Epitaphios Logos

Yesterday, I guessed that there would be an enormous number of responses from rhetorical scholars to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday in the months and years to come. Because I am what I am, I’m going to take an initial pass at placing the speech (and Palin’s) into the context of rhetorical scholarship, at least in one specific way.


One of the first things to notice about Obama’s speech is that it falls into a genre: the funeral or memorial oration. A lot of great speeches, from Pericles’ Funeral Oration that Thucydides offers us in his History of the Peloponnesian War to the Gettysburg Address to President Reagan’s speech following the Challenger disaster.

As the reference to Pericles suggests, the funeral oration as a genre of oratory goes back to ancient Greece, Athens in particular. In Greek, the term for these kinds of speeches was epitaphios logos.

Obama's Speech: An Initial Look

I'm postponing for a day or two my promised (threatened?) thoughts on how to talk about how and why the Arizona shooting stands in a particular symbolic relationship to larger events.  In the wake of President Obama's speech last night, I've been thinking quite a bit about why it was as effective as it was (already being touted as one for the history books). 

My guess is that there will be plenty of panels at the National Communication Association convention next year (as well as many other presentations and journal articles) devoted to looking not only at Obama's speech from any number of perspectives, but in comparison with the statement from Sarah Palin issued hourse before.

I'll take an initial stab at that tomorrow, but I wanted to pass along a bit of quick-and-dirty rhetorical analysis that appeared in todays Guardian.  They did a word count on the number of times specific words showed up in each speech and the percentage of the total text that this represented.

Obama's Peaceable (and Sensible) Ground Zero Mosque Rhetoric

A bunch of folks, including the sometime/part-time governor of Alaska, have accused President Obama of being either A) wrong in his remarks about the “Ground Zero” mosque, or B) unclear or contradictory in his remarks. Neither of these accusations is true. In fact, Obama’s statements on this issue have been entirely correct morally and factually and also entirely consistent. I’d add that I think they are a great example of what “peaceful” rhetoric can be.



Obama said on Friday that Muslims, like anybody else in America, are completely free to practice religion in any way they see fit, as long as they do so within the context of the law. On Saturday, he pointed out that he had *not* said anything one way or the other about the “wisdom” of building this particular mosque, but simply that it was absolutely within the law to do so.


Would we want a president to say anything other than this? The entire purpose of having freedom of religion enshrined in the Bill of Rights is precisely to point out that it doesn’t make a bit of difference what anyone-- you, I, or even the president—thinks about someone else’s right to practice their religion. It’s not a matter of opinion or majority rule. You get to worship God (or not) the way you want to, particularly on your own property. No one, and I mean no one, can possibly offer an argument that says the government could or should interfere with the building of this mosque. At least, no one can offer an argument that would be consistent with well over two centuries of Constitutional law as well as the most basic tenets of the American form of government.