Substacks
Things Worth Remembering: Winston Churchill’s Gracious Farewell Douglas Murray
Welcome to Year Two of Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering. For the next 12 months, Douglas will present great speeches from famous orators that he has memorized—and explain why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read from Winston Churchill’s eulogy for Neville Chamberlain, scroll to the end of this piece.
If poetry is the most condensed way to communicate human feeling, speech-making is the oldest, perhaps best-proven way to transmit a specific message.
People often ask me how to get better at public speaking. I tend to offer one piece of advice: listen to, read, or watch great speeches of the past. Just as the only way to become a good writer is to be a good reader, the only way to become a good speaker is to be a good listener.
That is not to say that there aren’t certain rules to public speaking, which I will get to later in this series. But if you study these rules—read, say, your Cicero or Aristotle—then it doesn’t mean you will necessarily be able to perform.
In any event, the main aims of great speaking are to persuade, charm, and move.
Two weeks ago, the YouTube channel Hodinkee released a video featuring noted Lost actor Daniel Dae Kim, in which he spent 37 uninterrupted minutes talking about. . . buying watches in retail stores.
Not acting, his personal life, or his experience as a Korean-born artist building a career in the United States. Just the purchase and ownership of mass-production wristwatches from various billion-dollar brands. Going into the store, seeing the watches, handing over the credit card—that sort of thing. The video was well-received, with one commenter noting that he “LOVED this conversation. This is what our hobby is all about! Thanks for posting, Hodinkee!”
Which leads to an obvious question for many readers, namely: What, exactly, is “our hobby”?
It turns out three things are inevitable: death, taxes, and politicians eager to stop so-called price gouging in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Whether it’s a hurricane in the Carolinas, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a devastating flood in New Orleans—or a catastrophic fire in Los Angeles—one of the first moves in the politician’s playbook is to condemn the greedy capitalists who exploit the misery of their fellow citizens by jacking up prices on basic necessities.
Sure enough, here was Mayor Karen Bass on Sunday, fresh from her trip to Ghana, taking to X to proclaim that the city would have “no tolerance” for anyone who “illegally hiked rents and prices.” California attorney general Rob Bonta chimed in: “We should not be engaged in price gouging, whether it’s groceries or rent. We are very serious about this.” And Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that aims to prevent price gouging on building materials, storage services, and other essential supplies and services for the entirety of 2025.
At first glance, you can hardly blame them. After all, what kind of monster would take advantage of their neighbors’ desperation by hiking prices for necessities when the supply of those necessities is depleted? Is there anything worse than thinking about your profit margin in the midst of tragedy?
Actually, there is. Keeping prices low during a disaster by making it a crime to raise them will do far more harm than good.
January 13, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
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