Make Your Own Inauguration Speech

Via the always blinding, always warming Mr. Sun.

Go here for details.

Comments

[Thomas Paine's Goiter]

Did you think this was funny? I looked at all of the responses and didn’t even crack a smirk.

There is more humor in a gaius rant about Kant.

[Ron Hardin]

Christian Schu:tz has a “Stencilled Speech for All Occasions” in Adorno’s _The Jargon of Authenticity_ that would fit.

It starts, before it goes on too long,

“It is not by chance that we are gathered here today for the purpose of
celebrating this day. In a time like ours, in which the true human
values have more than ever to be our innermost concern, a statement
is expected from us. I do not wish to present you with a patented
solution, but I would merely like to bring up for discussion a series
of hot potatoes which do after all face us. For we do not need ready-
made opinions, which anyway do not touch us deeply, but what we need
is rather genuine dialogue which moves us in our humanity. What
brought us together here is our knowledge of the power of encounter
in the forming of the intrahuman sphere. The things which matter are
settled in this intrahuman sphere. I do not have to tell you what
I mean by this. You will all understand me, for in a particular
and extraordinary sense you all have to do with people.

“In a time like ours – I have mentioned it already – in which the
perspective of things has everywhere begun to waver, everything
depend more than ever on the individual who knows the essence of
things, of things as such, of things in their authenticity. We need
openhearted people who are capable of this. Who are these people? –
you will ask me – and I will answer you: You are they! By being
gathered here you have proven more thoroughly than by words that you
are prepared to put emphasis on your concern. That is what I would
like to thank you for. But I would also like to thank you for
energetically opposing, by your commitment to this good cause,
the flood of materialism which threatens to drown everything around
us. To say it in a nutshell from the start: you have come here to
be given directions; you have come to listen. From this encounter,
on an intrahuman level, you expect a contribution to the re?ablishment
of the intrahuman climate. You expect a restoration of that homey
warmth which seems to be lacking, in our modern industrial society,
to such a terrifying degree…”

Bush, though tends sometimes to have some actual decent rhetori