Republicans vs. words

post from Bookninja on 06 October 2008 10:43:00 AM. © Bookninja

An interesting piece in the New Yorker on how the Republican campaign downstairs has moved from battling certain words (like “liberal”) to reviling all “words” in a quest to discredit Obama, that shameless user of words. They’re trying to divide the populace into those who value “words” and those who… um, what, exactly? Scratch their armpits and hoot as they fling poo? Isn’t this a little insulting? Listen, we’re going to use our elitist “words” to tell you how much we appreciate that you’re an illiterate, lever-pulling monkey who’ll do anything we say because of the state and era you were raised in. But don’t get us wrong, despite the fact that we’re using them, we are fully aware they suck and that you hate them as much as we do. Don’t you, Bobo? Good boy.

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.? The once bipartisan campaign adviser Dick Morris and his wife and co-writer, Eileen McGann, argue that the McCain camp, in true Rovian fashion, is ?using the Democrat?s articulateness against him? (along with his education, his popularity, his intelligence, his wife?pretty much everything but his height, though it may come to that). John McCain?s threatened cancellation of the first Presidential debate was the ultimate defiance, by action, of words; sure enough, afterward conservatives manfully disdained Barack Obama?s ?book knowledge.? To have seen the mountains of Waziristan with one?s own eyes?that is everything.
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.