what are you playing at?
In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.” The fresher-faced extremist Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, called Obama “just a person of words,” adding, “Words are everything to him.”
[....]Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks. The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.
But we all need words, and both campaigns wrestle every day over them. Words are up for grabs: just follow the lipstick traces.
Read the rest, as they say. And then, perhaps, go back and (re)read Stoppard:
Rosencrantz: What are you playing at?
Guildenstern: Words, words. They're all we have to go on.
--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
(hat tips to dear S.--now flourishing at the publication in question--for the link, and to AL, who's got the Stoppard quote embedded at the end of her email, thus ensuring I never forget it.)
posted by kitabet at 4:55 PM
2 Comments:
That was one of the best New Yorker issues I've read; all of the election articles were good, I thought.
Here's Obama and Clinton arguing in a New Hampshire debate about words:
Clinton: So, you know, words are not actions. And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action.
You know, what we've got to do is translate talk into action and feeling into reality. I have a long record of doing that, of taking on the very interests that you have just rightly excoriated because of the over-due influence that they have in our government.
....
OBAMA: Look, I think it's easy to be cynical and just say, You know what? It can't be done, because Washington is designed to resist change.
But in fact, there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better.
And I think we're in one of those moments right now. I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes; not incremental changes, not small changes.
....
And, you know, so, the truth is, actually, words do inspire, words do help people get involved, words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health-care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy.
Obama believes in words. I still do, too, despite everything.
Peter--yes on both counts. One of the most interesting things about watching Obama run--and, inshallah, about eventually having him in office--is the novelty of a politician who's also a genuinely gifted writer, with a writer's sense of the weight of words. That makes it all the more cringeworthy when he descends into electioneering cant (as they all must) but it gives me hope for some gold among the dross.
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