No one chatted during my presentation at the Eyewitness to Revolution symposium last night, but that may be due to the fact that, by the time I got the microphone, there were only a few minutes left in the program.
I scrapped my planned talk - which I had honed to a trim 12 minutes - and just read from my book, letters I had had my students write in December 1981 describing their lives in Poland.
The problem was the first speaker of the evening, who didn't just stand at the podium, he settled into it. We had been told to keep our presentations to 10 or 15 minutes; he spoke for nearly half an hour. The moderator was in a difficult position, for how do you interrupt a man who's telling the story of his country's heroic struggle against oppression? (You don't want to be an oppressor yourself.) When she did hold up a paper, telling him to wrap it up, he nodded politely and carried on oblivious.
I always wonder if such people have no sense of time or no consideration for others. Probably both. It is said that these people need an audience, but what they really need is an editor; having been one I sit and cut away as they speak, one sentence leading inexorably into another. Are they waiting for a final flourish that never comes? Or are they just mesmerized by the sound of their own voices? Again, it's hard to say.
I was not happy, but I was reminded of Orwell's satire of Stalinism: All speakers have equal time, but some speakers' equal time is longer than others'.
