Rhetoric

This evening, I am thinking about rhetoric.  It is the artful use of combining what to say, when to say it and how to say it.  It is the things you say behind closed doors that persuade the masses that listen.  It is an art form by itself.  I began to think about the feeling of being a victim of rhetoric.  Seems like every traveling evangelist wanted to come and prophesy husbands to the churches made mostly of women wanting husbands.  They prophesied money coming for those desperately waiting on it and a way for those who had no way out.  Sometimes, I thought that it was abusive.  I think it is wrong to play on the feelings of the broken for an offering.  It is wrong to say something just to get the desired response.  Rhetoric at times can be an elaborate form of lying.  We lie to change or distort the truth.  The truth was, that sometimes, I sat in insufficient places.  These were places where my dreams would never come true.  Rhetoric decorated those slums and ghettos with glossy trinkets that were just gilded pieces of wood.  The truth chipped that gold film away and I decided that it was better to see things as they are, than to deceive my own self.  I believe there is beauty in describing an old weather beaten barn as an old weather beaten barn.  Beauty is at it's best when we have to find it in the mist of ordinary, plain humanity with not a fresh coat of paint nowhere.  A truly sad victim of rhetoric is the person who would rather hear a bunch of trumped up lies, than a single line of unadulterated truth.

Do Me Wrong Do Me Right James Taylor
http://youtu.be/3C9w9qGQixw