Politics for Grownups

This autumn night
Dawns, yet unaware
An insect sings on-
Just as am I,
Is he sunk in sadness?

Another thing that struck me in the brief Jon Stewart-Peggy Noonan interview was Mr. Stewart's visceral frustration at politicians' meretricious use of slogans, catch-words, and symbols as stand-ins for defined terms, argument, truth, or clarity. I believe two examples he gave were Conservative pack-mules 'legislating from the bench' and 'strict constructionist.' These could mean all sorts of things, but in practice are code for rather specific anathemas and goals. As Stewart pointed out, rather than risk alienating some groups of voters by railing against gay marriage, a candidate can remain in good stead with both his more Conservative core and moderate voters by espousing his distaste for the first and his fondness for the latter. A major point in Noonan's book is that the bulk of the American populace, regardless of political views, is as angry at being talked down to in this fashion as is Stewart.

And I think this is part of Sarah Palin's appeal. Unlike 'managed' and 'handled' long-time 'insiders,' she says what she thinks. She may get flustered, she may not always make sense, but until recently, when her logorrhea and lack of self-censorship became blunted by those same managers and handlers, she could be relied upon at least part of the time to say what she meant. I don't mean to say that she any more than the rest of us always acted in accord with her values, but she was largely upfront about them and the extent to which they informed her decisions. Nor do I mean that she was entirely unsophisticated politically or did not sometimes choose her public words judiciously, but her back-country candor, her physical expressiveness, and her fitted pink jackets undoubtedly do seem fresh, and more 'real' than the blandly and painstakingly contrived 'brands' of other national figures.

Perhaps tonight in the VP debate, with Palin's recent intensive training and the 90-second limit on responses, she will say as little of what she means as anyone else. She may even have a new more 'professional' haircut and style. Perhaps those ghastly faltering interviews with their exaggerated expressions and gestures and the incoherent strings of 'talking points' were a necessary intermediary step between her original shoot-from-the-hip/ take-no-prisoners/'Joe-Six-Pack' upfrontness, and she will now be ready to respond to any and all questions in a perfectly-clear and meaning-bereft coherent iteration of the same populist 'talking points' minus the nose-wiggle and the finger-licking, but with added 'y'alls' and more consistently dropped terminal G's. Should she remain on the national stage, whether the point is reached tonight or later, she will eventually be able to say as little in as many words as anyone else -- but succeed in doing so with appropriate punctuation and breath stops.

I enjoy subtlety in the right places as much as the next person. But this isn't Edo Japan, and foreign policy can hardly be confused with a lone heron on a foggy marsh. Evocation is not called for: clarity and direct speech are. I don't want synechdoche or stand-ins; I want facts, actual positions, and exposition! It doesn't matter to me in the slightest who pulled whom up by whose bootstraps -- or whether there were bootstraps involved in anyone's 'narrative' at all. I am not a medieval Japanese, and neither are you, so a symbol-ridden terse tanka is of no use to me whatever in parsing your actual stance on a specific issue. God help me, I, as much as anyone else, support 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'democratic values,' 'rights,' and wish the best for the 'American taxpayer' and the 'American Dream' - but from my espousal of these abstract concepts here you still have no idea in what way I believe they are to be defined, pursued, implemented, or served. Like a bugling stag weary in the browned bush-clover, or a departing goose calling a distant farewell, the autumn mountains echo with my mournful cry: Say something, one of you, any of you, that isn't fully, patently, abhorrently inane!

Peggy Noonan and St. Paul

Well, my love affair with Peggy Noonan continues. She is that all-too-rare combination: a lady, a Conservative, a human, demonstrably non-insane, and a thinker (although I disagree, and quite vigorously so, with several positions she has held), something nearly as hard to find as 'small town values' in small towns.

Tonight Ms. Noonan was on the Daily Show to promote her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now. The title will be disturbing in some quarters for its inclusion of the term 'patriotic,' syllables which, when mispronounced, rhyme rather effortlessly with volk and kokutai (国体). I, however, would advise those naysayers to notice the second word, grace, and reflect on what our country, its politicians, and its political contests, might look like were grace, alongside its parents maturity and reflection, to be employed more widely.

Nor did Ms. Noonan's performance belie her espousal of grace as a virtue. She was calm, soft-spoken, persuasive, and did not once wink, wrinkle her nose, lick her finger and stick it in the air, or escalate her pitch to shrill or girlish levels. She spoke, reasoned, and comported herself like an adult, something which one should hope might pass unremarked, yet cannot for its rarity. And despite Ms. Noonan's recent still-on-microphone gaffe in which she used mild profanity and dismissed the wisdom of the Palin nomination, her ladylike demeanor and reasonable speech helped stifle almost all of John Stewart's customary swearing.

Part of Sarah Palin's gut demagogic appeal, I suspect, is that she acts like a girl. She is unintimidating, even when she resorts to the crudest, most puerile sarcasm. But girlishness, or childishness, does not engender respect, nor does it facilitate rational conversation or debate. I entertain grave doubts that the Corinthians wore red peep-toe pumps or bobbed their heads coquettishly while pursuing the Vice-Presidency, but Paul nonetheless saw fit to caution them thus: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me”(1 Corinthians 13:11). Would that the majority of American politicians follow Peggy Noonan and do the same thing.

'Shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it;-this is knowledge.' -Confucius

I'm...Sensing...a...Grammarian...from...Beyond...

We all remember Captain Kirk. Some - the hot alien 'humanoid' chicks on distant planets, for example - remember, no doubt, far, far more of him than we mere human late-night dorm-room Star Trek rerun watchers ever knew. But even we can recall his slicked hair, his ripped shirts, his luck with the ladies, the high attrition rate of his red-uniformed personnel when out in the field.

Mostly, however, what endures is his diction. It was daring, unique, revolutionary, even, not merely to have an African-American woman on the bridge of the Enterprise as an officer, but to also have a main character speak...in...so...repellent a -- manner. It needn't only be repressed trauma, however, that we take from this shared heritage: knowledge of exactly what someone means when he refers to 'Captain-Kirk-Speak' can help us in our quests to make the world a better place -- or at least not make people sick when we communicate with them.

Leaving aside the overrated realm of face-to-face contact, I would like to turn to the written word and, in fact, to pay especial attention within the print world to the problem of email. Email can be a bit confusing, I realize, because we send it to people we know and people we don't know, and we use it with people with whom we share a mutual fondness, as well as with people we despise and who despise us. Still, in hopes that the last category can remain smaller than the penult, I would like to add my own rule to the standard email proscriptions of Don't Write in All Caps; Don't Eschew Standard Paragraph Standards; Don't Assume Something Will Sound Funny and Not Mean Once Written; Don't Use LOL, R U, U 2, C Ya, or suchlike, unless you have not yet graduated high school; Don't Write in Such a Way that Emoticons Seem Necessary to Convey Your Meaning; and Don't Use Emoticons.

My rule, friends, is simple: it is Do Not Abuse the Ellipsis. We all have our problems, our own crosses to bear, but years of living upon this earth have taught me that most of them derive from bad parenting, poor health, and imperfect decision-making skills. I can think of exactly none that could possibly be traced to run-ins with three...sequential...printed...dots. So take out your pain on something else.

Here is the lowdown on the skinny re the 411 about the ellipsis (plural ellipses, and coming from the Greek ἔλλειψις, meaning, unsurprisingly, 'omission').

• You can use it in quotations, to indicate you are leaving something out, as in this bit of Yeats, where I show I hacked it from the front and back and tore some guts out of the middle, as well:

1. - ...Our breasts are heaving...our lips are apart...

• You can stick it at the end of something, to indicate you could go further, that there really is more to be said (again, an omission), but you are opting not to, for reasons patent or opaque. You might also see this type of usage in fiction writing to describe the trailing off of one party's side of a conversation.
  

1. - Obviously I never planned to sleep with Jennifer...
2. - Surely you're not wearing that shirt...
3. - Ronald was doing perfectly fine until he met up with those Heideggerians...
4. - Now that you mention it, I don't remember turning the stove off...
   

• And I admit that it can be used, at least in casual situations, at times, to represent a pause longer than a comma between two parts of a sentence. Alright, fine, even between two sentences, but again, only in very casual communication, and not all the time, and not to imbue the writing with a gravitas that it lacks qua writing (which is how and where writing should get its bloody gravitas, if it even wants any to begin with. Not from dots. No dots I know of are capable of impregnating any pause).
  

1. - He told me he loved me...again.
2. - I rewrote the article...with no ellipses this time, sir.
3. - Well, yes, it seemed odd...but he is a Heideggerian.
4. - Of course I turned the stove off, pet...or was that yesterday?

What it shouldn't be used for is a crutch, as with habitual attempts to render thought processes typographically. Nor again, as per the above, to make things seem thinkier or deeper than they really are. Think of it as simple mathematics: if you look at a page of writing, what does it mostly contain? Positively tons of letters, only here and there interspersed with dots and other punctuation. The punctuation is there in the service of the letters and the words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs those letters make up. The punctuation is like the boom-mike guys on a set: necessary, but hardly the crux of the matter.

So these sorts of things frighten me:

1. - time to...think, and...reconnect, with self...
2. - wanting to...understand
3. - to think...and to feel...
4. - for me...and...for you
   

I don't know what they mean. I don't know what the ellipses mean, either. That's a bit of an exaggeration: I do, to a certain extent; the ellipses are there, in cases like those, alternately to 'soften the blow', to serve as a proactive, prophylactic defense against allegations of callousness, and to prove, through graphical representation, that each word was labored over until just the right one, or, minimally, the least wrong one, out of such an imperfect selection, was at last found. I'd say more here, but I'm...thinking...right...now, in fact. Is it not obvious? Can you still suspect I am not, despite the preceding proof?

Dear...friends (see? it's creepy, no?), the Japanese are the only ones on this planet who can use ellipses routinely without thereby increasing my chances of dying of stress-related illness. The reason is that the Japanese are the only ones on this planet with a culture that demands much be left unsaid, in order to preserve dignity and promote harmony. Because of this, there is a whole infrastructure, thousands of years of precedent, giving context and meaning to each incompletely-uttered thought. That in practice means it is far from impossible in the vast majority of cases to deduce what lies on the far side of the dots.

1. - Yes, Friday is perfect... (It's just that)...
2. - I didn't sleep with Jennifer... (But that was only because I fell down the stairs untying my shoes)...
3. - We'll certainly consider your proposal... (And by 'consider' I mean laugh about it and toss it in the trash)...
4. - I would be ever so happy to join your Heidegger study group... (I'll just make sure to be elsewhere and unreachable every Wednesday from 3 o'clock on...)

All four have implications that conflict with at least part of the stated sentence. And in spoken Japanese, or English spoken by a Japanese person, this fact would be obvious in the moment, as would be the gist of what remained unsaid. But unless you are Japanese, and dropping a few dots at the ends of things to maintain decorum and foster civility and good will, I beg you: be chary with the ellipses. Plus, if you save up enough of them, you won't have to worry about coming up with any pithy Final Words with your last breaths; you can just whisper 'Dotdotdot' and leave the world to make the necessary inferences from your life.