What Were We Thinking?
by Alex Rose
DECEMBER 30, 2008 TAGS:
So it is that administrations leave legacies. Presidential terms, like decades, wars, and the reign of pop icons, become for us convenient markers of a time, bracketing whatever notable themes or ideas happened to emerge therein. The correlations themselves may be trivial; nonetheless, the temptation to impose a sense of inevitability upon the past, to pin a zeitgeist to fixed temporal guideposts, proves irresistible.
It's in this spirit that I submit the following meditation — a eulogy, of sorts, for the would-be heirlooms of the Bush administration, the failed campaigns and fading ideologies — as we segue into what may prove to be a truly new era.
• Compassionate Conservatism
I'm sorry to see this one go. What made it so special was its tacit implication that such a thing was a novelty, that the idea of conservatives caring about other people —minorities, say, or immigrants — was so fresh and unexpected that it needed a pithy soundbyte to be taken seriously.
The genius lay in its faux-irony. It was supposed to sound like a contradiction in terms, and it did; but an apparent oxymoron that nonetheless advertises a sincere ideology performs a curious double function. In this case, the surface irony acted as an acknowledgment of the stigma — "OK, we understand that compassion hasn't exactly been our strong suit" — yet as a slogan intended to launch a social initiative it served to overturn the same negative impression — "but we're going to prove you wrong this time." It was simultaneously an apology and a promise to make good.
The term died a quiet death, however, partly because no one really believed that "compassionate conservatism" could live up to its name and partly because it never did.
• The "T" Word
There was an early episode of "The West Wing" in which the flamboyant British ambassador urges the White House not to meet with an Irish war criminal, someone he identifies as a "terrorist." The stiff communications director warns him not to be cavalier with such terms, whereupon the ambassador dryly responds, "Sir, a terrorist is a terrorist even if he wears a green necktie and sings 'Danny Boy.'"
Ah, when this was so.
In its account of the barbaric Mumbai attacks last month, the New York Times repeatedly avoided using the 'T' word, referring to the militant Islamic guerrillas as "attackers" and "assailants" rather than … well, the thing they were. The strained attempt at diplomacy failed. Readers of every variety — experts, surviving victims, lay people — were justifiably incensed that the Times would choose to tiptoe around a term so obviously appropriate simply to placate the semantically faint of heart.
"Terrorism" was never a casual term, to be sure, but its use has shifted dramatically in the past decade. Bruce Hoffman, in his 1998 book, Inside Terrorism, bemoaned its then-ubiquitous usage in the media:
Hoffman may have been right. But would the Mumbai reportage fiasco, have occurred before Bush? Before 9/11? Or, more to the point, before Bush's response to 9/11?
The current squeamishness surrounding the 'T' word may be less a function of Bush's particular usage than of the fear of being associated with Bushian rhetoric and its various ideological or racial overtones. Indeed, Modern Republican Vernacular has a tendency to vacillate between the sneakily euphemistic (saying "detain" when what is meant is "incarcerate") and the ambiguously elastic (stretching "investigate" to include illegal wire-tapping and pre-Geneva Convention interrogation techniques). The result being, for many of us at least, a hyper-alertness towards potentially offensive nomenclature. At the same time, we would like to call a spade a spade and not have to quibble over every inflection of a word's meaning. Hence, the retaliatory strike at the Times.
Will "terrorism" one day recover from Bush? A linguist I spoke to recently seemed skeptical. As it stands, he said, "the term is almost semantically vacuous."
• Homosexuality as a Choice
Aside from Bush's unintentional coinage of the priceless term "internets," what do you remember about the 2004 debates? The moment that sticks out for me is when CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asked the President whether he believed homosexuality was a matter of personal choice. Not wanting to upset either his conservative base or the tens of millions of gay voters watching at home, Bush stared blankly for a moment before responding. "You know, Bob, I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."
For my part, I took his admission of ignorance as commendable. If nothing else, the President did not presume to understand something he didn't, nor take the opportunity to denounce a lifestyle he and other Republicans had often deemed immoral. A rare moment of diplomatic humility from the Decider.
Still, the idea that sexual preference reflects a deliberate choice is an unsettling one, a regrettable artifact of our Puritanical heritage. When colonists first arrived in the New World, they brought with them the Enlightenment conceit that "deviation" in all its forms represented a violation of reason. Homosexuality, like leprosy, was seen as an affront to the natural order itself, a detriment to the preservation of life — even the progressive Thomas Jefferson deemed castration an appropriate punishment for sodomy.
The pious obsession with purity and orderliness has persisted through the generations, a trump card played at every opportunity to avoid progressive reform. Slavery, forced sterilization of the mentally ill, persecution of gays and subjugation of women have all been justified on the basis of what was considered "natural" at the time.
In the case of homosexuality, the underlying fear has been the perceived threat of contamination. What if the children become infected with this vile scourge? What if the contagion spreads through the commonwealth? How will our species survive without procreation? The belief that sexual orientation is a choice, then, represents the wishful illusion that "perversity" is controllable, something that can be quarantined and rendered inert.
The implication is more damning still. To suggest that someone has chosen to be gay is to accuse them of moral failure, of willfully selecting a life of sin. But the old, lamentable association seems finally to be withering. In the post-Bush years, we may begin to see an America more concerned with inclusion than exclusion, with extending our freedoms rather than restricting them.
• Teaching the Controversy
A less commendable admission of ignorance came early in the first term, when Bush attempted to quell the rising furor over "intelligent design," the political face of Creationism, by declaring that the "jury [was] still out on evolution."
Jesus wept. This supremely ill-advised comment did nothing but demonstrate to educated Americans just how little their leader understood about the natural world. Many suggested Bush was just taking one for the team as a gesture of support for states' rights. But if he did believe in evolution, yet was willing to shrug off the most powerful and well-supported theory since Copernicus as an unverified hunch simply to score some points with the religious right, then how could he be trusted not to pussyfoot and prevaricate when it came to other matters, like, say, national security?
In any case, it was an unfortunate stance and an equally unfortunate choice of words. Whatever Bush's actual beliefs, he is no slouch when it comes to assessing other people's beliefs, and capitalizing on their attendant hopes and fears when it suits his agenda. The metaphor of a jury conjures an image of the scientific community as a group of men weighing their personal prejudices while poring over disparate pieces of evidence and marking yeas and nays on secret ballots. In reality, science is not a democracy, researchers are not elected officials, and theories are never accepted or dismissed on the basis of a majority vote.
But words are powerful, and it is all too easy to conflate political controversy with scientific controversy when authorities use the term interchangeably. To wit: if evolution is referred to in the media as a "controversial theory," it's often taken to mean that the theory is being challenged by prominent scientists, when in fact it's the politicians and ministers and school boards making all the fuss. No serious scientist disputes evolution by natural selection any more than he would the rotation of the Earth or the theory of gravity. What controversies exist in the field of evolutionary biology concern details, such as when a certain species diverged from another, or what function an apparently vestigial structure might have served in ages past. Professional science is organized as a marketplace of ideas, and the credibility of any particular idea is determined by a combination of its compatibility with established laws and its predictive power, not by how it jibes with the happy cosmology of Rick Warren.
How ironic, then, that the most contentious education issue of the decade — whether or not to "teach the controversy" in public schools — would be settled in a Kansas courtroom. After a week of hearings in 2005, the verdict was reached, and the myth of science by committee met its demise.
*
It goes without saying that a list of this scope cannot pretend to be exhaustive. But why not tip our hats to a few that didn't make the cut, the other grande dames of Bush's tenure.
Farewell, Axis of Evil. What entity since the very Axis powers the buzzword so shrewdly connotes would have the gall to lump all its political opponents — even those we helped erect — into a single, undifferentiated ghetto of depravity? Farewell, flip-floppers. Who would have thought a word for "changing one's mind" could be successfully associated with unreliability and wishy-washy ambivalence? Farewell, abstinence only. Encouraging teens to ignore their tempestuous biological impulses was surely worth a shot. Farewell, deregulation. We hardly knew ye.
Alex Rose is the author of The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales.
It's in this spirit that I submit the following meditation — a eulogy, of sorts, for the would-be heirlooms of the Bush administration, the failed campaigns and fading ideologies — as we segue into what may prove to be a truly new era.
• Compassionate Conservatism
I'm sorry to see this one go. What made it so special was its tacit implication that such a thing was a novelty, that the idea of conservatives caring about other people —minorities, say, or immigrants — was so fresh and unexpected that it needed a pithy soundbyte to be taken seriously. The genius lay in its faux-irony. It was supposed to sound like a contradiction in terms, and it did; but an apparent oxymoron that nonetheless advertises a sincere ideology performs a curious double function. In this case, the surface irony acted as an acknowledgment of the stigma — "OK, we understand that compassion hasn't exactly been our strong suit" — yet as a slogan intended to launch a social initiative it served to overturn the same negative impression — "but we're going to prove you wrong this time." It was simultaneously an apology and a promise to make good.
The term died a quiet death, however, partly because no one really believed that "compassionate conservatism" could live up to its name and partly because it never did.
• The "T" Word
There was an early episode of "The West Wing" in which the flamboyant British ambassador urges the White House not to meet with an Irish war criminal, someone he identifies as a "terrorist." The stiff communications director warns him not to be cavalier with such terms, whereupon the ambassador dryly responds, "Sir, a terrorist is a terrorist even if he wears a green necktie and sings 'Danny Boy.'"
Ah, when this was so.
In its account of the barbaric Mumbai attacks last month, the New York Times repeatedly avoided using the 'T' word, referring to the militant Islamic guerrillas as "attackers" and "assailants" rather than … well, the thing they were. The strained attempt at diplomacy failed. Readers of every variety — experts, surviving victims, lay people — were justifiably incensed that the Times would choose to tiptoe around a term so obviously appropriate simply to placate the semantically faint of heart.
"Terrorism" was never a casual term, to be sure, but its use has shifted dramatically in the past decade. Bruce Hoffman, in his 1998 book, Inside Terrorism, bemoaned its then-ubiquitous usage in the media:
Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television and … one can find such disparate acts as the bombing of a building, the assassination of a head of state, the massacre of civilians by a military unit, the poisoning of produce on supermarket shelves or the deliberate contamination of over-the-counter medication in a chemist's shop all described as incidents of terrorism.
Hoffman may have been right. But would the Mumbai reportage fiasco, have occurred before Bush? Before 9/11? Or, more to the point, before Bush's response to 9/11?
The current squeamishness surrounding the 'T' word may be less a function of Bush's particular usage than of the fear of being associated with Bushian rhetoric and its various ideological or racial overtones. Indeed, Modern Republican Vernacular has a tendency to vacillate between the sneakily euphemistic (saying "detain" when what is meant is "incarcerate") and the ambiguously elastic (stretching "investigate" to include illegal wire-tapping and pre-Geneva Convention interrogation techniques). The result being, for many of us at least, a hyper-alertness towards potentially offensive nomenclature. At the same time, we would like to call a spade a spade and not have to quibble over every inflection of a word's meaning. Hence, the retaliatory strike at the Times.
Will "terrorism" one day recover from Bush? A linguist I spoke to recently seemed skeptical. As it stands, he said, "the term is almost semantically vacuous."
• Homosexuality as a Choice
Aside from Bush's unintentional coinage of the priceless term "internets," what do you remember about the 2004 debates? The moment that sticks out for me is when CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asked the President whether he believed homosexuality was a matter of personal choice. Not wanting to upset either his conservative base or the tens of millions of gay voters watching at home, Bush stared blankly for a moment before responding. "You know, Bob, I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."
For my part, I took his admission of ignorance as commendable. If nothing else, the President did not presume to understand something he didn't, nor take the opportunity to denounce a lifestyle he and other Republicans had often deemed immoral. A rare moment of diplomatic humility from the Decider.Still, the idea that sexual preference reflects a deliberate choice is an unsettling one, a regrettable artifact of our Puritanical heritage. When colonists first arrived in the New World, they brought with them the Enlightenment conceit that "deviation" in all its forms represented a violation of reason. Homosexuality, like leprosy, was seen as an affront to the natural order itself, a detriment to the preservation of life — even the progressive Thomas Jefferson deemed castration an appropriate punishment for sodomy.
The pious obsession with purity and orderliness has persisted through the generations, a trump card played at every opportunity to avoid progressive reform. Slavery, forced sterilization of the mentally ill, persecution of gays and subjugation of women have all been justified on the basis of what was considered "natural" at the time.
In the case of homosexuality, the underlying fear has been the perceived threat of contamination. What if the children become infected with this vile scourge? What if the contagion spreads through the commonwealth? How will our species survive without procreation? The belief that sexual orientation is a choice, then, represents the wishful illusion that "perversity" is controllable, something that can be quarantined and rendered inert.
The implication is more damning still. To suggest that someone has chosen to be gay is to accuse them of moral failure, of willfully selecting a life of sin. But the old, lamentable association seems finally to be withering. In the post-Bush years, we may begin to see an America more concerned with inclusion than exclusion, with extending our freedoms rather than restricting them.
• Teaching the Controversy
A less commendable admission of ignorance came early in the first term, when Bush attempted to quell the rising furor over "intelligent design," the political face of Creationism, by declaring that the "jury [was] still out on evolution."
Jesus wept. This supremely ill-advised comment did nothing but demonstrate to educated Americans just how little their leader understood about the natural world. Many suggested Bush was just taking one for the team as a gesture of support for states' rights. But if he did believe in evolution, yet was willing to shrug off the most powerful and well-supported theory since Copernicus as an unverified hunch simply to score some points with the religious right, then how could he be trusted not to pussyfoot and prevaricate when it came to other matters, like, say, national security?
In any case, it was an unfortunate stance and an equally unfortunate choice of words. Whatever Bush's actual beliefs, he is no slouch when it comes to assessing other people's beliefs, and capitalizing on their attendant hopes and fears when it suits his agenda. The metaphor of a jury conjures an image of the scientific community as a group of men weighing their personal prejudices while poring over disparate pieces of evidence and marking yeas and nays on secret ballots. In reality, science is not a democracy, researchers are not elected officials, and theories are never accepted or dismissed on the basis of a majority vote.But words are powerful, and it is all too easy to conflate political controversy with scientific controversy when authorities use the term interchangeably. To wit: if evolution is referred to in the media as a "controversial theory," it's often taken to mean that the theory is being challenged by prominent scientists, when in fact it's the politicians and ministers and school boards making all the fuss. No serious scientist disputes evolution by natural selection any more than he would the rotation of the Earth or the theory of gravity. What controversies exist in the field of evolutionary biology concern details, such as when a certain species diverged from another, or what function an apparently vestigial structure might have served in ages past. Professional science is organized as a marketplace of ideas, and the credibility of any particular idea is determined by a combination of its compatibility with established laws and its predictive power, not by how it jibes with the happy cosmology of Rick Warren.
How ironic, then, that the most contentious education issue of the decade — whether or not to "teach the controversy" in public schools — would be settled in a Kansas courtroom. After a week of hearings in 2005, the verdict was reached, and the myth of science by committee met its demise.
*
It goes without saying that a list of this scope cannot pretend to be exhaustive. But why not tip our hats to a few that didn't make the cut, the other grande dames of Bush's tenure.
Farewell, Axis of Evil. What entity since the very Axis powers the buzzword so shrewdly connotes would have the gall to lump all its political opponents — even those we helped erect — into a single, undifferentiated ghetto of depravity? Farewell, flip-floppers. Who would have thought a word for "changing one's mind" could be successfully associated with unreliability and wishy-washy ambivalence? Farewell, abstinence only. Encouraging teens to ignore their tempestuous biological impulses was surely worth a shot. Farewell, deregulation. We hardly knew ye.
Alex Rose is the author of The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales.
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