In this house divided, American political discourse sounds more like a domestic disturbance than a thoughtful debate.
As Rachel Malik wrote in an excellent blog post, "The 'trouble' with words like assault or harassment is that they don't seem to belong in everyday discourse, they sound technical, perhaps a little alien.
Some of this discourse might sound nativist and nationalist, but that part might well be a response to the entrenched disdain in the Indian elite consensus for things spiritual or Indian, rather than any deep "yogic" antipathy for non yogic lifestyles.
But Paul's discourse often sounds a note of excited reticence; he is very good at taking the already resonant Old Testament words such as "satisfy" and "acceptable" and pulling from them a kind of controlled, ironic fervor.
"Imagine a world where every article could be assessed based on its level of sound discourse," he wrote.
By the standards of contemporary American political discourse, he can sound like a pony-tailed advocacy lawyer as he pummels a Democratic administration for carrying out extrajudicial "assassinations".
"The recent discourse of Erdogan sounds very similar to the nineteen-nineties," Murat Somer, a professor of international relations at Koç University, said.
For myself, I can recall little in a lifetime of tuning in to public discourse which has sounded uglier than the relish with which he and George Osborne have both spoken of public service cuts.
We must provide an alternative to the noxious rhetoric that is eroding our dignity as human beings, finding ways to show the public what civil discourse looks and sounds like, how people can engage in productive, respectful disagreement.
It engages with the poem directly, as a piece of trustworthy human discourse – which doesn't sound too revolutionary, but the truth is that many readers don't feel like that about poetry any more, and often start with: "But what does it all mean?" on the assumption that "that's how you read poetry".
