Obama & Favreau

Stanley Fish says "Barack Obama's inaugural address is proving to be more powerful in the reading than it was in the hearing." Professor Fish tells us that commentators on radio and television are now eagerly discussing the implications of an isolated sentence, clause, phrase or word. He says:

Obama doesn't deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate. 

The technical term for this kind of writing is parataxis, as opposed to hypotaxis. Again, Professor Fish:

One kind of prose is additive--here's this and now here's that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you're looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you. 

I wrote a speech like that once. I entitled it Ground Truths -- a phrase I got from Laurence Prusak when he was at IBM. He got it from the U.S. Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned, where it was used to describe "the rich truths of real situations experienced close up: on the ground, rather than from the heights of theory or generalization." In this speech, I took a CEO's observations about his industry and offered them up as a list of industry-wide ground truths. The remarks were delivered at an association meeting that no one else from his company attended. Within the company, the speech was never heard; it was only read, as it got passed around through the management ranks. Years later a member of the CEO's executive staff told me "we felt differently about our company when we read that speech." 

That's the power of words written as one meditative bead after another: an unknown number of readers over an unlimited period of time accepts the invitation to contemplate each independent thought, and then they change the way they feel about something. It can be a company -- or a country.

What's that? I didn't say anything about Favreau? Neither have the commentators. But we know he's back there, where he should be, helping an Obama speech be as Obama-esque as it can be.