From Death Sentence (Don Watson 2003) pp108-110
It may be that the current Prime Minister simply lacks inspiration and matches his language to this absence. It is just as likely that his blandness derives from the kind of politics they all play in these times: the poll-driven kind which demands that leaders stay in touch with the people, even if it means that leaders speak to us as inarticulately as the witnesses to accidents and sport we see on television. The difference between the feigned spontaneity, outrage and excitement seen in authoritarian societies and dictatorships is different solely in degree from democratic leaders who are agitated only by what agitates public opinion. More commonly, our leaders are primed to insert the bit which is the currency of political exchange — the grab or sound-bite — regardless of the consequences for language, coherence or self-respect. This creates a curious and debilitating paradox: to seem like ordinary people our leaders try not to say anything too difficult or challenging. But they must say something, partly to maintain the impression that they know something, or believe something, but mainly because that’s how it works: it’s grist to the mill, so they try to say the thing that will have the most effect; a pointed, distilled sort of thing in what they reckon is language the mob will understand.
The result is that people of ordinary intelligence notice something unnatural in their gestures and something distracted in their expression, because the politician can’t hide the fact that he’s waiting for the chance to say what he’s been primed to say, and when he gets that chance he jumps at it with unnatural haste. But because it’s rehearsed it doesn’t sound natural, and chances are he will add some dog-eared phrase like ‘at this particular point in time’ or ‘a window of opportunity’ or ‘in terms of a window of opportunity’ or ‘at the end of the day’, and viewers will mentally yawn as their brains struggle for oxygen, and go back to the ironing for stimulation. In his efforts to appear ordinary the politician runs the risk that ordinary people will think him inconsequential or a drongo: especially if he gets tangled between the grab he’s dredging from his memory and other mental processes necessary to survive or ‘think on your feet’, in which event he (in this case the US President) might say something like ‘You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test’; or ‘More and more of our imports come from overseas’; or ‘I’ve been misunderestimated’. Or, in reaching for something grand, he might say the family is where ‘our wings take dream’.
It is sad that politicians rarely attempt to put their case complete with ambiguities and contradictions; that is to say, as ordinary people generally put their cases to each other. A politician of this kind might be very popular, especially if he also had beliefs and principles. But of course this is a difficult effect to achieve when you are talking through journalists, and your advisers’ words are lying like dead things in a front chamber of your brain, or you have a script in front of you which you only half believe. It’s out of daily political reportage that those dying phrases come spinning slowly; and, as they do with ‘Neighbours’ or ‘Home and Away’, the people imitate them without meaning to. You’ll hear them say at this point in time in workaday conversation, or he would not resile at funerals. I am grateful for this window of opportunity to pay tribute to my father. Or, We will never forget the way Muriel pushed the envelope. And then the people who write the soap operas hear it, and their characters begin to say they will not resile and they have pushed the envelope; and the language becomes less like a language and more like just what happens when you open your mouth; less like an expression of a mental process and more like gruel or reflux.
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