Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Minus fullness and fury.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan narrowly avoided quoting Shakespeare in a story about George Bush’s phoned-in UN speech today. Kaplan said the speech “was full of stirring words, signifying nothing,” but that was an exaggeration in service to art: the words were stirring only in the sense that they stirred Kaplan to exasperated puzzlement, which was itself most likely simulated.

In his closing, President Bush posed a challenge to the General Assembly: “The nations gathered in this chamber must make a choice. … Will we support the moderates and reformers who are working for change across the Middle East, or will we yield the future to the terrorists and extremists?”

Which “moderates and reformers” is he talking about? What kind of “change across the Middle East”? What actions is he proposing the nations take? Or is he just reciting bromides, uninterested in the answers or in how “this chamber”—which, undeniably, has a dreadful record on such issues—might try to deal with them?

Presumably that last plaintive line is a rhetorical question. But whether the speech was bromide, soporific, or hallucinogen — individuals react differently, as we have learned to our sorrow, to the same substance, or lack of it — it serves nicely as a segue into Billmon’s most recent Orwell Festival, in which he highlights various Orwellian observations in the context of current political discourse. Here’s my favorite from today.

While civilized societies uphold justice, mercy, and the value of life, the terrorists hold to an ideology that feeds on the pain of others and glorifies murder and suicide. Though they plot and plan and operate by stealth, the terrorists make no secret of the beliefs they hold. They seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child would live in total obedience to a narrow and hateful ideology.
Dick Cheney
Speech to the National Automobile Dealers Association
September 19, 2006

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy . . . And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.
George Orwell
Politics and the English Language
1946

There’s more, all culled from speeches or remarks delivered today by Bush, Cheney and others, and you should go read it. If nothing else, you can drop Kaplan a note and put him out of his querulous misery, if such it was, with an appropriate Orwell quote.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act V Scene V