My November 17 post on preachers who lift sermons from the Internet drew a rather strongly-worded reply from one Bruce D. Johnson of Germantown, Maryland. Mr. Johnson, a former preacher, says that I have no standing to object to this practice because I’m a speechwriter.

The full text of Mr. Johnson’s reply may be read as a comment on my November 17 post. But the pertinent paragraph is this:

“However, what I find most interesting about your comments, and I apologize ahead of time for the strength of these words, is how hypocritical your comments are. You are a speech writer. You write words that other people use, but don't attribute to you. In all of my years of listening to politicians (or CEOs who use speech writers), I have never heard either one say, "In the words of Hal Gordon, my speechwriter . . . " So why is it only when a preacher uses someone else's words that it becomes unethical?”

I sent Mr. Johnson a rather lengthy reply, addressing all the points he made in his comment. But I’m going to reprint the portion of my reply that deals with Mr. Johnson’s charge of hypocrisy, because I feel that I have to uphold not only my integrity, but the but the honor of the speechwriting profession.

So here is my answer.

Dear Mr. Johnson:

Hal Gordon

If any other speechwriters want to jump into the fray, I’d be most interested to read your reactions.

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech

David Murray, the editor of Speechwriter’s Newsletter (or “Preachwriter’s Newsletter” as he humorously styled himself in his comment on my last post) has weighed in on the issue of preachers using canned sermons downloaded from the Internet.

Intriguingly, David sees the words of a CEO or a politician as “somewhat less central to their mission” than a preacher’s. David maintains that what a politician does – i.e., leadership or voting record – is more important than what a politician says.

(David is a young whippersnapper who is perhaps not old enough to remember when Sen. Joe Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy for president in 1987 when it was revealed that he had stolen a speech word-for-word from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.)

In contrast, David feels that speaking from the heart is central to a preacher’s calling.

I suspect that most of us feel the same way. But Bruce Johnson, who speaks with the authority of a man who was a minister himself for 15 years, disagrees. He says, “Not only does a preacher need to be a communicator, but also a CEO kind of leader, a manager, a counselor, a strategic thinker and planner, a community leader, a care giver, a worship leader, a creative genius, a problem solver and conflict manager, a peacemaker, a financial expert, a fund raiser, etc. Preaching is just one small part of a ‘preacher's life.’”

Furthermore, says Mr. Johnson, “Preachers don't have a choice if they want to keep an audience. And you know this from your speechwriting. What could have captured people's attention a decade or two ago, won't work any longer. Technology has changed all of that. It's similar to great food. If you've never had gourmet food, Bob's Big Boy works. But once you've been exposed to Michel Richard's Citronelle or Tom Colicchio's Grammery Tavern, Bob's Big Boy just doesn't cut it any longer. If a preacher wants to be effective these days, he’s got to be an edutainer.” [sic]

Is that what a preacher is today? An “edutainer”?

To be fair, I suppose we could take note of the fact that most of the teachings of Jesus have some down to us in the form of parables. And I don’t think it’s at all irreverent to suggest that Jesus was aware of the entertainment value of a good story. But He didn’t download his parables off the Internet.

I’m afraid it’s hard for me to regard church as just another entertainment option. In my rather lengthy reply to Bruce Johnson, I said something that I did not include in my last post.

So I’ll end with it here: “The rector of my own church (I’m Episcopalian) likes to remind his parishioners that they are not the audience on Sunday mornings. God is. That’s why it’s called worship.”

Amen.

Technorati Tag: speechwriter; speechwriting

To leave the subject of canned sermons on a light note, I’m going to share a story that I heard Sen. Russell Long tell some years ago.

There was once an earnest young Baptist preacher who was about to give his first sermon. For six days he labored long and diligently over the manuscript, giving it all piety and scholarship he had in him.

And on the seventh day … he forgot it!

It was only when he mounted the pulpit on Sunday morning and reached into his coat pocket that he realized he had left the sermon behind on his kitchen table. Panic seized him. Under the stress of the moment, he found himself unable to recall a single word of the sermon that had cost him so much effort.

With a sinking feeling, he decided that there was nothing to do but ‘fess up. Looking out at the upturned, expectant faces of his congregation he declared, “Brothers and sisters, I apologize to you from the bottom of my heart. I did have a sermon prepared for today, but I left it behind, and I can’t for the life of me remember what was in it. So this morning, I’ll just have to speak as the Lord directs me.”

The young minister paused, wiped his forehead, raised his right hand, and in a voice throbbing with sincerity he added: “But I promise you –- I’ll do better next week.”

Islamic fundamentalists do not believe in pluralism. The believe that Islam is the only way –- not just for them, but for everybody. Nevertheless, they understand how to use pluralism to serve their ends. In the process, they have highlighted a threat to free speech that the advocates of political correctness have not fully appreciated.

Consider the Islamist demand that all negative references to the Prophet Mahomet be suppressed. On its face, the demand is outrageous. But in reply, the Islamists point to laws in western democracies like Germany and Austria that make it a crime to deny the Holocaust. If free speech can be limited to avoid giving offense to one religious group, they say, then certainly it can be limited to avoid giving offense to Muslims.

It’s hard to argue against that kind of logic. Rather, the argument sharply illustrates how insisting on political correctness can subtly subvert the right to freedom of speech.

Holocaust-denial laws are but one example of how political correctness can set us on a slippery slope to censorship. In October, the French National Assembly approved a law that would make it a criminal offense to deny the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I. Who’s next?

In some American states, secondary school students are not only required to study the Irish potato famine, but are required to study it as an example of “genocide.” In other words, the “party line” is that the Irish were deliberately starved by their British overlords.

Also in America, colleges and universities have experimented with speech codes designed to ban “offensive speech.” The college administrators say that they are merely trying to promote civility and assure minority students a “non-threatening” environment. But some students have complained that these codes are being used to silence any opinion that liberal academics find offensive. A number of courts have agreed with the students and struck down the codes as violations of free speech.

In the musical 1776, there’s a great moment where the Continental Congress is debating the text of the Declaration of Independence. Some of the more timid members of the Congress are shown trying to soften the language of the Declaration, to avoid offending Britons who might be inclined to side with America against the Crown. At length, John Adams can endure the temporizing no longer. “Gentlemen!” he bursts out. “May I remind you that we’re going to have a revolution? I’m afraid we’re going to have to offend somebody!”

Free speech –- if it is truly free –- will usually manage to offend somebody. That’s why we need to be guided by the First Amendment and not political correctness when it comes to letting people speak their minds.

Novelist and Cambridge don Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once offered the following advice to writers: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it –- whole-heartedly -– and delete it before sending your manuscript to the press. Murder your darlings.” [Italics original.]

What Sir Arthur meant, I presume, is that good writing is like a proper English gentleman. It does not draw attention to itself. If it does, it causes the reader to focus on the writing, rather than on what the writer is trying to say.

As a writer myself, I know that. But, being a writer, I can’t help being seized from time to time with the impulse to perpetrate an exceptionally fine piece of writing. When I do, if I don’t have the good sense to delete it, I usually find that I have an editor or a client who will do it for me.

Once, I was asked to ghost a holiday season op/ed for General Colin Powell. Determined to produce a piece worthy of the client and the occasion, I labored doggedly over the opening sentence, re-writing it at least a dozen times before I finally arrived at this: “Each December, during the darkest and most desolate days of the year, we dauntless mortals do the incredible: We celebrate.”

That was the keynote. In the ensuing paragraph, I talked about how, during the month of December, we gather our friends and families around us and make merry. If we are Christians, we light Christmas trees; if we are Jewish, we light the menorah; if we are African American, we may light the seven candles of Kwanzaa. We banish the gloom by turning the darkest month of the year into a season of light.

I thought it was good piece overall, but I positively doted on that opening sentence. I loved the rhythm, the alliteration, and the flow. I marveled that I had produced something that good.

So, naturally, that sentence was the first thing to be drummed out of the op/ed by General Powell when he saw the draft. “It’s depressing,” he told me.

Well, I was used to the General’s edits, and he did like the rest of the piece, so this Christmas story had a happy ending. But it was a stern reminder of how right Quiller-Couch was in warning writers not to fall in love with their special effects.

Don’t fall in love with them. Murder your darlings. If you don’t, someone else will.

Remember George Romney? If you don’t, he was the politically moderate and craggily handsome Governor of Michigan who was a serious candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 1968.

Then came the infamous interview.

Romney was asked to explain why he had switched from supporting to opposing American involvement in Vietnam. According to Romney, his previous support was the result of his having been given –- in his words –- “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get” when he visited the country in 1965.

Romney might have lost the nomination in any event. But if he had simply said that he had changed his mind on the issue, instead of trying to pin the responsibility on the military officers who briefed him, he might at least have spared himself the avalanche of ridicule that the “brainwashing” remark brought down on his head.

Overnight, Romney –- a decent, intelligent man and respected public servant –- was reduced to a figure of malicious fun. “Heard about poor George Romney?” ran a popular joke of the period. “Since they washed his brain he can’t do a thing with it.”

You would think an object lesson like that would have taught George’s son Mitt the importance of taking responsibility for his public stands. But it didn’t.

Mitt, a successful governor, political moderate and presidential aspirant like his father, led the charge against gay marriage in Massachusetts in the hope of winning points with the Religious Right. The gambit appeared to be working. But then a letter he wrote in 1994 in support of gay rights came to light earlier this month.

As a candidate for Senator, running against Ted Kennedy, Romney sent a letter to the Log Cabin Club of Massachusetts, a gay Republican group, in which he promised to outdo Kennedy in promoting gay concerns. “For some voters, it might be enough to simply match my opponent’s record in this area,” Romney enthused. “But I believe we can and must do better. If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern. My opponent cannot do this. I can and will.”

The revelation of this letter put Romney in a crossfire. Gay groups and their friends called Romney a hypocrite, while the grand inquisitors of the Religious Right told him, as Ricky used to tell Lucy, that he had some “’splainin” to do.

So Romney ‘splained away.

In a statement issued yesterday, Romney said that there was no inconsistency in his position on gay issues: He was opposed –- no, wait, his exact words were that he was “not in favor” of discrimination of any kind, including discrimination based on sexual preference. And he said that he was also committed to preserving traditional marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

In short, he tried to duck the issue by pretending that there was no contradiction between his earlier and later positions.

Sorry, Governor, it won’t wash. You said in your 1994 letter that you supported “equality” for gays and lesbians. The principle of equal rights includes the right to marry. Also, when you said you were “not in favor” of discrimination based on “sexual preference” you were sending another mixed signal. Sexual orientation implies a condition that at person cannot control. Sexual “preference” implies a choice. You were offering a sop to the Religious Right while hoping that the gay lobby wouldn’t notice the subtle distinction.

You flip-flopped, Governor, and then you tried to avoid responsibility for it. Your campaign for President will probably come to the same end as your dad's -- and you will have even less excuse.

It was December of 1939. Attempts to achieve peace on earth through appeasement had failed, and a woefully unprepared Britain had declared war on Hitler. While his subjects hung blackout curtains over their windows in preparation for air raids, King George VI struggled to compose his Christmas radio broadcast.

Unhappy George! A shy, stammering man for whom public speaking was torture, he had reluctantly assumed the throne three years earlier when his older brother had skipped off to marry an American divorcee. Salvaging the monarchy’s prestige had seemed a daunting task then, but it was nothing compared to the burdens of being a wartime king. The Christmas broadcast was only the beginning of what would be demanded of him in the years ahead.

Fortunately, the King had help. Someone (it had to have been a speechwriter) gave him some lines from an obscure book of poetry that had been published about thirty years before. They expressed perfectly the message of hope that the King wished to give his people, and he used them with great effect at the end of the broadcast:

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied,
“Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.”

The King concluded: “May that Almighty hand uphold and guide us all.”

The poem made the broadcast. One might almost say that it made King George.

It is impossible to exaggerate the effect that this brief radio address had on British morale, or on the British people’s affection for their King. Forever after, the lines he quoted on the air during that fateful broadcast were associated in the public mind with George VI. When the King died in 1952, they were engraved on his tomb.

The author of the quote was later identified as one Minnie Louise Haskins, a retired lecturer at the London School of Economics. But the person who sent the quote to the King remains unknown. That is as it should be. Speechwriters should remain anonymous, but that doesn’t mean that there are no heroes in our profession.

I wish happy holidays to speechwriters everywhere –- you’ve earned them.

Former President Gerald Ford, who died yesterday at the age of 93, will probably not rank as one of our greatest presidents. But his work to unite the nation after the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate will rank as a noble achievement.

Ford, who became president in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, entered the White House uniquely handicapped. He had no mandate from the American people. He was the first vice president to have been appointed to that office. He succeeded Nixon barely nine months later, thus becoming the first president to have been appointed to office.

Perhaps no president ever had a weaker political hand to play. But Ford felt that he had a duty to bring the American people together, and he rose to the occasion magnificently.

Speaking to the nation on August 9, 1974, little more than 30 minutes after Nixon’s resignation was announced, he said this:

Mr. Chief Justice, my dear friends, my fellow Americans:

Thank you.

Healing words. Ford would later title his memoirs, A Time to Heal. He was bitterly attacked for pardoning Richard Nixon a month later, and that action may have been the main reason why he lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

He must have known that the pardon would cost him dearly. But since he felt that this was the only way the nation could put Watergate behind us and move on, he was willing to pay the price.

Gerald Ford did his best for America. Perhaps that is how he should be remembered.