But what, after all, makes for an effective political insult?
The answer is style. Too coarse, and the abuser sounds malicious. Too unimaginative, and the words evaporate en route. Too petty, and the insulter is harmed more than the insultee. Too distant from truth, and it just won’t stick. Bill Moyers’s jibe that “hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life” is an attempt at wit; the real thing is Bill Buckley’s remark that LBJ was a man of his last word. Is Jimmy Carter the worst president the U.S. ever had, or, as William Safire put it, the “best U.S. president the Soviet Union ever had”? Gore Vidal calling Ronald Reagan a “triumph of the embalmer’s art” seems itself the triumph of a curdled soul; but even Reagan could laugh when Gerald Ford quipped, “No, Reagan doesn’t dye his hair. He’s just prematurely orange.”
It is one thing for our semiliterate intellectuals to sneer at the current president’s locution, and another to remark, as H.L. Mencken did of Warren Harding, that his speech “reminds me of a string of wet sponges . . . It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” Compare this to Sen. Harry Reid’s feeble attempt at scathing wit against President George W. Bush in 2005: “I think this guy is a loser.
Joesph Tartakovsky is only partially right. Style is certainly part of what we’ve generally lost in politics. But without any substance, all the style in the world won’t help much. Let’s compare Buckley’s putdown of LBJ with Reid’s putdown of GWB.
First, Reid inserts himself: “I think this guy is a loser.” Buckley lets his phrase stand on its own: “Johnson is a man of his last word.”
Second, Buckley took a cliche and gave it a twist that illuminates Johnson’s contradictions; Reid relies on a cliche that only adds to the fog of confusion around Bush’s presidency.
Third, Buckley’s gibe is a specific criticism of Johnson’s tendency to pander to his audiences and his rapid changes in policy due to what’s popular; it’s telling that summarizing takes more words than Buckley’s actual epigram. Reid’s criticism, however, is vague and depends on his listener sneering at Bush in the same way Reid does.
People usually claim to dislike politics because it’s nasty. But since so many issues, from wars to waste management, are intrinsically nasty, getting the nastiness out of politics—getting the politics out of politics, so to speak—is probably impossible. Perhaps the problem with politics today isn’t that there’s no style, but that there’s no substance behind the sneer. Without the redemption of substance, the nastiness has become an end in itself.
Hubbard posted this at 9:30 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 as Politics, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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Bill Clinton on Obama:
The Telegraph has learned that the former president’s rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronising attitude to Mr Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence.
A senior Democrat who worked for Mr Clinton has revealed that he recently told friends Mr Obama could “kiss my a**” in return for his support.
The article describes Clinton as “bitter.” Clinton’s reputation will probably never recover from his scandals, since it looks like he won’t have a second act, a chance for redemption. Naturally he’s upset. I still can’t believe some Democrats want Hillary on the ticket, since she comes with this vulgarian.
Hubbard posted this at 9:29 PM EDT on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Audacity of Hype
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Even Bill Gates (H/T) has trouble with windows. A sample from his e-mail:
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame
I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.
Let me give you my experience from yesterday.
I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.
The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.
This site is so slow it is unusable.
Read and enjoy.
Hubbard posted this at 12:23 PM EDT on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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Two fight of center writers I generally like, Jennifer Roback Morse and Dorian Davis, both discuss gay marriage today in problematic pieces.
Morse’s column is more problematic. I normally like her a great deal, and I wholeheartedly recommend her pamphlet 101 tips on a happier marriage. That said, here’s a bit of what she wrote today:
Well, it is official. You won. We lost. Same sex marriage is the law in California. We might win the amendment in the fall, but let’s face it. The momentum is on your side: the Inexorable March of Progress and all that.
Other states will recognize California’s same sex marriages? The Federal government will? (Answers: no and no.) Morse surely knows this, which is why much of the rest of her piece, giving advice to same sex quasi-married people has a less than happy tone:
Now that same sex couples can marry, there is no longer any excuse for the State of California to encourage non-marital cohabitation, by opposite sex couples or same sex couples. California should shut down the domestic partnership registries. Cohabitation is socially and privately inferior to marriage. The state should insist that couples either put up or shut up: get married or be single. No more half-way house of marriage-lite.
Few same sex couples have taken advantage of the opportunity to marry, even where it is legal. So far, Massachusetts has the highest rate of marriage among gay individuals: a mere 16% of the gay population has married. I somehow doubt that the remaining 84% are living celibate lives. Some of them are cohabiting. These high rates of same sex cohabitation have got to stop.
If there actually was genuine marriage available, I’d agree with her. But since there isn’t, I can’t. For sake of argument, I can’t marry a British man and expect the federal government to recognize the marriage for the sake of citizenship. We’re still dealing with marriage-lite right now. If a couple married in California moves out of state, I’d recommend they get a domestic partnership in their new state of residence because there’s no guarantee that their California marriage will be valid in Connecticut.
Still, I actually do agree with Morse on one key point in her column:
I have in my filing cabinet some model legislation that would make adultery a civil offense. That means that a faithful spouse has the right to sue an adulterous spouse for damages. Don’t get me wrong: no policemen will be peaking in people’s windows. The injured party gets to decide whether it is worthwhile, all things considered, to sue. My guess is that few people would bring such suits. But lawyers and marriage counselors who practiced back in the Bad Old Days before no-fault will tell you: the threat of such lawsuits deterred a lot of bad behavior. Now that gays can marry, you have just as great an interest in marital fidelity as the rest of us.
I’ve been looking for someone to introduce this legislation. Maybe if a member of GLBTQ caucus introduces the legislation, it will get some traction.
You who made the conservative case for same sex marriage convinced the public that same sex marriage would provide the same private and social benefits as opposite sex marriage. But marriage is more than just a set of benefits: marriage also is a set of obligations and constraints. Those of us in the Marriage Movement have been trying to help people see that there is freedom within those constraints. But it has been a tough sell. People want only the benefits and none of the obligations. People go for the short-term gratification and miss the Big Prize: lifelong married love.
Now that you can marry, I assume that you are on board. I look forward to hearing from you.
I’m not an elected official, but strengthening marriage with civil offense laws makes sense to me. Even though there isn’t gay marriage yet, of course. Given the confusing mishmash of state, local, and federal laws, today’s committed same sex couples get lots of extra obligations and fewer benefits. And I think having Dr. Morse speak at some couples’ retreats that I know some gay people do before commitment ceremonies would be a good idea. (See her pamphlet for more; I link twice because it really is among the best $4.77 you can spend.)
Dorian Davis (H/T) argues that Republicans should embrace gay marriage:
It also puts Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage on the losing end of a civil rights issue - the last place that Republicans can afford to be considering their already damaged brand. Indeed, the collateral damage from their same-sex marriage exploitation now could be the loss of much of a new generation of Republicans later - a fate more catastrophic, one could argue, than seeing Ellen Degeneres and Portia De Rossi married. In California, for instance, almost 70 percent of respondents under 30 support same-sex marriage, compared with just 35 percent of those over 65, according to the Field Poll. National numbers bare out the same idea. In their May 2008 poll, USA Today/Washington Post reported that almost 80 percent of the under-30 crowd considered same-sex marriage a “private” matter, while just 45 percent of seniors agreed. Of all the lost causes to pursue, then, a same-sex marriage ban seems not just futile but dangerous if Republicans hope to be competitive with the next generation of voters.
As I recall, the Equal Rights Amendment was also inevitable and had large majorities of the country behind it and then it flopped. Further, just because most people support an issue doesn’t mean that their support of it will determine their votes. For example, most polls show that gun control is popular in the nation at large; pluralities and majorities favor stricter gun control laws. But the gun owning minority cares much more about gun control as an issue, which is why most politicians try to be pro-gun rather than pro-gun control.
The overwhelming majority of people are straight, and most of them aren’t particularly hard-core supporters of gay marriage. I think most of us on this blog support gay marriage, but all of us (queer me included) are willing to vote for politicians who oppose gay marriage; it isn’t a make-or-break issue for us.
So, contra Morse, gay marriage isn’t here yet; contra Davis, it isn’t inevitable. Alas.
Hubbard posted this at 11:41 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 as Kulturkampf, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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Jonathan Rauch proposes a thought experiment:
[I]magine your life without marriage. Meaning, not merely your life if you didn’t happen to get married. What I am asking you to imagine is life without even the possibility of marriage.
Re-enter your childhood, but imagine your first crush, first kiss, first date and first sexual encounter, all bereft of any hope of marriage as a destination for your feelings. Re-enter your first serious relationship, but think about it knowing that marrying the person is out of the question.
Imagine that in the law’s eyes you and your soul mate will never be more than acquaintances. And now add even more strangeness. Imagine coming of age into a whole community, a whole culture, without marriage and the bonds of mutuality and kinship that go with it.
What is this weird world like? It has more sex and less commitment than a world with marriage. It is a world of fragile families living on the shadowy outskirts of the law; a world marked by heightened fear of loneliness or abandonment in crisis or old age; a world in some respects not even civilized, because marriage is the foundation of civilization.
This was the world I grew up in. The AIDS quilt is its monument.
In his own way, David Frum provides an answer to what straight life would be without marriage:
My late mother was once asked by an interviewer: “Do you ever have dreams about being single again?” She answered: “I have nightmares about it.” One would fear not only losing the one you love — but also of losing the better self into which love has made you.
When I asked my wife to marry me all those years ago, I quoted Evelyn Waugh’s letter proposing marriage to his second wife: “True it will be nasty for you — but think how nice it will be for me!” It was — and it is.
Hubbard posted this at 11:57 AM EDT on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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