The voice does two things. It tells the story of the times; and it injects the telltale emotions, moods, and attitudes of that story.
The public swallows the tale with all its lies and omissions, and accepts the way in which the whole act is spooled out by the sound of the narrative voice.
The tone of the story creates a trance.
Different societies are vulnerable to different styles of story-telling.
Americans on this side of the Atlantic, listening to the radio speeches of Hitler delivered with staccato militant force, thought the German people were clearly crazy to go along.
It never occurred to the Americans, glued to their radios listening to President Roosevelt, that many Germans would think the sing-song pseudo-British style of the aristocratic FDR was a transparent joke.
What I’m talking about here has has NOTHING to do with the American cause or the Nazi cause. It has to do with different voices for different societies.
“I’ll take my hypnosis on rye with mustard.” “I’ll have mine on a bun with mayo.”
It’s assumed that, because Hitler and Mussolini were cementing their control through mass arrests and overt shows of force, they could get away with vocal displays of shouting and intimidation. Otherwise, the people would have turned away from them in disgust.
That’s not the whole picture, by any means. Large numbers of people in Germany and Italy responded enthusiastically to the voices of Hitler and Mussolini.
The trance they entered, as a result, wasn’t a passive narcosis. It was a kind of hysteria that demanded action.
If, down the road, America is put under an OPENLY declared state of martial law, with all the bells and whistles attached, the elite television anchors, like Brian Williams and Scott Pelley, will tell that story—not like Mussolini would—but as our anchors always do; in measured, “responsible, objective” tones. It will be “grave and sober.” The voices will suggest a dollop of alarm, but…everything is under control.
That’s the way modern Americans want to hear The Voice narrate the story of the times.
And the president of the moment? He will deploy those same tones. He won’t be standing on the balcony of a building shouting and waving his arms.
But the result will be the same.
In the wake of post-WW2 America, as the feisty combative Harry Truman exited the White House, the bland-egg Eisenhower took up residency. He was always calm and under control. He was the modest hero. He was what you’d call, in his speeches, a Grade B anchor. Not good, but not the worst.
At the same time, American television news was coming into being. Douglas Edwards, one of the first elite anchors, was a smoother, better-trained-for-television Eisenhower. Ed Murrow, who had been narrating the war from London, added his “pregnant-with-meaning” ominous tone to US news broadcasting.
The narrative style of the American voice was under construction.
Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, along with Walter Cronkite, moved in to put their ineradicable stamp on the sound of our civilization. They were a step up from Doug Edwards. They could crystallize a tight range of repressed feelings in every distinct sentence they uttered. They were coming out of literary traditions: Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett.
Tough guy with a warm edge.
America loved it. Those new voices enabled every kind of con, six ways from Sunday, to be visited on an adoring public.
Flash forward to 1968. Despite the revolution of the ’60s, more than half of voting America still wanted the whitebread, big-bullshit, used-car-salesman nostalgia of the previous decade. So Richard Nixon, a man who couldn’t open his lips without lying on several simultaneous levels, waltzed into the White House.
After the hopeless Gerald Ford stood in for Nixon, a cartoon of a cartoon was needed; a peacemaker; a man “of the cloth.” Sold out to David Rockefeller down to his jockstrap, Jimmy Carter came to the presidency to heal the nation from Watergate. He was the new voice silkily twanging the American story, a respite from Nixon.
Then, out of Hollywood, appeared an actor who, despite a wretched history in films, could sell the shining city on the hill. Reagan performed far better than expected on the podium. America wanted a redux of the freedom story, and he supplied it, as the invasive federal government nevertheless continue to burgeon from its every rotting pore.
And on it went. Presidents and anchors on television conspired to deliver a two-dimensional fairy tale, in a country where an accelerated androidal conformity was beginning to dominate the landscape.
Television was the mutual electronic feeding trough for the Great Voices and the public. They mixed and matched and swam in convenient concert, through gray offal.
Talent spotters at the networks and inside the major political parties knew what to look for. They knew how the voices needed to sound. They knew the game.
Slightly more progressive and hip for the boomers? Bill Clinton.
Shit-kicker John Wayne retro? GW Bush.
A new interplanetary sun-god messiah? Obama.
A Hemingway knockoff with an edge in his voice? Dan Rather.
Smooth-groomed high IQ macaque? Brian Williams.
Might turn in his mother to the cops? Scott Pelley.
Drooling sad-eyed swan imported from the Morning Show? Diane Sawyer.
Sacrifice the mind on the altar of cosmically oozing sentimentality, tricked out as news? Oprah.
Floating blithely in an ocean of high-level corporate-government-banking crimes, Americans can choose their favorite voice to obscure the truth and tell a very, very tall tale.
That’s what people want, and that’s what they get.
Will any of these elite voices ever upset a serious apple cart? Not on your life.
Story and Sources Here
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