For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       Friends, Romans, countrymen – lend me your ears! Listen now to my message hewn from the forests of truth! And find it in your hearts to believe me when I say, as God is my witness: oratory is making a come back! It's the Obama effect, really. A man who has proved himself startlingly good with the autocue, has put the spoken word back on the map. We've had good speakers before, of course. But Obama is now; he's black and President of the USA. After George Bush's awkward and error-prone fumblings, pray silence for the rhythmic rhetoric of Obama; crashing through walls of seasoned political scepticism like a tidal wave through deck chairs. The BBC has responded with The Speaker – a talent show to find Britain's best young orator. And what a career move it could be; for even if they don't become world leaders, there's serious money to be made from after dinner speaking. Tony Blair can earn up to £6000 a minute; so there's clearly hope for us all. Oratory, however, like sheep shearing or kicking a football, is a skill not a virtue. To say that you're a world champion sheep shearer says nothing about the content of your heart, and it's the same for orators. Hitler was a wonderful orator, as was Abraham Lincoln, but the outcomes were different. The power of words is the power of the con man as well as the visionary. Hitler was famous for showing a complete lack of inhibition when he spoke, and people believe that. It's passionate, emotional; it must be true. The Greek demagogue Demosthenes also believed in presentation. Content really wasn't important at all; just delivery, delivery, delivery. Rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion, is morally neutral. The only real question for the orator is this: to what end shall I put my skill? Former President Bill Clinton still believes in the spoken word. His favourite modern-day example was Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and he defines a great speech as one which changes the way people think and feel; for then they might also change what they do. Oratory thrives particularly in crisis; and if there isn't one, the orator must create it. Churchill's crisis was clear, and in 1940, it was his words which went to war quite as much as the spitfires. But often, there's more crisis in the speaker than the world they denounce: the gift of oratory has been the gift of almost every insecure, manipulative and dangerous religious leader down the years. People are swept off their feet, but swept into hell. The wise Socrates had a deep distrust of oratory. In the cold light of day, it's not the speech we remember; but the sentence or silver-bullet phrase. The Sermon on the Mount, ten minutes, and Gettysburg Address, two minutes, both had them; while King's "I have a dream" speech is remembered mainly for those four words. And Obama's genius? Well, that's just three: "Yes we can!" More writings © Simon Parke