To Reverse-Engineer the Mash-Up of Stump Speeches...

http://tinyurl.com/27l45k
Dana Milbank's recent article of the Washington Post is the latest of what appears to be a string of articles documenting how various candidates in the 2008 election have cut & pasted pieces of other politicians' speeches (there was another sketch of how HIllary and McCain borrowed rhetoric from Obama, but I can't find the article now…!).

Now, Dana Milbank should be lauded for his diligence, but much of what he's found here is arguably coincidence. But those rhetorical semblances that look too strong for mere coincidence, on the other hand, are interesting, and, I think, are these days better hunted for by regex than by humans. Like how they use Moss to keep CS 101 kids from copypasting code.

I don't know what it would mean, though, if we scripted everyone's script, if that's worth the time and energy to pursue.

Think back to Greek oratory: Lysias, Demosthenes, and the rest of the Big Ten were often copypasted wholesale, case after case, generation after generation, language after language, civilization after civilization. Just change the so-called "named entities," and maybe fiddle with the syntax, and you're in business.

That tradition would continue through English, with the so-called "elegant models" Addison, Cowley, Dryden, Tillotson, Temple, Swift, Johnson, Bacon, and Pope. The Founding Fathers copied these guys relentlessly – Benjamin Franklin grew up copying these speeches longhand to commit them to memory. John Adams noted in his journal how Demosthenes copied the history of Thucydides in entirety eight times over, in order to imbibe the richness of its style, and Adams bid us to do the same with Tillotson.

That was all the classical model. "The economy of classical language (Prose and Poetry) is mathematical [and] relational, which means that in it words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships. In it, no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of the thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection."(Barthes, Writing Degree Zero). The classical is the scriptable.

Since Romanticism's obsession with "creativity," a word once reserved for God alone, we've come to the whole "word is bond" thing. The rapper instead of the DJ (okay, imperfect analogy; every rapper cut & pastes like a Greek orator too these days).

But what does our accosting sense for originality mean when nary a politician writes his own speeches anyway?