joes wishes, if only he could, to dissociate himself. Like him, instructive speech is unartistic and boring. It’s passed over with quiet acknowledgement, but never with open interest or curious engagement. At best, it’s prosaic, but it’s usually wearisome, utilitarian, and downright cold. While it might tell you just how to do something, with lifeless words and pallid bulleted points, it conceals from you the exceedingly important question of why it ought to be done. While it might guide you through a specific action, in linear fashion, from one step to the next, it offers no guidance to your inevitable wanderings through the unexpected turns of life.

The former, on the other hand, provides exactly that type of detailed and subtle navigation of which the lost journeyman, hacking at thistles and caught in the brush, is most in need. Often, as does instructive, persuasive speech answers that same question of how, but its reach, beyond that point, is immeasurably extended. It emphasizes not only how—a question beyond which the instructive speech can proceed no further—but, more importantly, why. And, as the ever-axiomatic Friedrich Nietzsche once stated, he who has a why on which the highest aim of his life can be targeted, by which it can be elevated and inspired, can bear almost any how.

How, in the opinion of Nietzsche, and in that of the truly persuasive speaker as well, plays forever a subordinate role. As might be said of that great German philosopher, to whom insanity too prematurely arrived, persuasive speech can be poetic and artistic, educational and delightful, explanatory and moving in such a way that none can escape the magnetic power of its force. More than anything else, though, it provides to you a why—the end after which we all seek.

Of the constituent pieces out of which a persuasive speech is built, by which it’s ultimately to be raised, there are but three: ethos, pathos, and logos. In the absence of but one of these strong, Grecian legs, the foundation of persuasive speech risks becoming unsteady. As experience tells us, and scientific probing assures us, no chair can stand on two legs alone. We’d not risk investing our comfort in the uncertainty of so unstable a seat. Remove from that wobbling structure yet one more leg, and its collapse is inevitable and swift. That said, though mutually reinforcing and jointly integral, there is, between the three legs of persuasion, a distinction to be made: the last, logos, isn’t quite as important as the second, pathos, while the second fails to supersede in priority the first.  

The first, ethos, deliberately positioned as such, is by its pride of place the most important. It refers to the character of the speaker from whom the words of the script flow, the figure before the curtain or—as is the case these days—the camera by whom, ultimately, you’re either to be, or not to be, persuaded. The listener must be assured of his character and buoyed by its presentation. He must content himself with his qualification and the earnestness of his pursuit.

The second, the pathos, is dependent on the lability of that same listener, the audience member by whom those sober and discerning judgments are made. While he might have a greater or lesser propensity to be moved in an emotional way—to succumb to the lachrymose, or be elevated by the funny—he’ll never succeed in being fully immune to the manipulation of the passions by which those responses of tears or laughs are stirred. This is the speaker’s surgical prowess, a penetration through a listener’s skin to which there’s no external defense. The emotions, after all, are nothing if not the nearly visible parts of a man’s soul, lineaments of his conscience superficially hidden, onto which a good speaker’s hands can’t fail but grab.  

Finally, there’s logos. To the sensitive ear of the pious Christian, by whose religious acuity, so sublime an utterance is sure not to be missed, this word refers to the literal incarnation of the divinity on Earth. To the more sublunary Greeks, a group of pagan thinkers from whom the word is more distantly borrowed, logos, with far less ineffability,means “wisdom” or “reason”. In the battle for persuasive speech, after the deployment of both ethos and pathos, one after the other, logos, in its own right,is capable of landing a profound blow. It’s timing, as noted, is of the essence: like a deadly weapon whose single blast is non-renewable and quickly exhausted, it mustn’t be wasted at the unsettled beginning of a fight. That is the time for ethos, after which pathos follows. To batter one’s audience with statistics and data (logos) before first establishing character (ethos), and then massaging emotion (pathos), would be an invitation to failure.

And though logos should always arrive last, it mustn’t be neglected and kept idle in the rear. It’s a bullet in the persuasive barrel that must be spent. It mustn’t accumulate rust as ethos and pathos flex their bulging muscles, relish their gathering victories, and dance in the spoils of their newfound celebrity of which, through the brilliance of their rhetorical feats, they’ve come into acquisition. Without logos, a persuasive speech will never achieve perfection, will never secure complete victory, and can never hope, after the dust is cleared and the words are counted, to recruit to its side those intelligent opponents over whom they hope to claim control.

We’ve just witnessed, at the conclusion of an extraordinary summer month, to which a terrible spring has yielded way, two weeks of virtual political conventions. The first was consumed by the efforts of the Democrats, a party to whom, not long ago, the path to an electoral victory in November appeared to be encouragingly open. Nonetheless, with practiced sincerity and rehearsed urgency, it was their attempt to dissuade us, once again, from repeating on an incumbent the mistake we made four years earlier on a parvenu. Three months’ time will tell if, indeed, they were effective.

That said, a leisurely, late-August assessment of their work can be made based on the items listed above. However convincing some of their arguments, and forceful their pleas, their attempts at persuasion were generally wanting. Based on the standards of persuasive speech as outlined above, they failed to meet the criteria with which a truly persuasive speaker ought to obsess herself. They omitted, in most of their speeches, that last component by which persuasive speech is most firmly tied together—logos. Much was said of the unwaveringly decent character (the ethos) of their chosen candidate, Joe Biden, and the empathy (the pathos) of which he’s an endless and deep source, but there was no mention of a logos by which all these great things might be consummated. There was no specific agenda to which, come January 2021, we might look forward, no plan for a novel policy to which we might attach our bruised and chastened hopes, by which this current one will be replaced.

Thus, in the absence of logos, their speeches were incompletely persuasive. Come November, that failure might result in a painful consequence.

The Republicans, providing the sequel to this remote, televisual string of campaign events, succeeded where the Democrats failed. Perhaps this was the consequence of an additional week’s preparation, or the ability to watch from afar the shortcomings of a competitor. They got to see the fruits of the other side’s labor, against whose ripeness, they might taste and measure the nutritive value of their own. They were able to detect, as the Democrats packed up and sought the refreshment of a new week, the land left untouched and fallow behind them, into which rhetorical seeds might be sown, out of which persuasive roots might grow.

The Republicans proved themselves, by far, the more capable farmers. For the most part, with occasional exceptions, they were able to include all three components of persuasive speech in their addresses: ethos, pathos, and logos. A labored testament to the gentler qualities and the endearing character of a coarse and rugged president were extoled; a reference to the murderous, rioting Bolsheviks (by whom, as recounted by his wife, the late Officer David Dorn was so wantonly killed) was emotionally made; and a vision for the future, as well as a recounting of the past, was heard from workaday women and men. Unemployment figures were announced, trade agreements celebrated, and projections for the next four years promulgated with the sobriety of statistical assurance. Facts and figures, especially when favorable, weren’t concealed, but highlighted with the confidence of a player in the lead.

In a variety of ways, with any number of permutations, these three boxes—those of ethos, pathos, and logos—were consistently checked. The Republicans, when contrasted with the Democrats, seem to have made a more concerted effort to ensure that they were marked.

Concerning the options of the political parties between which we have to choose, we have but two: Democrat and Republican. This, sadly, is the narrow binary to which we Americans—a people of immense diversity and anfractuous nuance—have been fated. Perhaps a time will come when our options will multiply, our candidates will awe us, and the omnivorousness of our palates will be better fed. That time, sadly, is not now, and this is the diet on which the body politic must subsist. Until then, however, if we are to be led by the rules of rhetoric, as opposed to the dictates of fancy, the Republican will necessarily be our choice. If rhetoric had its suffrage, its vote would be cast for the party of Trump.

At the very beginning of his great treatise on rhetoric—a work to whose immortal wisdom and constant guidance, all accomplished talkers still return—Aristotle enumerated the three crucial components on which every persuasive speech ought to be built. Combined, they form a sturdy triad of oratorical legs, a base of articulate strength upon which all good speech must stand. In the order of their descending import, a ranking of their superiority from first to last, the components on which the effective and, hopefully, persuasive speaker must lean are ethos, pathos, and logos.

I love muttering to myself the delightful music of these words—germinal not only to the language, but to the very thought of man—almost as much as I enjoy reading them in print. Perhaps, at the conclusion of this entry, you’ll feel much the same. Either way, one borrows them, obligingly, from the vaunted language of the Greeks, that once dominant, now antiquated tongue in which our garrulous Stagirite, our venerable Aristotle, once lectured and wrote. We take from him, from them, these three crisp and elegant words, these tightly-packaged expressions whose meanings are boundless, for which our ponderous English offers little in the way of a satisfactory translation.

Still, we must try our very best to render them intelligible to the learned ineloquence, to the rugged lassitude of our modern American tongue.

Ethos, in a word, relates to one’s character. It takes its meaning from the nature, personality, or disposition of the person upon whom our eye (or, in this case, our ear) is cast. Specifically, it’s an appeal to the character of the speaker, the stage-occupying figure out of whose dancing lips, the sweet words of a musical script flow. The audience before which he stands, upon whose curious heads his persuasive and honeyed droplets of knowledge will soon shower, must believe with absolute confidence in his professional qualification, as well as his personal merit. That by which it must be convinced, of whose falseness or deception, like a child whose intuition is supernaturally keen, it’ll be immediately aware, is his credibility and his character as it pertains to his work.

Without ethos, all else is lost; victory, in this fantastic battle of oratory, simply can’t be regained. The ethos, or the character of the speaker is, after all, “the most effective means of persuasion”, as Aristotle said—a boldly-drawn line from which our own opinion wouldn’t dare swerve. It is the singular tool without which, though doubtless equipped with other sharp rhetorical gadgets by his side, a man striving to persuade others can’t hope to succeed.

The primacy of ethos, then, is unquestioned. It enjoys the dominance of a ranking from which it can’t be moved.

Pathos, second on our list,is the next instrument to be brandished from the rhetorical utility belt. Coming at the heels of ethos, it too can be employed with dexterity, puissance, and tact. It refers not to reason, but to passion, not to character, but to feeling. It is sentimentality, and—so far as it’s measured against the iron weight of reason, or logos, the final, much-celebrated item on our list—it’s always supreme. Whereas the ethos concerns itself with the character of the speaker, the pathos appeals to the emotions of the audience, the crowd by whom the tear-provoking, laugh-inciting, anger-rousing words are to be received.

The human soul is an entity divided; it’s as though a chariot pulled by two horses, one charging to the left, the other mounted to the right. It’s the job of the charioteer, the symbol of the intellect and the ally of truth, the only part of man in whose grasp the reigns of navigation reside, to control and synchronize the vigorous movements of their thrust. This was the allegory put forward by Plato, the great thinker to whom much of Aristotle’s philosophy is owed. The one horse, more intractable than the other, is passion. He’s irrational, sensuous, and prone to an impulsivity at which his tranquil colleague sneers. As such, he’s the side to whom pathos will have far easier access, the part on which, in the deployment of his pathetic words, the successful orator will do well to focus.

It’s a focus by which he’ll richly profit; as the Scottish empiricist, David Hume famously noted, reason is, and always ought to be, “the slave of the passions”. In other words, the left horse, author of so much bucking and kicking, tossing and biting, is the equine tyrant in absolute control. This, in the age of modern psychology, seems to have become a maxim up to which no better proof or argument stands. It is by appealing, if not supplicating to these masterful passions that the audience, in the words of Aristotle, is put “into a certain frame of mind” by which it can then be moved. Of course, this “frame of mine” is one on which the pathetic speaker can then proceed to work, into which he can press his fingers, as though molding a pliant, soft piece of clay.

We’re left finally with logos. Third on our list, it’s the least influential component on which the edifice of persuasive speech is built. While still important, it’s a relatively weaker leg through which that building’s weight is to be borne. The term, since the time of Aristotle, has been adopted and redefined for every convenience of Christological use. It’s unburdened itself of its original Greek meaning to which, in a moment, we’ll try to repair. However, for now, in the pious understanding of the Western mind, it’s connoted with the divinity of God and his only begotten son. It’s the one term by which the startling prologue of John’s concluding gospel is remembered. To the devout Christian, logos is well-neigh synonymous with that sect’s eponymous founding Jew—the carpenter, moonlighting as a messiah, who absorbed our sins and edified our souls. 

For Aristotle, and for those centuries of Greek thinkers by whom the founder of the Christian faith was preceded, logos meant something rather different. In a word, it meant “reason”. It was the logic, so to speak, of sound discourse and intelligent thought, of cognizance, sagacity, and wisdom. It was the jewel of the philosopher and the conceit of the sophist, the pride of Plato and the affectation of Protagoras. It was the attainment of which, for differing purposes, all educated men were desirous. And while it was highly valued in those disparate fields, and insatiably chased by the hungry men by which they were tilled, it was not considered especially useful in the cultivation of an audience’s love.

Logos stirred not the audience’s soul. It was provocative of no movement by which an inch of persuasion might be gained. Its chief purpose, rather, was to supplement and strengthen the other two legs on which persuasive speech was to be balanced: ethos and pathos. To the former, it added credibility and to the latter, it transferred force. On its own, however, or placed, errantly, in a position to which all other components would be inferior, it would be dry, pallid, academic, and vacant. It would sound as though an empty statistic on a hollow graph. The audience would fail to succumb to the cold persuasion of such lifeless data. It would reject the barren, nearly automated regurgitation of so many stillborn facts. Character and emotion, ethos and pathos—those were the robes in which nude and colorless data, lifeless and ugly logos, must be dressed. They were the sparks by which those data might be enlivened, by which the audience might be persuaded.

As we enter the most politically-fraught time of the season, a sixty-day period during whose every hour, we’ll be inundated by campaign speech after speech, we might quietly repeat to ourselves these three rhetorical words: ethos, pathos, and logos. We mustn’t forget them, as they’ll be our guidance. We mustn’t neglect them, as they’ll be our loyal friend. They’ll serve as our rubric as we endeavor to assess the relative worth or demerit of every speaker. Those that are most persuasive will be the ones who can employ, in agreeable proportion and with a fidelity to the sequence described above, all three.

Allow us to scrutinize our politics, as seldom we do, with a sensitive, rhetorical, Aristotelian ear.