Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Kairos in Bush's 9/11 Speech
On September 11, 2016, terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers and damaged the Pentagon using hijacked airliners. President George W. Bush gave a speech 9 days later addressing how he would attend to the issues at hand. Here, his kairos is perhaps not the best. His speech, according to our source's prologue, was "well anticipated", which is the nice way of saying that he took too long. Considering that this was the largest terrorist attack to happen in the US, he should have responded within the day or at least within the week. This destroys some of his kairos by being late in comparison to the event and its scale. However, it still has kairos in that it still happened within a reasonable time period to a point that it is still incredibly effective in portraying its message. Bush additionally places demands on the Taliban that he expects them to follow immediately. This gives Americans an idea of what is happening in real time, and helped to give time credibility to the speech.
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I agree that Bush's use of kairos is not at its best, due to the time gap between 9/11 and the speech. This major gap destroys some of the kairos but seeing as it wasn't very far off from the true event maintains some of that kairos.
ReplyDeleteSarah Neydon
I think your point that Bush's delayed following up speech to the 9/11 attack lost some of its kairos is good. However I think that there was a reason behind the delay. I believe that at the time, the whole nation including Bush himself was in such a state a shock that no one really knew how to response to the attack.
ReplyDelete- Ruoping Li
I think your point that Bush's delayed following up speech to the 9/11 attack lost some of its kairos is good. However I think that there was a reason behind the delay. I believe that at the time, the whole nation including Bush himself was in such a state a shock that no one really knew how to response to the attack.
ReplyDelete- Ruoping Li
I agree with your point that Bush's use of kairos was not as adequate as expected. Your analysis help readers better understand why you would say that it took to long for the speech, but was still in fact kairos even if it was late.
ReplyDelete-Billy ROsenberg