Life + Style: Joe Bident’s stutter also accompanies the presidential inauguration

The US presidential campaign had many low points, but one of them remains memorable in many ways: In the first round of the presidential debate, Donald Trump’s verbal rampage could not be controlled by even a moderator considered one of the interviewers. harshest on American television, the president almost never let his opponent finish a line of thought. THE New Yorker One of its authors, Nathan Heller, commented on Twitter at the time that there was no greater nightmare for a stutterer in a situation like this. And in this nightmare, Joe Biden had to fight himself like a stutterer.

Joe Biden will become President of the United States at the age of 78 and has had a brilliant political career with senatorial and vice-presidential chapters, backing up his mother’s repeated instructions with his life:

Don’t let stuttering determine you.

However, that does not mean that stuttering did not accompany Joe Biden’s life, somewhere in the foreground, somewhere in the background. Because, as stakeholders sensitively mention, even trained speakers like Joe Biden are always aware of their speech error, even if their speech seems fluent and flowing.

Joe Biden is likely to give one of the most important speeches of his life in front of millions of audiences on January 20, the day of his inauguration. And every stuttering man will join in the prayers and words with every fight.

Biden decided a few years ago to speak openly about his stuttering, many times amassing his own experiences into motivational speeches in which he encouraged his peers to what he had learned from his mother: do not allow this disorder to prevail in their lives.

Yet even today, there is a strong narrative that interprets the traces of Biden’s stuttering, his verbal stuttering, as a deterioration in his mental state. (Donald Trump based an important part of his campaign on the fact that his opponent was mentally unfit for the presidency, while he could not boast of having passed the cognitive test in which he was asked to answer five words: person, woman , man, camera, television).

But when Joe Biden searches for words, quickly changes direction in a sentence, or just moves on to the next thought, he uses stuttering methods and stuttering maneuvers to avoid stuttering.

Stuttering is a disorder of the continuity of speech; This includes, but is not limited to, warfare, but we are not referring only to when someone inadvertently repeats the first syllable. But also, for example, when someone takes long breaks between words or sentences, they often get stuck on them, as well as when they stretch certain sounds. At the moment, there is no consensus as to why stuttering develops, according to the current professional position, there may be several joint causes of speech failure, we wrote a few years ago on World Stuttering Acceptance Day .

Experts suspect genetic reasons behind stuttering, certain that it can be inherited at some level, mainly in the paternal branch: two thirds of stutterers had or have another stutterer in their family, in Joe Biden’s case it was a maternal uncle. In most cases, classic stuttering appears at the age of 3-4 years, but often a great trauma can lead to studs and repetitions.

Approximately 70 million people worldwide are struggling with this disorder, three million in the United States and two percent of the adult population in Hungary, according to a survey published by the CSO, but experts say this figure could be Greater because many do not stutter either consciously or out of their own fault because they do not know that they are struggling with stuttering.

The assumption is hampered, to put it mildly, by the fact that there are many harmful stereotypes about stuttering, although it is increasingly rare for stutterers to be considered stupid or mentally disabled. However, the series of failures and feelings of exclusion still weigh heavily on many stutterers, and stutterers are often betrayed by those closest to them: their parents, teachers, or schoolmates.

In the case of Joe Biden, for example, a Catholic nun who taught in seventh grade, and when she read a text aloud – this is the web of many stuttering fears – she reacted to his stagnation with derision: “Mr. Ba-Ba-Ba-Biden, what’s the word? “The nun provoked. Joe Biden this story is Atlantic recalled his journalist, John Hendrickson, who also lives with stuttering, in one of his most revealing interviews. After the nun scoffed, Joe, a 12 to 13 year old boy, left the class in protest and went home. I was angry, angry and humiliated, ”he recalled his feelings at the time, adding that he had carried shame with him for a long time. Hendrickson also reached out to Biden’s former high school classmates, who admitted that with their teasing, the nicknames that concerned him, they too had contributed to this embarrassment.

In a later speech, Biden put it this way: stuttering, if we think about it, is the one drawback that people still laugh at and that still humiliates others, often not on purpose.

As a teenager, Joe Biden tried to master his verbal jams in front of the mirror by reciting poems by William Butler Yeats aloud, he can still remember some texts from the outside today, and he claims that the university lectures helped him a lot. And of course your big favorite The king’s speech in which Colin Firth viscerally returns VI. George’s heroic struggle with words. He told CNN

the worst thing a parent can do is to want to finish their stuttering child’s sentences at all costs.

He still writes his speeches today indicating in the text where he should stop for a break, but the Atlanticnek According to the expert, Biden’s eye movements and blinks also show that he is still making efforts to keep his stuttering under control. John Hendrickson is convinced that Biden’s memory omissions also stutter. At a 2019 meeting, for example, many mocked Biden for forgetting Barack Obama’s name, even though he simply got stuck with Obama and quickly replaced him with my boss.

Many people complain that Biden speaks of his stuttering primarily in the past, as a confusion, an enemy that he has defeated, whereas abolishing the stigma of stuttering would require much more acceptance, normalizing stuttering, advocates say.

Joe Biden, however, turns to stuttering youth and children with immense empathy and willingness to help, and the politician’s campaign staff could not be accused of failing to recognize the reluctance factor in the situation. From one moment to the next (but we could also say from one verbal stalemate to another), one of the stars of last year’s Democratic nomination convention became the 13-year-old, who was inspired by Joe Biden to face his own. stammering. Brayden Harrington met a few months earlier with then-presidential candidate Biden, whom he immediately trusted after he declared: “We belong to a club, we stutter.”

While Biden has repeatedly recalled the painful stuttering stories of his childhood and adolescence over the years, he added one by one that, in fact, stuttering was one of the best things that could have happened to him. “The stuttering gave me an idea of ​​other people’s pain that I would not otherwise have in my power,” he said. And on January 20, he will move to the White House with this knowledge, among other things.

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