Condescension and leaving the political fold

The New Neo Posted on by

In my “about me” description (see upper right), I mentioned that I’ve faced some ostracism within my circle of friends and colleagues for my political views. This was especially dramatic beginning with the buildup to the Iraqi war and ending with the 2004 Presidential election.

It hasn’t been pretty, and I’ve lost some of them, perhaps forever—sometimes merely by dint of saying something as mild as, “I disagree.” It’s not as though I insulted them—at least not knowingly or intentionally—but many have nevertheless acted as though they’d been insulted.

The situation would usually arise in the context of a party or a dinner or some other get-together among friends. I’d be at the table, chatting, joking, having a good time, and someone would bring up politics, the war, Bush—something. Then the vitriol would start, with the assumption that of course all of us agreed on these things: Bush was an asshole and a liar, the war a disaster and a crime, and so on and so on and so forth.

I’d be faced with the choice of speaking up or keeping silent. Sometimes I chose the latter, depending on the company, how long the conversation went on (passing remark vs. lengthy gabfest), and how strong I might be feeling that day.

Whenever I did decide to speak up, I tried to be quiet and respectful, and above all simple. I’d start by saying that I’d been a liberal Democrat my whole life (I’m one of you, not one of them, so don’t hate me, please!). I’d say I’d never voted for a Republican in my life (true). Then I’d say, in the mildest of voices, that nevertheless I happened to have come to agree with George Bush on quite a few aspects of his foreign policy.

First there was usually a stunned silence. At one party the person I was addressing asked me, “What did you say?” three times before she actually could process my answer and even understand the words I had said, much less react to them. Yes, every now and then people would be curious to hear what I had to say, and we would have a decent discussion. But far more often the anger would erupt, often instantaneously—and I mean rage, the like of which I had never before encountered with friends or acquaintances. A closed-mindedness, and a refusal to even listen to me. Most of these people had always seemed to respect my intelligence before, but now I was considered to be very very stupid—or evil. Gone over to the Dark Side.

Attacks. Name-calling: “imperialist,” “colonialist”—and, in one rather memorable case, “Dan Quayle lover,” although I certainly hadn’t breathed a word about any passion for him. Many of my friends were noticeably cooler to me after these exchanges, and a couple of old friends actually severed our relationship (permanently, so far).

There are a host of reasons this happened, I suppose. But at the time I didn’t see it coming, and it was extremely shocking and disturbing to me. But now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I think that I actually would have gotten a better response from them if I’d skipped the “I’ve always been a liberal Democrat” intro. Because there are few things more hated than an apostate, a turncoat, a traitor.

Someone who leaves the fold is much worse than someone who was never in it. There’s a special rage reserved for those who have rejected the ideas that others hold dear. I don’t think I ever said anything condescending to any of these people, but time and again they told me I was being condescending.

But when I thought about it, I realized that this perception of condescension was inevitable and unavoidable. After all, I was saying “I used to believe ‘A,’ but now I believe ‘B,'” and I was addressing people who continued to believe “A.” Under the circumstances, how could they fail to see me as condescending, whether I was really conveying that attitude or not?

Inherent in the idea of anyone changing his/her mind from one position to another is that the person must think the second position is superior to the first—else why the change? So, whether or not the changer intends to be condescending, the reader/listener hears condescension because in fact it is implicit in the situation. No way out of it, I’m afraid.

One more thought about the Schiavo case

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve pretty much said all I want or need to say here, which is that the case is essentially a family dispute gone very, very bad.

But today I read a piece posted on the blog Horsefeathers that articulated a couple of points that seem not to have been said as yet by anyone (although that’s hard to believe, I guess, with all that’s been written on this one case).

The docs at Horsefeathers are atheists, so they’re not coming at this from a religious point of view. But they still come down on the side of preserving Terri’s life. Here is the quote I find particularly interesting:

We come down on the side of Mrs. Schiavo’s parents. They have, it seems to us, earned the right to assume the burdens of caring for their daughter. They can’t move on to find another daughter, as Mr. Schiavo can move on to find another wife.

I think this is one of the many reasons people find this case so troubling. The idea that a husband–especially one who, as in this case, has “moved on” and begun a new life quite a while ago–can take a child away from parents who cannot “move on” quite so easily, if at all, is, quite simply, heartbreaking.

The invasion of the body mikes

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse’s speculates here about the influence of the show “American Idol” on the current style of singing in Broadway musicals. I agree with Ann that “American Idol” really isn’t the culprit, but I have a different one in mind: the invasion of the body mike.

If I do say so myself, I’m somewhat of a minor expert on Broadway musicals of the 50s and 60s. My parents were big fans, and as a young child I was taken to every single one that was suitable for children–which turns out to have been just about all of them. We also went to all the City Center revivals of the classic musicals from the 40s. I loved the theater, and these shows were absolutely magical for me.

Later on, I stopped enjoying Broadway musicals so much, and for me there’s one glaring reason (a reason not mentioned in any of the articles Ms. Althouse cites): the aggressive amplification that’s been standard in all musicals on Broadway for decades.

I don’t know whether I have especially sensitive ears, or what it is, but I noticed the difference immediately, and I didn’t like it. One of the greatest things–if not the greatest thing–about the Broadway musical was the sense of being in the flesh-and-blood presence of real people singing to you, the audience, and that is shattered (for me, at least) by hearing amplified voices. They might as well phone it in, or CD it in.

Yes, the old-style performances included belters like Ethel Merman, who could be counted on to be heard, unamplified, in the furthest reaches of the balcony, and wasn’t exactly subtle. But she was the exception. The rest of them–and their names are not necessarily famous, except for Julie Andrews and a few others–were both subtle and refreshingly human. There was a person-to-person immediacy, a communicative intimacy, that simply doesn’t exist today.

And if this propels me into curmudgeon status, so be it. These present-day performers from something called Broadway Unplugged seem to agree with me, anyway. Here’s a representative quote, from singer Mark Kudisch, about the benefits of singing off-mike:

This evening’s going to be so fantastic because people will actually get to hear people’s voices, their real energy, their color without it being messed with by someone else’s technology. There’s nothing more frustrating than when you sing quiet, they turn you up; when you open up, they turn you down. It all sounds the same out there…I’m not barred down by a mike, and what hand the mike is in. We just do what we do. There’s a freedom involved. It’s you, it’s your energy, it’s your actual resonance that gets to the back of the house. And for an audience, it requires them to actually sit up and partake, to listen, to actively be a part of what’s going on. It allows every individual audience member to personally become a part of the evening.

In Lebanon, every day is Flag Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Amidst the exhilaration of the Lebanese demonstrations and the blogospheric hooha about the liberty babes, there has been one burning unanswered question that has tormented me: where did the protesters get all those flags, and how was it done so quickly?

The Lebanese flag has to be one of the most beautiful flags ever, with its red stripes and the green cedar in the center. It was hardly ever seen before the Hariri assassination–and then, afterwards, it suddenly seemed to be everywhere, a veritable cedar forest.

Had everyone been hiding one under the mattress, waiting for the signal to come? Was there a special mobile flag factory, seeding them around the country? Or were they imported for the occasion (although most assuredly not from Syria)?

Did anyone else wonder about this, or was I all alone in my obsession? I googled it, I asked my friends; no one seemed to know or care. So I resigned myself to the mystery.

But help came from an unexpected source, the NY Times. Imagine my delight when I came across this 3/22 article (unfortunately, according to NY Times policy you have to register to see it, and then after a week it gets archived and you have to pay to get it) entitled “Banner Days for the Lebanese (Ask the Flag Makers).”

It turns out that the entreprenurial spirit is alive and well and positively thriving in Beirut. Like Santa’s elves in the weeks before Christmas, like accountants leading up to April 15, there has been no rest for the weary flag makers of Beirut:

In a cramped two-room apartment here, a group of men and women toil day and night to produce a most improbable symbol to emerge from the country’s popular demonstrations: the Lebanese flag. Seven days a week, 22 hours a day, employees of the Bourj Hammoud flag factory cut and sew, working feverishly to meet the nearly insatiable demand for flags since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14. The workers sleep in shifts, a few hours at a time. On a good day, the factory’s seven employees turn out 5,000 Lebanese flags, but it is not enough….The Bourj Hammoud factory, which had been making Valentine’s Day T-shirts, switched to flags on the 15th and has not stopped since.

And yet, questions remain. We may never know the identity of the mysterious caller who phoned Mr. Gassan, a flag distributor, the day before the demonstration and ordered 40,000 of them. That’s a lot of flags, but Gassan estimates that three-quarters of a million have been sold since Hariri’s assassination. That’s an awful lot of flags. Even at the rate of 5,000 a day, it doesn’t add up, but who’s counting? They’re beautiful, they’re everywhere, and the flagmakers are very, very happy.

Long may they wave.

The Althouse challenge: explain inconsistent compassion

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, I’ll bite.

Ann Althouse challenges the blogosphere to answer the question Ralph Nader posed on “Crossfire” the other day: why aren’t Republicans and Democrats consistently compassionate?

Three reasons:

(1) Because they are human beings, and human beings are not consistently anything–except, perhaps, inconsistent.

(2) Because they are politicians, and many of their decisions are strategic rather than moral, designed to get themselves elected and then re-elected.

(3) Because (when they’re not following rule #2 above) they believe that adherence to certain overarching principles will lead to a greater good for all, and therefore they are ready to sacrifice compassion towards certain individual cases at the altar of this common greater good.

Dancing in a ring (a response to a query posed by Norm Geras)

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent post, Norman Geras wrote:

And yet it is almost de rigeur amongst people of liberal and left outlook, today, to use as representative of what we should fear in the way of a possible return of the horrors of Nazism, not the many actual ruthless and life-devouring regimes we have known in recent decades, but… George Bush, or America, or some other Western instance or combination. Why? One answer I would give to this is that I don’t know. I’ve been trying to understand it since September 11 2001 and on some level failing. Yes, you can say knee-jerk this, that and the other, and in its own way it is right to say so. But, more deeply, the failure involved in these de rigeur responses, the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters, is hard to comprehend.

In that one-word sentence, “Why?” and its answer, “I don’t know,” lie an enormity of wonder, a perplexity many of us share.

Why do so many “of liberal and left outlook” focus on Bush’s supposed crimes, making the Nazi comparison at the drop of a metaphor, and ignoring the far more terrible tyrants around the world for whom the Hitlerian analogy would be more apt? Why indeed have many on the left functioned as apologists for Saddam Hussein, a man whose downfall they should be applauding? When they said they were against tyranny, didn’t they mean what they said?

I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer. But I do have a response.

First, I offer this quote from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It’s wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs. But there’s a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.

Now, you might say that leftists didn’t have to compromise their beliefs to have applauded the downfall of Saddam Hussein and to have realized that he and his regime were worse (and far more Nazi-like) than George Bush. Indeed, there are many leftists who have consistently said these very things. But there are others—and their numbers are not small–who have not, or who have done it with so much “throat-clearing,” as Chris Hitchens calls it, that their statements become virtually meaningless.

What is the difference between these two types of people? I think it has to do with the extent of their devotion to the circle dance, and the hierarchy of their belief system. The former group–what Norm Geras calls “principled leftists”–truly do believe what they say about hating tyrants and tyranny, and this is one of their highest values. They apply it irrespective of where the tyranny originates. But the second group, the terrorist and Saddam apologists, the relentless Bush=Hitler accusers, are quite different. It seems that they feel that their membership in the circle of the left requires them to elevate one particular guiding principle above all else, and that is this: in any power struggle between members of a third-world country and a developed Western country (especially the most powerful of all, the United States), the third-world country is always right.

Once learned, this very simple and reductionist principle makes the world easy to understand, and dictates all further responses. If one believes this principle, then oppression and tyranny can go in one direction only, and all evidence to the contrary must be ignored, suppressed, or twisted by sophistry into something almost unrecognizable. But once that price is paid, one can go on dancing in the old circle.

In the quote with which I began this essay, Norm Geras refers to “the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters.” I think the key phrase is “which matter more than just about anything else matters.” To those intent on dancing the circle dance above all else, the priorities are different. Apparently, other things matter more.

I don’t think this phenomenon is limited to the left. I’ve watched some on the right do the same sort of thing (although the details and issues are quite different): ignore evidence or twist logic to make sure they come to a preordained conclusion that fits into previous theories. And on the right there are also those brave ones who leave the circle and dance outside the ring.

A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 3–Beginnings

The New Neo Posted on by

(Part I)
(Part II)

How does a political identity begin?

Political identities, like religious identities, start when we’re very young, and they start with the family. Later on, in our teens and early twenties, we may rebel, or we may continue along the path laid down in childhood. But as little children we can’t possibly understand politics rationally. For children, politics is mostly a matter of affilliation, plus some vague information swirling around in the public domain and filtering down to the child in childish terms: What does my family think and believe? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

My first political memory is of the Korean War, which began when I was almost an infant (please do me a favor and don’t do the math). I must have been only two or three years old when I told my mother, after careful and solemn consideration of the pros and cons, that red was no longer my favorite color. When she asked me why, I answered that it was because it was the Communist color (or perhaps “Commie color”?).

Thus is a political consciousness born. I didn’t–and couldn’t, being so young–have any understanding of the conflict itself, nor of the issues involved. But I’d overheard things, enough to conclude that there was an enemy, and that since the enemy liked the color red (heretofore my favorite color), now I needed to hate red.

On my first day of kindergarten I was issued a set of metal dog tags with my name and address and instructed to wear them around my neck at all times. I don’t know whether this was a national policy, or one limited to New York, but everyone in our school was given them, although few of us ended up wearing them (we were also supposed to bring a handkerchief to school every day, and I forgot that too, and regularly got marked down for it). I knew exactly what the dog tags were for, though, thanks to my best friend. If we were bombed and blown to bits, she explained, and there were no bodies left, the dog tags would help them identify the pieces (ah, those innocent pre-DNA days!).

So I grew up with the idea of war and danger hovering very near, although the danger never did materialize on our shores. Later there were the famous “duck-and-cover” drills, which seemed useless even then, in a war that was likely to be catastrophically nuclear. There was once an even more elaborate citywide drill in which all the schools and businesses closed prematurely at a certain pre-planned time in the early afternoon, and we were all supposed to get home immediately, or to go to another pre-arranged place where a trusted adult would be waiting. We had about 15-minutes’ time to get there.

This latter drill was supposed to mimic the way it would be if we actually got a warning that a fleet of ICBMs had been launched and was zinging our way from Russia. I viewed my lonely walk home that day as an exercise in going there to die, not to be safe–for how could home ever protect me from that? The eerie, silent, nearly car-free streets I walked along half convinced me, a child with an overactive imagination, that this was the real thing. As I looked up at the sky I could almost see the warheads coming, so real did it all seem.

I saw the movie “On the Beach” when it first came out in 1959, and read the book, too, for extra measure. Afterwards, I became so fearful that the world would end in 1964, the year in which the book was set, that for self-protection I started to avoid reading things that seemed likely to upset me so much, although my avoidance was far from complete (I did a project for the Science Fair on fallout shelters, for example).

During these early years I was quite aware that everyone in my family was a Democrat. So, I was a Democrat too, whatever that meant. It meant I was for Adlai Stevenson and that I didn’t like Eisenhower, although since Eisenhower was the President I had to root for him, too, which was a bit complicated. But I was a mini Pauline Kael in the making, unaware of knowing any Republicans at all, and I had been suitably shocked when Eisenhower was re-elected (as Kael had been about Nixon’s re-election). I hadn’t the foggiest notion what Democrats actually did, just that they were supposed to be kinder and nicer, especially to poor people, and that Stevenson was smarter, too.

But there was another strain in my family that was impossible to ignore. I had one relative who was relentlessly pro-Soviet. At all family gatherings, he would hold forth on why the USSR was better than the US in every way–why, in fact, the Soviet Union was the greatest and most progressive nation on earth. And this wasn’t in the early days of Communism, before the awful picture had become crystal-clear; this was after Stalin, after the purges and famines, after the point of no return for most who had previously supported that regime.

This relative, whom I’ll call Joe, was my first introduction to fanaticism, although I didn’t know the word. There was no argument that could possibly dissuade him, even when presented by my father, who was awfully good at debate. Joe could rationalize anything, and never ever ever admitted that he’d been wrong. He seemed to touch a particular nerve in my grandmother, a stalwart and patriotic sort. At each family gathering she’d listen for a while to the mounting argument and the raised voices, and then she would finally raise her own in exasperation and say: “America has been very good to you, Joe. If you like Russia so much, why don’t you just move there?”

Not a bad question, actually; right on the money. But Joe never missed a beat, in the same way that he never had trouble weasling out of any other question he didn’t like. “Oh, I could move there,” he’d answer. “I’d like to. But it’s more important for me to stay and work for change here.”

I would observe from the sidelines. There was no point in entering this repetitive exchange, which always seemed to proceed in choreographed fashion to its inevitable denouement. I had no idea why the adults persisted in an argument that never changed, and clearly never was going to.

So, what did I learn in my childhood about politics? I learned to affiliate with my family’s beliefs on an emotional level, but I learned very little except generalities about the reasoning and factual basis behind those positions. I learned that politics could be a very contentious subject, but that people still liked to discuss it. I learned that some people were fanatics and didn’t listen to reason or argument, and I knew I never wanted to be like them. And I knew the world was a dangerous place, and that (at least in my mind) there was an excellent chance I wouldn’t live to grow up, because a nuclear conflagration would stop me. There was fear involved in politics, but it seemed important–perhaps a matter of life or death. I learned to protect myself from the intensity of this fear by tuning out information about certain subjects, by not reading about them in depth.

How much of this is universal? I imagine this sense of danger is typical for a child growing up in times in which there is a threat of war, which (unfortunately) includes most times. I think the sense of right/wrong and us/them (polarization and identification with a particular group) would also be quite strong for virtually all children growing up with family and friends who are more or less on a single political page. I also think it likely that even children in more politically heterogeneous families form some sort of political identification based on the politics of one parent or another, and that, although this identification is probably more tentative, sometimes it can be quite strong. I think that most, if not all, children lack the cognitive powers to understand the deeper issues behind political affiliation, and so the decisions children make aren’t really cognitive decisions at all, but simply emotional reactions.

Extrapolating from my own situation and the situation of my friends who grew up as liberal Democrats, I think the sensitivity that caused me to turn away from seeking out deeper knowledge of upsetting or frightening topics of the day may have been somewhat typical. Paradoxically, though, my interest came in through a sort of back door–I would read about other wars and other times. In this, perhaps, I was not typical; I really don’t know. The Holocaust, WWI, the Trojan War, the Civil War–I could (and did) read about these events, but not about threats that were too close to home, too up-close and personal.

I think that there were special circumstances in my own family–Joe, to be exact–that sensitized me to be extremely wary of fanatics. As a result, I dedicated myself on some very deep level to the idea of being openminded, and to seriously considering arguments that ran counter to my habitual opinions. I think it was this deeply-rooted antagonism to fanaticism that set the stage for the possibility (not the actuality, and certainly not the inevitability, but just the possibility) that I might change my political position much later in life.

(To be continued….in Part 4)

[ADDENDUM: For next part, “Interlude,” go here.]

The Shiavo case–a family affair

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t weighed in on the Shiavo case yet, and I haven’t followed it in anything approaching exhaustive detail. But I have my take on it, which I think is a bit different from most of what I’ve been reading.

I look at it as an excellent example of a case that is primarily and essentially a family dispute. I don’t know whether these parties have ever tried mediation or family therapy–not that either would have led to a resolution, of course, but I wish they’d been tried.

If Terri herself had left written instructions in a living will, we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all; her wishes would have been carried out. In the absence of such written instructions, if both parties (the parents, the husband) had been on the same page about what Terri wanted, we also wouldn’t be having this discussion. Even without that agreement between the parties on what her wishes might have been, if both parties themselves agreed on what they wanted, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The only reason we are having this discussion is that Terri’s husband and parents disagree, and disagree strongly enough to have a court battle.

To me, it would have been best if her husband and family could have reached some agreement out of court. Since that didn’t happen, and has no chance of happening any more, it becomes a court case. As far as I can see (and, once again, I have to say I have not read a vast amount of documentation about this case), the issue becomes twofold: is Terri’s husband correct in his statement of what her wishes were; and, if we can’t know for sure, whose wishes should be paramount, the husbands’s (to “let her die”) or the parents’ (to “protect her right to life”)?

In human terms, this case is nothing but a tragedy, from start to finish. A beautiful young woman in the prime of life reduced to this sort of twilight lingering dependency. Heartbroken parents, a husband who was probably heartbroken too, albeit in a different way (I will assume here that Michael Shiavo’s motives are good; I know others would disagree). All possible outcomes are almost unutterably sad. To look at photos of Terri’s grieving parents is to see a pain that is nearly unbearable.

But in legal terms, here is my suggestion: I think that Florida law, which to my understanding favors the rights of a spouse over the rights of parents, should be amended to read that the paramount right to decide (in the absence of written expressed wishes of the ill person) should rest in the spouse unless another first degree relative has been the primary caretaker for a certain time, in which case that caretaker/relative would have rights equal to or greater than the spouse. I’m not sure what the details of such a law would be in terms of what that length of time should be, or how to define “primary caretaker,” but I’m sure the legislature could duke it out on that and come up with something more fair than the present law.

I would also suggest that it be mandatory that the parties to such a dispute be required to try a course of mediation, and/or of consultation with a family therapist specializing in medical family therapy, as a prelude to any court hearing. This sort of thing is done in some states for child custody battles, for example, and I see no reason why it couldn’t be tried in cases like this. Of course, such an amended law won’t help us in the Shiavo case, but it might help for future cases.

If Terri dies soon (and it is looking more and more as though she will), her parents are going to have to go through a terrible time of pain and anger. I can only hope, if she is to die shortly, that it happens as painlessly and easily as possible, and that her parents get a lot of help, support, and love–whether through therapy or their church or friends or family or all of the above. They will need it.

ADDENDUM: I just came across this Charles Krauthammer piece in which he says essentially the same thing I’ve said here. I find this interesting because Krauthammer is a psychiatrist as well as a very fine writer. He approaches questions with that perspective, and it gives him a different take on many subjects. Not only that, but he has a special sensitivity, I think, as a person with a disability himself–he is a quadriplegic from an accident he sustained as a young man.

The language of public life

The New Neo Posted on by

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.”