A Three Legged Stool

    I find this to be annoying.  So, I'll annoy you.  Tom Selleck is a favorite B-List movie actor.  I like him.  One of my all-time favorite lines comes from him.  In " Quigley Down Under"  he says, " This ain't Dodge City and you ain't Bill Hickock."  It comes in handy as a put down in a gun rights debate.  Recently, he appeared in a commercial for some sort of financial thing or other.  In that commercial, in his best, gee shucks, sincere tones he told everyone how unstable a three legged stool was in comparison to a four-legged chair.  That is simply untrue.
     The production of an advertisement like this is a several hundred thousand dollar enterprise.  In the upper, decision-making process there are dozens of experienced, well-educated people.  How did they miss this?
     Any decent craftsman knows a three-legged stool is far more stable on an uneven surface and doesn't need precisely made legs to be stable on any surface.  You never have to stick a match pack or some other kind of shim under one of the legs to keep it from wobbling.  Most people who have ever milked a cow know this to be true.
     Now,  I kinda get it that a college graduate working at a production company probably has never milked a cow and might not be aware of that but how, among all those educated people, did someone not come across Buckminster Fuller?  You would think one of them had been to Epcot.  Epcot largely consists of a very large geodesic dome.  It's a series of interlocking triangles all based on Fuller's theories about the strength and stability of triangles and tri-pods.  Those facts, that should be immediately available to any well-informed person rendered what Ole Tom had to say absolute gibberish but boy, he sounded convincing. That's a problem.  It's a real problem in that at least one person involved in that production had to be aware it was gibberish but the decision was made that the reassuring style far outweighed any substance.  Further,  the decision was made that a majority of the potential audience was too ill-informed to know the truth.  That's a major problem of contempt for the average person.
When you translate that contempt into politics it becomes dangerous and a bit insulting if you catch it.
    Over the years we've seen a variety of public speaking styles in our leaders. There's the FDR style of careful explanation coupled with an appeal to the angels of our better nature,  couched in a kind of soaring, well crafted rhetoric.  It's the kind of thing you'd hear in the Ivy League mainly because these guys are from the Ivy League. Then we see the thing Selleck was trying to do rhetorically in Reagan's appeals. That kind of dead-pan unemotional assertion of assured, common sense no matter the content.
     I like Jimmy Carter's employment of the speaking style he'd grown up listening to from the pulpit.  It's a style heavily influence by classical ideas. That's mainly because of the heavy influence of Bible Colleges and Seminaries and their heavy reliance on classical instruction.  In that style not only do you hear the rolling cadences but if looked at on the page, the sentences nearly, physically balance.  That's evidence of a good education in Latin.  You can see it a lot in the writings of the Founding Fathers because that's the type of education they had.  Lincoln modified that style to suit his almost crunching logic mainly because he was self-taught and learned,  in large part, in a vacuum devoid of any Latin pretensions.  It's an interesting synthesis almost evocative of Truman.
    I have digressed but as a participant in several public speaking courses, it does kinda fascinate me.  You may have noticed these essays actually scan much better if they're thought of as little speeches.  For the most part, they are conceived that way.
    Back to the point.  I think it's obvious we have two types of leaders cut from the same cloth.  In the end, with few exceptions, these guys are highly educated.  The difference seems to be in their assessment of their fellow citizens.  Some have the realization that our people, en mass, eventually arrive at relatively wise conclusions.  A kind of common sense of the common herd.  In their rhetoric, they attempt to enlighten, inform and elevate the public debate.  They do this out of respect for those they address. Then we have people who think since they are better educated and better informed they are just better than the common herd.  Instead of respect for those without their advantages, they have a kind of contempt and believe people are meant simply to be led to whatever ends the speaker/leader desires.  There has always been a word for this: Demagoguery.  I wonder why common, constant truths seem to become shop-worn.
    So, the real difference isn't in the style.  The real difference is in the assessment of the audience. Some people will try to sell you a poorly designed chair and call it stability and some will refer you to the simple wisdom of a Buckminster Fuller.