Speaker's Corner: mouthing off, Yale style

If there's one thing I've learned to do really well at Yale, aside from drinking and hating myself, it's talking a lot about nothing at all. From the first time I raised my hand in English 129 in order to discourse brilliantly on how the Iliad was actually a handbook used to instruct ancient Greeks on proper meat preparation, I've been impressing professors and TAs alike with my ability to waste tons of time by shooting off my mouth about completely meaningless topics. And I know I'm not the only one who can do this: there were 16 other people in that 129 section jockeying to make the same observation. You probably do it too, and you love it, you Ivy League jerks.

When I came to England, I was worried that my ability to transform into a veritable 20th-century Demosthenes might never be tested. After all, I didn't want to seem like a typical American, braying in my donkeyish accent about things nobody cares about outside of Yale. And then there was the language barrier--how would the Brits know what I was talking about when I used words like "elevator," "apartment," and "non-smoking section?" And how would I understand their responses? I'd had trouble with this before, when a drunk guy at a pub called me a `gobshite,' and meant it as a compliment. I mean, "gobshite" doesn't sound too complimentary. It's not a pet name you might have for your spouse--"Gobshite, I'm home!"--in fact, it sounds like a novel British way of referring to someone as a big glob of feces. But that guy actually meant it in a nice way. I swear.

My fears about not being able to sound off were allayed when I found the place that promises even more Sunday morning fun than a tray full of Eli Breakfast Sandwiches: Speaker's Corner, in Hyde Park. Here was a place where I could spout random crap without fear of alienating everyone around me. Here was a place where you only needed two things to prove to the world how deeply you could think-- a larynx and an agenda no one cared about. Here was a place where an American English major could feel at home.

Speaker's Corner was founded in the 1830s and was the only place where the average person could talk publicly to an audience. This, of course, was during an era in which the concept of "free speech" went hand in hand with the concept of "rising up and slicing the monarch's head off." Anyway, there's not even unrestricted free speech there now--you can't use the f-word, and you can't tell people to rise up and slice the monarch's head off--but you can talk about things like religion, communism, and how much America sucks. You can talk all morning if you want to, and a couple of Sundays ago, that's exactly what my roommate and I did.

Of course, we did a little heckling and arguing beforehand. And what a fantastic array of quasi-sophists there was to argue with. There was a guy who lectured on why people should get eight hours of sleep every night and how the Louise Woodward case proved that America sucks; a guy who talked about why nudity should be encouraged on public TV and how the failure of the recent environmental summit proved beyond any doubt that America sucks; and a guy who talked about how we all should use our powers of artistic creation and how the handling of the recent Iraq situation proved once and for all that America sucks. And those were just the secular speakers. Being told that you live in a sucky country doesn't even compare to being told that you're going to burn on the Lake of Fire for eternity. "You stink of Hell," said one speaker to my devoutly atheist roommate after they had argued briefly. "You stink of Scotch," someone in the crowd shouted back. Another religious speaker, a cowboy from Florida, countered my roommate's arguments for natural selection by telling us we were both homosexuals. After all, anyone who disagrees with the literal truth of the Bible can't possibly be straight. And I won't even begin to describe the exchange my roommate had with a representative from the Nation of Islam. Apparently, my roommate thought arguing with a speaker who was surrounded by 10 earpiece-wearing, bowtied bodyguards was a good idea. It wasn't.

When attacked by the audience during our own orations, we were even cooler. Tired of hearing the zealots blather on, my roommate spoke on Darwinism while I gave an oration on why one shouldn't get bogged down by religious conscience. We shouted, we insulted, we argued; I felt like I was part of the Prime Minister's Questions on C-SPAN. Everything went well until some English guy realized we were Americans and started badgering us about the situation in Iraq, attempting to get us to admit that America sucks. I think we acquitted ourselves admirably, though. After all, we'd been trained well.

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