Our era of non-civil discourse
Victor Davis Hanson has a good article on how uncouth public speech has gotten in recent years. And he’s not just talking about Joe Wilson.
The Hanson piece reminded me of the fact that I was a bit ahead of the curve on this one. I wrote the following in March of 2005, and I think it’s even more apropos today. So I thought I’d republish it. Note, please, the quote from the man who has since become our Vice-President, Joe Biden.
I was reading Dr. Sanity’s recent post, in which she quotes Fred Siegel from the NY Observer. He describes an encounter with some undergraduate Dean supporters prior to the 2004 primaries thusly:
I was taken aback by my conversation with the Deaniacs; their sheer coarseness stunned me. Even at the height of the “Ronald Reagan is going to blow up the world” mania of the 1980’s, I had never seen a “Fuck Reagan” button. But the coarseness was consistent with the dominant mood in academia outside of the sciences.
Well, I hate to break it to you, Fred, but it ain’t just academia. At the risk of sliding even further into old-fuddydud-ism (and perhaps even my use of the word “fuddydud” is emblematic of the fact that I’m already hopelessly mired there), I have to say that I myself have noticed recently a remarkable rise of what Siegel delicately refers to as “coarseness” in public life, not just academia.
Clinton donned shades and played the sax on TV. That wasn’t any problem; it was fun. But now we have candidates using the F-word in interviews with the media. Kerry in Rolling Stone, describing Bush’s Iraq policy–well, at least that was Rolling Stone, which appeals to a certain demography, so there was a bit of logic behind it, although I think it did absolutely nothing to enhance his candidacy or his person. And, just to show that I’m a nonpartisan equal-opportunity critic, there was Dick Cheney dissing Patrick Leahy on the floor of the Senate–although that was a personal spat, apparently, rather than a public interview.
What’s up? We’re all baby boomers here, and we tiresome boomers used to crow about how we liberated the language (and a lot else) from the confines of earlier ideas of propriety, etiquette, and politeness. Some of this liberation was good, no doubt.
But there’s something to be said for propriety, especially in public life. Now Joe Biden, in an article in the 3/21/05 New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “The Unbranding,” is quoted as saying, “What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn’t give President Clinton the authority to use force” have now become, he said, moral interventionists. “Give me a fucking break.”
Does this make you want to vote for the man in 2008? Does it make him seem more “muscular?” Does it make him seem young and hip, or merely juvenile? To me, it’s the latter.
I’m a child of the 60s myself, and not averse to an F-word here and there in my private life. But I can’t imagine Roosevelt or Truman giving an interview and purposely using language that they no doubt were familiar with, but thought should be confined to private life, if uttered at all. They were aware that there’s public and then there’s private words, and as leaders of the Western world they had some funny notion of retaining a little dignity in public discourse.
[ADDENDUM: By the way, spellcheck agrees. It wanted me to replace “assholes” with “assails,” and “fucking” with “bucking.”]
The Demos have decided that after years of insulting Dubya, it is time to have Congress clean up its act, now that the shoe is on the other foot.
Just in time, just in time.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0909/House_guidelines_for_Presidential_putdowns.html
As others have already pointed out, Obama was calling others liars in his speech to Congress.
I prefer civility myself. In conclusion VDH recommends:
The solution, of course, is for the majority to simply say enough is enough, and declare a personal code of decency: “I will not stoop to smear and slur, won’t interrupt a speaker, won’t call anyone a Nazi, won’t do to others what they’ve done to me.” Only that sort of code will end the craziness.
Which sounds witless given the coarseness “advantage” employed by the left and their hypocrisy about it. However, with his historian’s gaze, VDH recognizes that too:
In the short-term it is a losing political formula for conservatives, but in the long term it is the only way to restore sanity and a winning strategy.
LOVE IT
http://biggovernment.com/2009/09/15/the-science-behind-the-acorn-sting/
Hannah Giles is off the hook !
Thanks, neo, for the link to a great VDH entry and for your comments. After a weekend low-lighted by Serena and Kanya, and also with Michael Jordan delivering what many feel was a graceless Hall of Fame acceptance speech, the depraved racist in me can’t help wondering whether those in the black community aren’t becoming more boorish in the aftermath of Obama’s ascendancy, being “inspired” by the ever-present display of his own over-inflated ego and arrogance. I thought a silver lining to his election might be the encouragement for members of racial minorities to aspire and expect even more of themselves. But then again, I naively thought they actually would be getting a worthwhile example to emulate. Silly me.
thats ok… spell check has lots of interesting quirks in it.
for instance.. it knows misogyny, but not misandry
it attempts to correct the latter to masonary, milady, and missionary.
(technically milady is not right (but i guess it is now) its m’lady which is a contraction of me lady meaning my lady – sigh)
heck i am still trying to figure out who changed gauntlet to gantlet…
sorry me meaing mine meaning my lady
as in
she is me missus
its me ladel man give it up so i can have me a drink.
James O’Keefe and I posed a question and gathered the evidence. We’ve run around this nation on a quest for truth unraveling the mystery of organized corruption.
and thats their trump card…
each push they release another investigative journalism experiment.
Oh, VDH….. How I enjoyed your writing. How can you be such a simpering old dope?
The point is not to ostracize or point fingers at others in moralistic fashion, but just simply say, “That’s not my way.”
Oh, for f sakes….
–And after you get your ass kicked up between your shoulders, spit on, buggered, demonized and politically marginalized, at least you have your your sanctimony to keep you warm in the wildnerness.
It wasn’t Bush’s way to fight back, or even defend the merits of his policies and decisions–look what happened.
“Feckless conservatives! In fecklessness, weakness, self-restraint and surrender, there is strength!”
Otherwise, we won’t have a tennis match, an awards ceremony, a Presidential speech, a congressional debate–much of anything without some hysterical rant from the unhinged.
How would that be a change!?
At long last: Why do we, as conservatives, have to resort to the tactics of the powerless when we have the power, the wisdom, and the guns?
WTF, VDH?
Does anyone believe that the amateur hit journalists who caught Acorn red-handed used tactics any different from Mike Wallace and the 60 Minutes team?
Tactics other than, y’know, not making shit up! So, yes, yes they did use different tactics.
You will never be in a position to sanctimoniously say “it’s not my way” ‘cuz you will never be in a position to be heard if you follow the loser’s philosphy….
When someone pulls a gun on you, do you say:
“I’m not pulling out my gun too. I believe in a more civil environment. I’d never pull a gun on a person–it’s not my way.”?
Civility doesn’t just happen in the absence of uncivil acts! Civility is imposed by the victorious. Uncivility is imposed by uncivil victors.
How does he not know that; with all his writing on Greece, honor, Western Civ?
More simply:
If someone punches me in the nose and I refuse to punch back because “it’s not my way”–and I get punched again, two punches are thrown, and incivility reigns.
If someone punches me and I punch back because “f you for punching me.”–No one gets punched again, two punches are thrown and civility reigns.
I reserve the right to be as uncivil as I wish in the defense of civility!
How does the old saying go?
“Profanity proves ignorance.”
“Profanity proves ignorance.”
That old saw only works on third graders and not very well….
Gray: I agree with you about the “60 Minute” tactics. As far as I’m concerned that was a fair cop and a damn remarkable one at that.
Even my jaw dropped at the straightforward, not-an-eyeblink acquiescence that the ACORN staffers showed to the proposition of sexual trafficking in minors.
We are through the looking glass, people.
and guess what? it didnt take even 24 hours between my reading the words from the link baklava put up, and i commented on for them to prove my pick up on it.
Still More Outrageous ACORN Sleaze: San Bernardino
In the latest in their astounding series of exposés, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles introduce us to San Bernardino, California ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke, who not only is eager to help them use taxpayer money to set up a brothel specializing in child prostitution – just like the ACORN folks in Baltimore, in DC, and in Brooklyn – but also boasts that she used to be a prostitute herself, and even that she murdered her husband.
tune in tomorrow when…
heck anyhthing i would make up wouldnt do justice to the extremity of the disconnected class.
What timing! I just re-watched Kate and Leopold, wherein Hugh Jackman (be still my heart) plays an accidentally time-travelling duke from 1874 against Meg Ryan’s go-getter ad exec. His almost-unfailing courtesy does not exclude smacking down the bad boss who is trying to use his advantage over Ryan to get her in the sack. The lines, paraphrased until the last bit, which is one of those gasp moments for a sweet-as-pie romantic flick:
“Perhaps Miss McKay objects [to accompanying you to the opera] on moral grounds.”
“What?”
“Perhaps she subscribes to the belief that [end of paraphrasing; rest is direct quote, I’m pretty sure] for a man to court a woman in his employ is nothing more than a serpentine attempt to turn a lady into a whore.”
Now, you could argue that “whore” is coarse – yup. It would’ve been MUCH more in character, speaking in Kate’s presence as he was, for Leopold to use a euphemism, but the statement is still as straight-up as it could possibly be: He was defending a lady’s honor against someone out to dirty it.
I love Miss Manners on the subject of how to respond to both coarseness and insult. She maintains, always, that in such circumstances courtesy does not require Christian turning of the other cheek; instead, she reeducates her readers on how the courteous person retaliates publicly. The last step before inviting the insulter to step outside is “a ringing ‘How dare you?'” When the response is to an insult, NONE of the earlier steps require passivity; they just use language, including body language, effectively as if they were a glove across the face.
The key, though, seems to be confidence in your moral position – something that moral relativism makes difficult. Oh, and eye contact.
But it’s silly to believe that in, say, Victorian times people of manners had no recourse against coarseness or insults.
They always had the duel as a recourse.
not always…
and i have argued till i am blue in the face as to how so many social ills and quite a few problems are easily avoidable if one follows such things. Most screech about it without understanding it, but usually what it denies, isnt worth having anyway. finding out before you have it is often better.
The Calculus of Inteervention
> But there’s something to be said for propriety, especially in public life. Now Joe Biden, in an article in the 3/21/05 New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “The Unbranding,” is quoted as saying, “What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn’t give President Clinton the authority to use force” have now become, he said, moral interventionists. “Give me a fucking break.”
All comment to the coarseness aside —
I’d point out, of course, that the difference between what was desired by Clinton in Bosnia and what was desired by Bush in Iraq is:
Bosnia was not, in any way, a threat to the USA, could not, in any way of significance, harm the USA, did not, in any way, encourage, fund, train, or otherwise assist the enemies of the USA.
The same could not be said of Iraq. It is not a proven thing, but Saddam operated what was, in 2000, three of the six known terrorist training camps in the world. This included the only one with an intact airframe specifically for the purpose in training terrorist takeovers of planes. It is rather hard to believe that the 911 hijackers did NOT take advantage of this. There’s no proof, but it’s one of Thoreau’s “Trout in the Milk” things.
Further, Saddam openly rewarded the families of the hijackers with millions of dollars. Had he remained in power, this would provide an obvious encouragement for others to find similarly spectacular ways to attack the USA.
He had openly declared his intention to obtain ABC weapons to use against his enemies — Israel and the USA (as well as internal ones like the Kurds). He was misusing funds derived from humanitarian aid stolen from his own people to bribe corrupt UN officials for the sole purpose of removing the sanctions and restrictions which made his ability to create and stockpile ABC weapons difficult, if not impossible.
I think, furthermore, that there were, indeed, some moral reasons for intervening in Iraq but not Bosnia.
Bosnia’s problems are an ethnic clash between two “clans” which are bound and determined to strike at one another. As long as such attitudes remain in effect, there will be no cessation of the hostilities OR the sort of reprisal-counter-reprisal and even downright genocides which are endemic to such (and, for much the same reasons, it is questionable about the wisdom of getting involved in Darfur. We should just drop guns and ammo from the sky in a wide swath across the countryside and let the people themselves deal with the warlords and oppressors)
Iraq, however, was much more a single individual, along with his supporters, preying on a collection of people. While there was clearly some of the “tribe-v-tribe” problem, it is clear from the results of only five years of real effort in Iraq that their people are not devoted to slitting the throats of their enemies, even if they die themselves in the process. The depth of hatred in the Iraqi people clearly does not overrule their innate common sense.
In summary — comparison of intervention in Bosnia to intervention in Iraq is a defective comparison when made with the kind of flip equation that Biden made (such a lack of functional reasoning is hardly atypical for liberals, however).
The differences between moral intervention in Iraq and Bosnia are legion.
> But it’s silly to believe that in, say, Victorian times people of manners had no recourse against coarseness or insults.
> They always had the duel as a recourse
Oh, don’t be ridiculous. By the times of Victoria duelling was virtually unheard of. Even in the “rough and ready colonies” dueling was generally discouraged sometime after 1810-1820. They may, very, very occasionally, have occurred after that, but not a lot. And that’s NOT in “Victorian England”, which is ca. 1830-1900. I suspect you would be hard-pressed to identify a single duel between upper class individuals when Victoria was in power. A list of five such would be virtually impossible.
Well, there is the story that after a speech on agriculture Truman made, someone asked Bess if she could try to get him to say “fertilizer” and she responded, “I had enough trouble trying to get him to say ‘manure.'”
But part of the reason for the coarseness in political rhetoric is the coarseness in the culture. After all, if truman had used that Anglo-Saxon transitive verb there would have been a public outcry. Now, if anything it’s cool.
It may be third grade level rhetoric but I do remember my mother telling me that profanity showed an uncreative mind. The other objection is that it’s meaningless. I have a friend who is a lawyer…she’s tall, slender, has a very soft voice. She is careful about her language partly because she is careful about how she speaks, partly because she’s a church goer and takes it seriously, but also because when on rare occasions she says “goddamnit” people pay attention.
When it’s every other word out of your mouth it loses any real effect.