By the Language of Fools Shall Ye Know Them

27 July 2011

Choice of words and metaphors often reveal a person’s substance — or lack thereof

With “full faith and credit” now in jeopardy — due to the risk of a down-graded credit rating as a result of our leadership’s childishly inept handling of the fiscal crisis — we have seen the essence of America’s Twenty-First Century dilemma. We have bona fide fools at the helm.

For evidence, I turn (again) to the insightfully-gifted Dana Milbank (of the Washington Post). He often tracks the language that Congress members (and sometimes the Executive) use, which gives us insight into just how distorted our nation’s leaders’ thinking is.

Yesterday, Milbank took both Congress and to Executive Branch to task for using sports metaphors to describe what is actually a national crisis of historically great magnitude:

“The White House moved the goal post,” House Speaker John Boehner protested Friday night.

“There was no change at the goal post,” White House chief of staff Bill Daley responded, via “Meet the Press” Sunday morning.

Yet Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, is on record saying the uprights were indeed moved — by the Republicans. “It is like trying to kick a field goal and the goalposts keep moving,” he said earlier in the budget fights.

“So, Pete, who cares? It’s just talk.”

A sense of proportion is lacking, when we trivialize Life’s magnitudes. Sports metaphors generally are not used, when ordinary people talk about the most significant issues in their lives.

We don’t talk football or baseball analogies, when Aunt Millie is dying and Uncle Jack is about to go bankrupt. We don’t talk goalposts to a kid, whose dad has just lost his job, when there’s no food on the table and no heat in the house.

The fact that our leaders consistently miss the point about the genuine significance of issues to ordinary people is frequently revealed not only in what they say, but how they say it.

Milbank concluded:

There’s only one problem with the governing-as-football idea: This isn’t a game. If you lose the full faith and credit of the United States, you don’t shake hands at midfield and meet for a rematch later in the season.

The trivialization of the debt dispute by our elected sports buffs points to a larger problem with our politics: that lawmakers have abandoned governing as they pursue a perpetual contest to gain seats in the next election.

Policymaking has become just another means of campaigning, as partisans on the sidelines chant slogans and hector the opposing team and leaders keep track of wins and losses — not for the American public, but in their own game of gaining and holding majorities.

Politics, in its historic sense, was about getting things done, ultimately for the nation’s good — Today, politics is solely about perpetual campaigning, so as to keep oneself in office

The national interest has been the casualty of that narrowed focus.

American greatness is ebbing because we have repeatedly elected a cohort of fools to office.

The fact that we continue to do so says something negative about our own ability to “size” proportion accurately.

PeteFree.com

By the Language of Fools Shall Ye Know Them