Thursday, January 21, 2021

Biden's Speech

This is a more theoretical post. For one of my postgraduate degrees, I studied more than ten-thousand pages of text by (mostly) American leaders. I found that, to interpret them, one had to examine so-called oppositions in the text, of which there are various kinds. Yesterday I read Joe Biden's inaugural speech. I came to it fresh, without expectations. But it didn't look good on analysis. Take the simple sentence, "Much to do, much to heal, much to restore ..." Now find the oppositions. On the surface of it, it is a unifying speech, but just beneath, it is divisive, aggressive. Here is what he might have said if we reconstruct these few words. Perhaps, "More to do, more to heal, more to restore ..." OBSERVATION: One might say that his predecessor was a catastrophe. However, that is not an excuse for an aggressive and divisive speech. It is interesting that it is hard to hide what goes on behind words.

POSTSCRIPT: My research is here in a 167-page "mini" thesis: A Deconstuctionist Critique

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