The King’s speech: MLK and Tucson

In his role as prophet to the nation, Martin Luther King, Jr. drew on
the ancient wisdom of both the Greeks and Hebrews. From Aristotle he
learned that the character of an orator is of prime importance,
but not in the ways we moderns might imagine. It wasn’t personal
morality that was the prized dimension of skillful oratory so much as
it was the proper execution of a persona (“mask” in Latin). “Person,” in this sense–literally, “that which is sounded through” (per-sonar)–is not an essence or ego or the irreducible human self. Rather, it’s a role one plays.

In his magisterial treatment of The Preacher King, Richard Lischer observes that Martin the seasoned orator understood this: “The hidden I exists all right, but it is available only to God. For all others, there are only masks.”  

This
strikes us–shaped as we are by our culture’s therapy-driven rhetoric of
“always be yourself”–as not only odd but deeply deceptive. We want our
public speakers–politicians and preachers, especially–to be transparent,
accessible, down-to-earth, one of us. To claim that they are wearing
masks is to suggest that they are perpetrating a fraud, pulling one
over on us. Facades in public discourse, we think, reasonably, are
precisely the problem.