Hello, all you fine folks out in cyberspace. I'm Hal Gordon and I'll be standing in for David Murray while he's in China. I just hope I can live up to the very flattering introduction Dave gave me on his departure. This is my first attempt at blogging, so I'm a bit nervous. Reading "Doonesbury" recently didn't do much for my confidence. Gary Trudeau suggests that blogging is for "angry, semi-employed losers who are too untalented or too lazy to get real jobs in journalism."

Fortunately, though, this blog is about the speechwriter's slant on public affairs, and I've got over 20 years' experience as a speechwriter. So, I'm ready, I'm set. Let the pontificating begin.

Here goes:

July 4 speeches tend to be as gaudy and bombastic as the showers of fireworks that end the day預nd as short-lived. I think that's probably for the best. Most of those florid July 4th addresses deserve to be forgotten. True patriotism goes beyond mindless self-congratulation; it includes honestly and soberly facing up our national shortcomings as well as our successes.

That's why one of the best 4th of July speeches in our history was given on July 5, in the year 1852. The speaker was the great African-American leader Frederick Douglass, and his topic was, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

Douglass was an imposing figure, both physically and intellectually. Photographs of him show a man of iron determination, with a leonine head and piercing dark eyes. A runaway slave, largely self-educated, he willed himself to become a master of the written and spoken word. He was a superb orator, and his topic was deliberately provocative. He was challenging Americans to live up to the principles they celebrated the day before. Either all men, regardless of race, were created equal, and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness熔r the Declaration of Independence was a hollow mockery, and America itself was a fraud.

Said Douglass: "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!"

Ultimately, Douglass' faith in America was vindicated; the serpent of slavery was crushed. But even today, we still cannot claim that we are fully living up to the grand promises embodied in the Declaration of Independence. So, on 4th of July, let us celebrate those promises, but let us spend the remaining days of the year working to ensure that those promises are kept.

This year's July 4th observance comes shortly after the House of Representatives approved a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to ban flag burning, and shortly before the Senate is expected to take up the issue.

While the amendment has failed on four previous occasions, there is a good chance that this time it will garner to two-thirds majority necessary for it to pass the Senate and be sent to the states for ratification.

There is no question that desecrating the flag enflames the passions of patriotic Americans. But at the same time, the best argument I ever read against the flag-burning amendment was made by an American whose patriotism was unimpeachable, and who knew, better than anyone else, why such an amendment would be a mistake.

His name was James H. Warner. He was a Marine flyer during the Vietnam War, who spent five and a half hellish years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. During that time he was starved, tortured, kept in solitary confinement for 13 consecutive months, and wracked with diseases and internal parasites brought on by his mistreatment.

In an all-out effort to break his will, one of his interrogators showed him a photograph of anti-war demonstrators in the U.S. burning the American flag. "There!" the North Vietnamese officer gloated. "People in your country protest against your cause. That proves that you are wrong."

"No," Warner replied. "That proves that I am right. In my country we are not afraid of freedom, even if it means that people disagree with us."

I'll let Mr. Warner tell what happened next: "The officer was on his feet in an instant, his face purple with rage. He smashed his fist onto the table and told me to shut up. While he was ranting, I was surprised to see pain, compounded by fear, in his eyes. I have never forgotten that look, nor have I forgotten the satisfaction I felt at using his tool, the picture of the burning flag, against him."

James Warner told this story in an op/ed he wrote for the Washington Post in July of 1989, after the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning was protected as free speech under the Bill of Rights. It was that decision that launched the campaign for a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution.

Mr. Warner's argument against the amendment is as compelling now as the day he wrote it: "We don't need the Constitution in order to punish those who burn our flag. They burn the flag because they hate America and they are afraid of freedom. What better way to hurt them than with the subversive idea of freedom? … Don't be afraid of freedom, it is the best weapon we have."

Amen to that.

In response to yesterday's wave of terror bombings in London, I offer this quotation from a speech delivered by Winston Churchill on July 14, 1940, during the Battle of Britain: "We would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved."

My sympathy to the victims and their families. May the perpetrators of this outrage suffer the same fate as the Nazis.

Any speechwriter who expects that he or she will have to write a graduation address in the future (and that includes most of us), should look up Steve Jobs' commencement address to the graduating class of Stanford University last month. It's brief, it's uplifting and it's full of practical advice for new grads.

I've always maintained that the reason why most graduation speeches fail is because most graduation speakers fall into the trap of thinking that the occasion is about them, instead of about the graduates. So they use the occasion to stroke their own egos or promote their pet causes. No wonder they bore their audiences.

In his own address, Steve Jobs talks about himself, but he shares experiences from his life and career that new graduates can relate to and learn from. Essentially, he tells the graduates to live courageously, to do what they love and to trust that if they are true to themselves, the choices that they make will bring them success.

The core paragraph is this: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

That's good advice for anyone.

You can access the complete text of Jobs' address here.

Hal Holbrook revived his one-man show about Mark Twain in New York City last month. It is a role he has played intermittently, but always successfully, since 1959. I'm dating myself, but I first saw him as Twain at New York's Longacre Theatre in 1966 when I was in high school. I saw him a decade later at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, poking good-natured fun at fundamentalism in the heart of the Bible Belt – and making the locals laugh in spite of themselves.

According to one Prof. Louis J. Budd of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, there are now over 100 actors currently making a living as Mark Twain impersonators.

Apparently, Mark Twain is as popular today on the lecture platform as he ever was, and it is not hard to see why. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance of Twain's brand of humor cannot help but be struck by how fresh, how biting and how pertinent it remains, even nearly a hundred years after his death.

Consider just a few random examples:

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live."

"July 4. Statistics show we lose more fools on this day than all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number now left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is no inadequate, the country has grown so."

"People seem to think they are citizens of the Republican Party and that that is patriotism and sufficiently good patriotism. I prefer to be a citizen of the United States."

On one occasion, Twain was debating Andrew Carnegie on the decision to put "In God we Trust" on the nation's coins. "After all, Twain," huffed Carnegie, "America is a Christian country." Twain was unimpressed. "Why Carnegie," he replied, "so is Hell."

Twain always seems to have the last word on any subject, which is perhaps why is most-quoted remark remains, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

I had intended to make my next posting tomorrow, but then I remembered that today is Bastille Day, and decided that I could not let the occasion pass without comment.

Bastille Day, of course, commemorates the storming of the fortress-prison of that name in Paris in 1789. The event is generally regarded as the start of the French Revolution, and the anniversary of it is a great national holiday in France.

Those outside of France are not always inclined to join in the festivities, however. Back in 1989, on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ruffled Gallic feathers when, on an official visit to Paris, she stoutly declared, "All the French Revolution created was a pile of headless bodies with a dictator standing on top."

Mrs. Thatcher was characteristically blunt. She was also characteristically right – and not merely because the Revolution produced Napoleon.

As historian Simon Schama has pointed out, the French Revolution was as much a step back as a step forward in the annals of human progress. The revolutionaries had read Rousseau. They believed with him that men and women are inherently good, and are corrupted by cicilization. To be happy, then, mortals must return to a simpler, more "natural' way of life.

And the French Revolution did indeed do much to simplify life in France. Schama notes, for example, that before the Revolution, France had been the richest country in Europe. But by 1795, a mere half-dozen years after the storming of the Bastille, the total value of French trade was less than half what it had been before the Revolution began. Ten years later, when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, French trade was worth only 60 percent of its value in 1789.

The Revolution was also anti-scientific. The Royal Academy of Science was abolished, merely because it was "Royal." On top of that, a revolutionary tribunal sent France's top scientist, Antoine Lavoisier, to the guillotine. When Lavoisier pleaded for a brief reprieve to finish an important experiment he was working on, he was curtly informed, "We need no more scientists in France."

Mrs. Thatcher was severely criticized for her undiplomatic assessment of the French Revolution, but she remained unmoved. On leaving Paris, she presented French President Francois Mitterand with a little gift: a nicely bound edition of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

High repartee is difficult enough to achieve in miniature – the quip, the snappy comeback, or the one-liner. To sustain it through an entire speech is a notable achievement.

One of the best examples I know of is a speech by Cherokee scholar Dr. Rayna Green in 1981. Dr. Green was speaking to a national meeting of Native American women educators and political activists. She devoted her remarks to expounding on the need for a "Museum of the Plains White Person."

In her view, the need for such a museum was urgent: "We are deeply concerned that White Culture appears to be dying out … The once elegant and distinguished language of White People has deteriorated so severely that almost none of those remaining speak it well; furthermore, they seem to share no mutually intelligible language. Their religion is in a virtual state of collapse. And their traditional art forms have been devastated, of course."

That was for openers. Dr. Green's satire grows more wickedly funny with each succeeding paragraph. In due course, she informs her audience that through eminent domain, Indian authorities have acquired at least 80 percent of the white cemeteries in this country.

This, she continues with a straight face, is only the beginning: "We have begun our national campaign to acquire the bones of famous white people, since they themselves insisted for centuries that we can all learn so much from studying and displaying such remains. And, accepting their notions of reverence for the exhibition of the dead and goods from graves, White People will be honored to have the remains of their grandmothers and grandfathers on display. We have just acquired what I think is quite an important and moving find, the bones of John Wayne, the White Culture Hero, and we plan to acquire the remains of many other famous white persons. You might guess who we have our sights on."

(John Wayne, who died in 1979, was buried in an unmarked grave, precisely because his relations feared vandals or grave robbers.)

In any event, Dr. Green's witty address makes a serious point. It forces White Americans to reconsider their attitudes toward Native Americans, and achieves this object without lecturing or scolding. Dr. Green merely invites White Americans to trade places with Native Americans for a moment, and see if we would like our own attitudes toward Native Americans and their culture to be applied to us.

The complete text of Dr. Green's speech can be found in that excellent anthology, In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century, edited by former Senator Robert Torricelli and Andrew Carroll. (Kodansha International, 1999).

"Oyez!" if you didn't know, is Latin for "Hear ye!" The word is still used to open sessions of the U.S. Supreme Court and lesser courts throughout the land.

It's an appropriate starting place to talk about President Bush's address last night nominating John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court.

The President's address was notably brief, and notably bland, although Mr. Bush permitted himself a swipe at judicial activism when he said that his nominee would "strictly apply the Constitution and laws not legislate from the bench."

Conservatives today are unhappy with judges who "legislate from the bench." And yet there was a time in our history when liberals had the same complaint.

In the mid-1930s, the great majority of Americans believed that the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt offered us the best way out of the Great Depression. But during those years, the Supreme Court was declaring large chunks of the New Deal unconstitutional. Public feeling against the Court ran high. The justices were derided as "nine old men" standing in the way of progress.

So President Roosevelt went on national radio and delivered one of his famous "fireside chats." In this address, he proposed to appoint one new Supreme Court justice for every member of the Court over the age of seventy. That would fix the "nine old men."

I recently looked up the text of that fireside chat. It is a gem of speech – reasonable, moderate in tone and very persuasive. President Roosevelt pointed out that there was nothing sacred about having nine Supreme Court justices. The Constitution does not specify the number of justices, and the number, in fact, fluctuated throughout our history until custom fixed it at nine. Furthermore, the President went to great lengths to reassure people that his plan was, as he put it, "no attack on the Court." Rather, he said, "it seeks to restore the Court to its rightful and historic place in our system of constitutional government."

Yet for all his popularity, all his political acumen, and all his skills as a great communicator -- and for all the unpopularity of the court at the time – FDR failed to persuade the public to support his proposal. Instinctively, the people recognized that if the President got his way, the independence of our judicial branch of government would be compromised.

There's a lesson there for President Bush. In the presidential election of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt had carried 46 of what were then the 48 states of the union. But still he failed in his proposal to add new justices to the Supreme Court. Even today, we remember this episode as FDR's "court-packing scheme" – and it ranks one of the greatest setbacks ever dealt a popular president. Where Supreme Court nominations are concerned, people are less likely to be swayed by what the President says, than by their own gut feelings as to whether or not the Supreme Court is being stacked one way or another.

David Murray will be back on Monday from his adventures in the Middle Kingdom – or China, as it is better known – so this will be my last post. I've enjoyed contributing to David's blog, and I hope my submissions have been of some interest.

I'll leave you, fellow speechwriters, with a favorite quotation of mine, which I hope will inspire you as it always has me. It's from the playwright Maxwell Anderson: "If you practice an art, be proud of it an make it proud of you … It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right."

So let us hold up our heads.

Wishing you good words,
Hal Gordon

Catching up with correspondence, planning Speechwriters Conference

First order of fog-clearing: Thank you, Hal Gordon for doing a magnificent job filling in for me while I rode plains, trains, buses and bikes across China for three weeks. One stop at an Internet café in LiJiang told me all was right—and had never been more right—with this blog.

Many impressions to share regarding China, but as I patiently wait for them to congeal into words—my how-was-China spiel thus far is limited to a wide-eyed, "BIG"—I'd like to invite all readers of this blog to send me proposals for sessions for the 2006 Speechwriter's Conference, to be held in February in D.C.

I've got lots on the conference docket already, but room for a few more and a deadline that looms. I'll be open to session ideas this week and next. Just e-mail me a couple of paragraphs about what you'll teach your colleagues and how your experience qualifies you to teach it and we'll take it from there.

Back at you soon ….

Why don't the Chinese ever say anything controversial? Why don't they ask difficult questions? Why don't they express their opinions? What are they afraid of?

These were questions I idly wondered about one evening on the train from Beijing to Chengdu as I read my book and waited for the lights to go out. I'd been through several days of boring lectures and careful answers from a young and articulate Chinese tour guide and participated, through translation by our Chinese-speaking tour leader, in more careful conversations with other Chinese people.

I had asked the front desk at the hotel if I could pay to have my hand-washed laundry dried, only to have them send up a man from housekeeping with a hair-dryer. He stood in my room, not looking at me, training the dryer on my shirts. Why hadn't I just been told, "No"?

Before the lights went out on the train I came across this passage in Paul Theroux's book, Riding the Red Rooster; he's talking about a Mr. Fang, sent by the Chinese government to watch him as he toured China back in 1989:

"He looked up and smiled at me, which depressed me even more, because I suspected that he was sad. Then I decided that he was not sad at all. He was like so many other Chinese—reserved and fatalistic and steeling themselves against disappointment. Yes, the Great Wall was a masterpiece and the Tang Dynasty had been glorious and they had managed to thrash the Japanese, and they had invented poison gas, toilet paper and the decimal point; but they also had a long history of convulsions and reverses. … Look at the upheavals that had taken place in just the past hundred years or so: the Taiping revolt, the humiliating colonialism of Europe and Japan, the Boxer Rebellion, the fall of the empire in 1911, the republic of Sun Yat-sen, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the battling between Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang and Mao's communists, the Great Leap Forward and all the other witch-hunts and hysterical purges that followed the emergence of the People's Republic, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Who wouldn't be uneasy? And these sudden agonies were undoubtedly the reason that few people ever showed confidence in the future. It was better not to think about it. And it was a loss of face to seem disappointed, which was another reason the Chinese never opened presents in front of the giver (nor commented on the gift, no matter how large or small), and why their impulse when startled was always to laugh."

Thought totally out of scale in severity and scope against the "change is the only constant" world of corporate America, these constant tidal waves, and their effect on the jiggling corks in the water, are too familiar to ignore.

My sister was on this trip, and she noticed that our tour guide was careful in answering our questions about the continuation of China's one-child policy the diminishing of welfare benefits. My sis theorized that she was nervous because her employer, China International Travel Service, was a unit of the Chinese government. I replied that in the U.S., tour guides are generally bland and apolitical in their opinions, too. But not because they are afraid of offending the government; because they are afraid of offending a customer, and drawing the wrath of their employers, who censure any employee who speaks his or her mind with one bullying word: "inappropriate."

What, I wondered when my compartment turned black, is the difference?

China: Best understood by corporate Americans (Part Two)

One of the many small ironies of modern China is the specter of urban street hustlers selling copies of Mao Zedong's Quotations from Chairman Mao, and bartering cheerfully on the price.

I bought three of these "little red books," as they were called when every Chinese youth owned one, to read and to wave a Party rallies in Tian'anmen Square and all over China.

On busses and trains, I idly read them myself. The old Chairman's thoughts read like the "Chairman's Thoughts"—those columns you still see in employee publications even today.

Drawn from his speeches and other writings, the quotations do what they are supposed to do: Leave the Great Helmsman lots of room for latitude.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure to introduce Mao Zedong, business consultant:

• On a sense of urgency. "We must not become complacent over any success. We should check our complacency and constantly criticize our shortcomings, just as we should wash our faces and sweep the floor every day to remove the dirt and keep them clean."

• On leadership. "Don't wait until problems pile up and cause a lot of trouble before trying to solve them. Leaders must march ahead of the movement, not lag behind it."

• On problem-solving: "In this world, things are complicated and are decided by many factors. We should look at problems from different aspects, not just one."

• On core values: "We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing."

• On strategic thinking: "Without preparedness superiority is not real superiority and there can be no initiative either. Having grasped this point, a force which is inferior but prepared can often defeat a superior enemy by surprise attack."

• On behavior: "We should be modest and prudent, guard against arrogance and rashness, and serve the Chinese people heart and soul."

As I'll discuss in my September "Beyond the Lectern" column in SN, clichés and platitudes are still the most popular form of corporate and government rhetoric in China. Chinese platitudipuses make our platitudipuses look like … well, their platitudipuses.

To wit: When Yahoo! China's president stepped down while I was there, he told China Daily, "After working at Yahoo! for one and a half years, maybe I should have a rest and spend more time with my family."