The right's choice of words
Bromwich, David
In all the discussion of sending the children of welfare mothers to orphanages, it seems to have escaped attention that an immoral use of the English language is involved. An orphan has never...
...Yet the far right who now hold sway in the country are so victory-maddened that all they have of prudence is every moment in jeopardy...
...He must have greatly admired the Stimulus Package...
...But the Speaker of the House chose his word with craft, and knew that his coinage would answer a need of his audience...
...Chekhov said there is no greater enemy of compassion than a full stomach...
...Jesse Helms, saying the president would be in danger if he came to an army base in North Carolina, was threatening with assassination the commander in chief of the armed forces...
...An orphan has never meant anything but a child whose parents are dead...
...The mass media have ceased to be a possible vehicle for the education of public opinion, as they were occasionally and on some subjects in the years from the Second World War to the election of Reagan...
...For how many other classes of persons will we soon be requiring language to perform a similar service...
...The whole duty of their commonwealth is: to them who have shall be given...
...The Republicans, with this their salesman, remain what they have been ever since Reconstruction: the party of the hot new rich and the selfish old rich, the party of privilege without recriminations...
...Nobody sane will ever look that way for wisdom...
...The president told some mayors the other day that the unfunded mandates bill in the Senate "must have been pretty good" if so many senators voted for it...
...And the response of the Democratic opposition...
...And, as is sure to happen to any idea, no matter how degraded, "Gingrich's Orphanages" were given instant legitimacy in the media by being turned into human interest...
...It was just one more of those far-out, practical-impractical, humanly so interesting ideas of the new Speaker of 1994, who in trivial yet such human ways resembles the new President of 1992...
...Meanwhile, liberalism in politics has declined into policy liberalism...
...And, to Helms's racist remark that it made him sick to think of American boys collecting garbage in Haiti, the reply should have come without pause that the statement betrayed a dishonorable idea of democracy...
...But it ought to remain, above all, education...
...The popular will is a necessary counterweight to tyranny, and that is all...
...he does not talk about them...
...To one who remembers that posture— which one might disagree with, but never find contemptible—the speed of the change is staggering...
...They do not stand for glory or nobility, for themselves or for anyone...
...Plain words have their plainest use when you are fighting for your life...
...Nothing anyone says in an interview can be criticized for being stupid or obscene or ill-informed, only for being politically risky or behind the curve or out of sync...
...Having taken her off the welfare rolls in society, we balance our books by taking her off the human rolls in language...
...q SPRING • 1995 • 167...
...On the other hand, a party can hardly be called democratic if it lacks a popular touch, and the Democratic party's manner is close to a perfect inversion of its beliefs...
...Given the place of many professional Democrats in the elite of status and manners the wonder is that they do not retire from opposition entirely...
...The New York Times probably thought it was being friendly giving a whole story to Barney Frank's opening week of resistance to the Contract with America, but the story managed to quote a single perfunctory sound bite before settling down to the usual identity-mush about the human interest of Frank's gayness...
...In the current mood, every lane is a fast lane, and the main emotion felt by the losers is PR envy...
...Then again, it is hard not to fall in with the language of innovation when your vice president has spent month after month advertising something called "the information superhighway...
...And if you have the right words, you can even find a way, sometimes, of telling the people that they are wrong...
...During the cold war, the defense of established wealth and power went with a willingness to sacrifice wealth and life itself for the goodness of the system in which they believed...
...Conceive of a mother of three children who is not especially successful at holding a job but who loves and cares for her children...
...Think of the "Stimulus Package" —a program that could have been called Jobs for Americans, or Improving our Cities...
...The friendly-to-all-cultures Newspeak of the eighties, which many liberals helped to shape or passively approved, is, among its many vices, a language in which invective and indeed sharp criticism of any kind is impossible...
...If only our slogans had a little of that gloss...
...The loss of an American soldier on foreign soil is not to be thought of...
...Of course, the distinction is meaningless in practice: when you preserve a nation against its hostile neighbors, you are allowing SPRING • 1995 • 165 Right Turn it to build itself up...
...Limbaugh says in effect: Mrs...
...Where a word slips into speech unobserved, a host of innovations will pass into practice unchallenged...
...Clinton, welcome to the human race, a lot of us have known for a long time there were other things in life than ambition...
...The drift showed appallingly in their warming to the North American Free Trade Agreement—a piece of Reagan-Bush legislation that should have been allowed its passage or postponement without a eulogistic gloss...
...President Clinton should have said, "That is the language of treason," and asked that Helms be removed on the spot from the committee on foreign relations...
...One of the most effective articles in his last book, See, I Told You So, is an attack on Hillary Clinton for a mildly sanctimonious gush of late-found wisdom about the small things career and ambition are beside the love of our dear ones, a sentiment she uttered to a reporter at the time of her father's death...
...and it cost the Republicans nothing to kill it...
...When you have taken away public education (the next unnecessary service slated for destruction) and told the mother to use her voucher at a community school she can help organize, what if she finds herself not wholly prepared for the modest task (as the bookkeepers think it) of running a school...
...The liberal paralysis about how to defend and how to attack and how to talk about anything but policy is self-incurred...
...and liberals of the professional class —the pollsters and legal academics and statesmen-in-waiting who travel the world recording opinions and making opinions, drafting position papers and responding to drafts of papers, writing constitutions for new nations and ruined nations —these people, if you ask whether they think the Look Like America Cabinet has been a success, have a benign come-off-it air which proves more surely than any argument that the trouble, whatever it is, does not touch them...
...So, by the expansion of a single word the living mother is written out of existence...
...As, under the proposed policy, children are to be snatched from unwilling mothers by order of the state, we want a way of assuring ourselves that what we are doing is natural...
...I asked the question directly and a well-bred man of the 164 • DISSENT Right Turn right replied: "If she doesn't know what her kids should be taught, maybe they should be taken away from her...
...Liberal columnists dug out their copies of Oliver Twist to see if they could work up a proper rage...
...It is a language helpless to fight against the therapeutic politics that has been the latest outgrowth of a therapeutic culture...
...The First Lady reacted to the mention of orphanages as one might to an unseemly odor: the word was so unnecessary, so uncalled for...
...It does not yet deserve to be called an opposition—admittedly a point of some delicacy, given a Democratic president touchingly eager to lodge himself in the narrowing crack that divides the parties...
...How will you explain the remanding of the children into state captivity, to her and to her neighbors...
...and he has done it by saying out loud that this is a revolution, and revolutions look like this...
...Even if they would like to do better, the anchor persons and television reporters do not know what they need to know 166 • DISSENT Right Turn to do better, and the newspapers mainly follow the pattern set by their video-literate betters...
...Gingrich has managed to dictate a new set of rules and conventions in the Congress (including the treatment as personal property of a school of members straight from the electoral hatchery, approaching one hundred votes...
...It would be natural if the mother did not exist...
...They live at a considerable distance physically, and a longer distance socially than ever before, from the people whose benefactors they aim to be...
...His reason was that while it might be all right for us to "peacekeep" we must on no account "nationbuild...
...We are now asked to apply the same word orphan to a child whose parents are living...
...Rush Limbaugh is no cleverer than the average left-wing chatterbox, and certainly no less vulgar than the worst, but he has mastered one art wonderfully, which most Democrats shed in so distant a past they no longer know its name...
...And supposing you weaken on this, what then...
...Their compassion is still alive, but it has grown—as how should it not?—theoretical...
...At what point did the American people say they wanted a revolution...
...He talks to the people...
...The new motto is: no sacrifice (of any kind...
...I once heard a genius refer to morality as "value infusion...
...Neither in Dickens nor in any other writer or speaker of English before Newt Gingrich is there a precedent for this shocking transposition of feelings...
...A touching and a well-timed piece of trust, but no matter how fast the scale goes down you ought to check what they put into it...
...The great task now is popular education, and it must be carried on in the absence of these older institutional helps...
...The Democrats could turn the tables if they had the wit: "We don't want a revolution, we don't think most Americans want a revolution, and we are here to defend the large part of their lives most people don't resent and don't think needs reforming...
...Congressman Goodling, of the committee on international relations, in a recent interview questioned the propriety of paying for any of our troops to serve in a UN peace-keeping mission, anywhere...
...Exceptions like Jim Hightower of Texas, the politician and talk-show host full of salt and sense who said George Bush was born on third base and thought he hit a triple—these level talkers of democracy are now operating almost without a party...
...There was never anything admirable about populism...
...But they called it the Stimulus Package...
...The rotten bargain of populism is the way it tempts us to praise a majority before we see the look on its face...
...Yet this withdrawal of the national government from the international order, even as the interest in national order is "devolved" upon the states, has been supported by persons with names better known than Goodling, among them Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...And he does it in large part by attacking the snobbery of their benefactors...
...The heat, the cruelty, the unfathomable bitterness of the mostly prosperous white people who love the change that is coming, have got to be seen to be believed...
...The danger is lest the Democrats come to seem, as they do more and more these days, merely the party of guilty privilege...
...The new moral bookkeepers ought to be asked a pragmatic question now and then...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
