Flap and doodle

IF YOU have plenty of caffeine on hand, and the patience of Job, try to make your way through our president’s speech over the weekend at the Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C. It may be that a lot of strong coffee, combined with more than a bit of morbid curiosity, will get you through it. Eventually.

The president was speaking at a memorial for those killed in the Navy Yard shooting last week. He spoke for some time, but, unfortunately, said little. And nothing at all of importance.

If you can manage to scratch your way through the thicket of platitudes in the speech (you may need a machete), and if you are able to part all the stock phrases, you might be able to glimpse something of an idea-way off in the distance. But then it scurries off before you can get too close.

You’d be forgiven if at several points in the speech, even dozens of points, you asked yourself: “What does the man propose to do?”

Well, sure, when a nutcase with a security clearance takes a gun and kills a dozen people at the Navy Yard, it’s a case of unspeakable violence. That’s understood. There’s no need to mention it. Naturally the president felt he had to mention it.

“And so, once again, we remember our fellow Americans who were just going about their day doing their jobs, doing what they loved-in this case, the unheralded work that keeps our country strong and our Navy the finest fleet in the world. These patriots doing their work that they were so proud of, and who have now been taken away from us by unspeakable violence.”

So did the president suggest a way to keep such unspeakable violence from ever happening again?

Not at all. He didn’t seem on speaking terms with anything specific.

What ever happened to that great communicator we used to hear so much about?

THE PRESIDENT said the shooting last week should lead to “some sort of transformation.”

Some sort? Like . . . what sort, exactly? Your guess is as good as ours, probably better, because we’ve gone through this great oration and can’t find one trace of a clear, concrete, specific proposal.

As far as what’s known as Gun Control, the shooter at the Navy Yard had a shotgun which he bought legally. After a background check. Of all the gun-control proposals we’ve heard over the years, not one of them had a thing to do with limiting the sale of shotguns, which are widely regarded as hunting equipment, not murder weapons.

Even candidates for the Democratic nomination for president may feel obliged to pose carrying a shotgun while dressed head-to-toe in camo. (Remember a candidate and future secretary of state named John Kerry going goose hunting in 2004?)

Indeed, when gun-control advocates set out to persuade others that their views on the subject are perfectly reasonable, they tend to start out by assuring the rest of us that they have no intention, none whatsoever, of taking away our shotguns-so hunters need have no fear.

Instead of specifying what he meant by “some sort of transformation,” the president boldly proclaimed: “We can’t accept this.”

Did we miss something, or has anyone-anyone at all-suggested that we accept mass murder? If so, the president didn’t specify who.

Here’s that one idea that we got a glimpse of, if only briefly, before it jumped back into the underbrush:

“In the United Kingdom, in Australia, when just a single mass shooting occurred in those countries, they understood that there was nothing ordinary about this kind of carnage. They endured great heartbreak, but they also mobilized and they changed, and mass shootings became a great rarity.”

So . . . .

Does the president think that this nation should adopt the same kind of restrictive gun laws they have in England and Australia? That’s an idea. Sure, it might be an idea that most Americans would disagree with, but it’d be an idea. It might be a debate worth having. The president might find some folks-even in this country-who like the idea. Even if there’d be that not-so small matter of the United States Constitution and its Second Amendment to overcome.

But the president had more clichés to get to, so he never went back to that idea. No, that would have been too . . . specific. Maybe even unpopular. And if there’s any guiding star this president follows, it’s the over-riding goal of assuring his own popularity if he can.

So here’s what the country got: “I’ve said before, we cannot stop every act of senseless violence. We cannot know every evil that lurks in troubled minds. But if we can prevent even one tragedy like this, save even one life, spare other families what these families are going through, surely we’ve got an obligation to try.”

Try what, Mr. President? He never did say.

He could have mentioned that the country needs to tighten up its current background checks on those buying weapons. But he didn’t.

He could have mentioned that handguns are much too easy to acquire in this country. But even tightening those regulations might not have prevented this shooting.

He could have said that assault weapons shouldn’t be sold to civilians. But that wouldn’t have avoided this shooting, either. No assault weapons were involved.

Instead, the president seemed to be talking for the sake of talking. So he said nothing. In as many words as possible.

A writer of some note named H.L. Mencken once said President Harding’s prose reminded him of a string of wet sponges and tattered washing on the line. And he continued, as only the Sage of Baltimore could:

“It reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

Herr Mencken never got to watch the Hon. Barack Obama in action, or rather in speech. More’s the pity. Some of us would have loved to see Brother Mencken take on this president’s flap and doodle. Just to see if it measured up to his comprehensive disdain for Warren G. Harding’s.

O WHAT should the president have said? He could have started off this way:

“My fellow Americans. It is lunacy itself for this nation to lack a better way to keep guns out of the hands of crazies. The man who shot up the Navy Yard last week told police that he heard voices in hotel walls, and that microwaves were after him. Yet somehow he was able to legally buy a gun-even after a background check. This is one of the rare shootings that we might have prevented, if we just had the political will. Certainly we have the technology. We should be able to keep up with tormented people who hear voices and believe microwaves are after them. And make their names, their addresses, and their freely admitted symptoms available to local police departments and gun dealers. All without running afoul of the law or the Constitution. Ever hear of Big Data?

“So let’s do more than talk. Let’s do what we can to fix this problem. No, we may not be able to design a perfect solution, but surely we can find a less imperfect one than the one we’ve got now.”

That’d be a speech worth hearing. Maybe even thinking and arguing about. But there’s no way to argue with a speech that says nothing.