Saturday, October 18, 2008

%&#*@Curses*#@#!

Texas Monthly has a great piece on Oliver Stone's new movie, W., talking in particular about whether or not Bush uses the f-word, as portrayed in the movie. Basically, Karl Rove panned the movie, saying that he couldn't remember Bush ever using that word in the 35 years he's known him. But, Dallas Morning News' Wayne Slater, who extensively covered Bush during his Texas years, remembers otherwise. The post goes on to quote Tucker Carlson (hardly an elitist liberal) who had a hostile discussion with Karen Hughes on the same topic in 1999:
...I heard that (on the campaign bus, Bush communications director) Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she’d heard—that I watched her hear—she in fact had never heard, and she’d never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane. I’ve obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.
Mental illness indeed. I personally am no Bush fan, yet I am not dismayed to learn that he curses like a sailor (why sailor?...why not construction worker?...anyway). I myself used to rely on the f-word in daily conversations for a variety of uses: emphasis, surprise, sarcasm, anger, dismay, and many more. The f-word is versatile, able to fill vocabulary gaps like no other. But, it became for me a verbal crutch, obscuring what vocabulary I did have, and leaving me unable to construct a proper sentence in polite company. That's largely why I completely stopped using it several years ago. That and the fact that my best friend in college was a non-swearer and I wanted to conform. This (amoral reason) is why I object to the use of expletives.

In fact, one can make a general case in favor of the proper use of the English language. Tony Wright, a British politician, wrote in 2001 that "poor English murders clear thinking." I couldn't agree more. I would go on to say that poor English (or whatever your first language is) reflects muddled thinking, an inability to string together coherent thoughts (I know, I'm an eff-ing elitist).

My larger concern is what Carlson called the "mental illness" of lying deliberately, even fully knowing that the listener knows that one is lying. What is the difference between Karen Hughes' apparently brazen behavior and Sarah Palin's baffling statement that the recent TrooperGate report "completely cleared" her?

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin insisted Saturday that a long-awaited legislative report proves she broke no laws in firing the state's top cop.

"If you read the report, you will see that there was nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member," the GOP veep nominee said as she boarded her campaign bus in Pittsburgh. "You got to read the report."

Or, as ABC's Jake Tapper reported in his excoriating article:
"Well, I’m very very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing," Palin said, "any hint of any kind of unethical activity there. Very pleased to be cleared of any of that."
Note the complete lack of nuance and even "depends on the meaning of 'is'"-type parsing. Not even "any hint" of unethical activity? This prompted the Anchorage Daily News editorial board to slam Palin's remarks, saying "Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian."

I miss the days of plain ol' spin. Orwell himself would have blushed on behalf of our politicians of today.

2 comments:

Jared Cramer said...

as always, erudite and insightful. i think that many a young christian that opts not to swear does it more out of a simple sense of conformity than about a conviction about language and holiness.

Anonymous said...

Raj,

Well-done., but I have to disagree with the closing line. I don't think Orwell would blush at all, as Hughes' and Palin's behavior are completely consistent with what he described here: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm I doubt he'd find the behavior shocking in the least

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