Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces, Part 2

In last month's Rant, I identified five contemporary commonplaces that strike me as DUMB in the sense that they do little to improve the sorry state of public discourse in the United States, AND are easily exploited by political hacks and opportunists. The five identified were: 

1. "Literally" 
2. "It is what it is" 
3. "Both sides do it" 
4. "Russian Asset" 
5. "Concerns mount" 

Snopes has verified that President Ulysses S. Grant actually did utter this quote in an 1875 speech. Ignorance is often created or reinforced by the mindless use of dumb commonplaces.  

This rant identifies five more dumb commonplaces. Much more than last month's list, these five are particularly nefarious in how they tend to be employed by bad faith political actors for the purpose of bamboozling the public. These same bad faith political actors willfully exploit commonplaces in an effort to appear like some kind of conscientious or noble public servant. In other words, when you hear these commonplaces come out of the mouth of your local, state, or national officials, be sure to consider the very real possibility that she or he is COMPLETELY FULL OF  SHIT. 

Commonplace #6: "It's Not Sustainable."  In the days when sustainability had a direct and recognizable connection to humans and their interaction with the natural environment, cogently arguing that something was "not sustainable" had the rhetorical force of a wake-up call. Environmental activists, scientists, and even some politicians helped the world to see, for example, how "it's not sustainable" meant that our current methods of creating, consuming, and disposing of "stuff" would make life more difficult for future generations. 

Today, "it's not sustainable" is used just as frequently by bad faith actors to argue against anything they don't like. For example, elected officials who were always against public school budgets anyway--often in hostile terms--now adopt somber tones to tell us that more resources for schools is "not sustainable." Much of the developed world can have health care for all, paid family and medical leave, high speed rail systems, and many other things that are the hallmarks of decent and civilized societies, but for us they are "not sustainable." Ask the same people about bloated military budgets, or about the billions spent annually on the war on drugs and incarceration, or about corporate welfare policies (if you're a Wisconsinite, think Foxconn) that drain public treasuries, and you won't hear a peep about how each program is not sustainable. 

 

Video: The Story of Stuff

The point is that "it's not sustainable" went from being an ethical descriptor of bad planning to a deceptive propaganda device designed to make bad planning sound good and good planning sound bad. Put another way, "it's not sustainable" became a "heads I win, tails you lose" trick. If Mr. Smith From Hell wants something, it's sustainable. It he doesn't, it's not. Fuck him. 

Commonplace #7: "It's not politics, it's math." One of the major responsibilities of government is to pass a budget. Because budgets are less about numbers and more about values, budget discussions are hard. This is true at the local, state, national, and even international levels. Most people don't like hard discussions, and hard discussions about values tend to send them into apoplectic tizzies. 

Over the years I've listened to and even participated in a number of budget discussions. The most educational are at the local level; because local government is non-partisan, government officials don't just fall back on partisan talking points or (as in the Wisconsin state legislature) just parrot the views of party leaders. Instead, officials will often trot out shibboleths seemingly designed to silence opponents: "we have to listen to what the people are telling us" (translation: we don't have to listen to what the people are telling us), or "the people want this" (translation: the people DON'T want this) or "the people don't want this" (translation: the people DO want this). 

All of the above are transparently weasel-like, but this one is my favorite: "it's not politics, it's math." That gem is usually said by someone attempting to position him or herself as somehow being above the fray that we mere mortals mess around in. I'm not sure when I first heard "it's not politics, it's math," but it is the kind of phrase that started to gain currency during Bill Clinton's remaking of Democratic Party rhetoric in the 1990s. Clinton endorsed the "triangulation" strategy, a tactic of framing oneself as the "reasonable" middle ground between polar extremes. So you would end up getting pure bullshit like this (I'm paraphrasing typical triangulated rhetoric): "Partisan politics won't let us get anything done. The Democrats think we can spend our way out of our problems. The Republicans want to starve government while cutting taxes for their rich donors. So both sides just keep playing politics to appease their tribes. But when I look at our budget deficit I want both sides to understand, it's not politics, it's math."  Brilliant, eh? 

Commonplace #8: "It's Just Common Sense." Public advocates framing their policy ideas as "just common sense" is something that has irked me for a long time. In fact in 2013 I wrote an entire Media Rant on it. As noted in that piece, in the public sphere when advocates say their plans are "common sense" they generally mean one of three things: 

• In my experience this is true. 
• I really, really want this to be true. 
• People I admire believe this is true. 

Privileging our experience, privileging our desires, and privileging the views of authorities are three of the major enemies of critical thinking. So what do we do when officials insist their appeals are grounded in "common sense?" Once again I'll refer to what I wrote in 2013: "The good news is we don’t have to be passive victims of common sense appeals. All we need to do is keep asking critical questions, be mature enough to change our minds when the evidence suggests we should, and resist all the pressures urging us to be intellectually lazy."

Common Place #9: "Violence against women." How could anyone possibly be opposed to the "violence against women" commonplace? Everyone's against "violence against women," right? Wrong. As noted most eloquently by University of Massachusetts professor of media studies Sut Jhally, the phrase "violence against women," because it does not identify the agent of the violence, makes it easy to ignore the fact that violence against women is an issue that MEN have the responsibility to do something about. Women of course have a role in ending violence against women, but the failure to clearly and unambiguously identify the agent of the violence has let most men "off the hook" on being part of the solution. 

As noted by Dr. Jhally, we (men) need to "break the silence" and call out our complicity in enabling the small amount of men responsible for most of the violence against women. A huge part of that effort requires changing the language of domestic/relationship violence. So whenever someone in your presence says something about "violence against women," politely interrupt them and ask, "you mean MEN's violence against women, right?" 

Video: Sut Jhally "Breaking the Silence" 

Commonplace #10: "We are better than this."  I was a fan of the late Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Congressman who represented his district for 23 years in the House of Representatives. Rep. Cummings' booming voice and moral tone always brought forth memories of the giants of the 1960s Civil Rights movement like Martin Luther King, Jr. Part of the Cummings brand was to express in vivid and moving terms some atrocity being committed by the government, and then end with "we are so much better than this!" 

Video: Remembering Elijah Cummings Most Memorable Moments 

When Elijah Cummings said "we are better than this," his emotive force made me suspend any attempt to ask if the statement was/is true. Are we in fact "better than this?" When anyone else besides Cummings uses the phrase, it seems as if ALL I think about is its accuracy or lack thereof. And unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that we are NOT "better than this." In fact, in most areas we are probably a lot worse than we think. Imagine a Roman senator thousands of years ago, surveying the cruelty and greed of the actions of powerful people across the empire and concluding "we are better than this." With sober hindsight, we can reasonably conclude that Rome could never "be better" as long as it insisted on running a cruel and greedy empire. 

Thank you for engaging part II of "Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces." Let us all pledge to be less dumb  by being more mindful of our linguistic choices. To cite another commonplace I hate, "we got this!" 

Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces, Part 1

In the 1950s and 60s the late French scholar Jacques Ellul wrote insightfully about technology, language, politics, and culture. His books The Technological Society (1964) and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965) provoked critical conversations in sociology, media and communication studies, political science, and other fields. My personal favorite is the 1966 A Critique of the New Commonplaces. In that work Ellul did something I regard as the responsibility of intellectuals: he exposed the stupidity of much discourse in the public sphere without sounding like an out-of-touch academic elitist. Though Ellul wrote from a French perspective, in urging readers to be more conscious and critical of the language they consume, the book marched on terrain traveled by George Orwell in his classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. 

Ellul defines commonplaces as "ready-made ideas which are found in all the newspapers . . . The commonplaces are the excrement of the society." Commonplaces have wide acceptance; politicians, pundits, professors, and really anyone can cite them without having to worry about too much pushback. All cultures have a need for ready-made, "common-sense" ideas; that quality by itself does not make commonplaces comparable to excrement. But when ready-made ideas get hijacked to support vile political agendas, that is when the excremental aroma becomes unbearable. New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is in Ellul territory when he calls out "zombie ideas." He writes, "A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, eating people’s brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves — a claim that has been proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large role in our political discourse."

I agree with Dr. Krugman that today's Republican Party is especially prone to exploiting, for hardball politics purposes, commonplaces that should have been put to rest long ago. However, the GOP's linguistic marksmanship is but a subset of a more general dumbing down that's been creeping up on us for quite some time. In the remainder of this post I want to highlight some particularly dumb commonplaces commonly heard in our society. A few have more ominous political consequences than others, but all of them contribute to the sloppiness in public discourse that frustrates mindful citizens while empowering political hacks and opportunists. I'll feature ten dumb commonplaces, five this month and five next.  

*Commonplace #1: "Literally." Pre-pandemic, a student approached me in the hall one day and said, "that article you assigned us was so hard to read that I literally pulled my hair out." My response was, "wow, that's a freakin' amazing toupee you have on because it looks exactly like your real hair!" Of course my student did not mean that he actually pulled his hair out. He was merely trying to emphasize the frustration that comes on when confronted with difficult reading. Lots of English language purists out there react violently (usually not in a literal sense) to the way my student used "literally," though Merriam-Webster claims that using literally just for emphasis is correct too. My student could have legitimately said to me, "Don't like the way I used literally? Go look it up in the literal dictionary, asshole." (He literally looked like he might be thinking that.). 

Recognizing my obsession with the overuse of literally, my sister-in-law Jen got me this shirt! 

My problem with the overuse of "literally" is not that usage of it to show emphasis is "incorrect." Who am I to argue with the word gods and goddesses at Merriam-Webster? My problem is that the overuse has made "literally" into a mindless cliche'. When words or phrases become cliches, they lose whatever communicative power they may have once had. "Literally" has become equivalent to "selling like hotcakes," "avoid like the plague," or "the rest is history;" word choices that peg the user as devoid of original thoughts. As a teacher, I think it's my obligation to encourage students to generate fresh images--to make a literal impression on the brains of their listeners and readers (;-). 

*Commonplace #2: "It is what it is." Dictionary.com traces this mother-of-all defeatist expressions to a 1949 news article trying to describe life in frontier-era Nebraska. Every time I hear someone say the expression I want to say back, "what the fuck is it, really?" 

Politicians use "it is what it is" in what I perceive as a passive-aggressive manner. City councilors will often say something like this: "We can't really do anything about wages at the local level. The state has our hands tied. It is what it is."  Translation: "Working people are getting screwed by the system, but I am not going to do shit about it unless you force me to." 

*Commonplace #3: "Both Sides Do It."  This is a particularly intoxicating commonplace for mainstream journalists. So fearful of being accused of bias, mainstream journalists will go out of their way to show that no matter what horrible thing the Republicans are doing, the Democrats are somehow doing it too. "Both sides" reporting has always been part of what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the "savvy" style of reporting in which the journalist gets to position him or herself as somehow "detached" and without viewpoint, a positioning that is both disingenuous and literally (ha ha) impossible for any person with a pulse to hold. 

Though disingenuous and impossible, the "both sides do it" mantra could make some sense in an era when both major parties believe in representative democracy and argue over legitimate policy differences. In such an era, the journalists can see themselves as a kind of "referee" standing in between both sides. But it's not clear that such an era ever really existed anywhere other than in TV soap operas like The West Wing. More troubling, today's Republican party has openly renounced representative democracy, from suspending their responsibility to construct a party platform in 2020 and replacing it with a blind endorsement of Trump to doing everything in their power across all 50 states to make voting more difficult for constituencies not already in the GOP corner. The Democratic Party is awful and is the place where, as Green Party activist David Cobb once said, "progressive ideas go to die," but they at least do not try to win elections by preventing their opponents from voting. 

*Commonplace #4: "Russian Asset." Here's an example of establishment MSNBC Democratic Party awfulness. In 2016 the Dems could not admit that they lost fair and square to a crass doofus like Mr. Trump, so the narrative for the next four years was a never ending lurid tale of foreign interference and intrigue. Some went as far as to claim that the Orange Man had been a "Russian Asset" since the 1980s. Meanwhile Jill Stein, Susan Sarandon, Tulsi Gabbard, popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, and really ANYONE who somehow failed to sufficiently defer to Hillary was also a Russian Asset. As noted by Matt Taibbi (an independent journalist so frequently accused of being a Putin Puppet that he and his co-host Katie Halper sarcastically named their podcast "Useful Idiots"): 

"Rather than confront the devastating absurdity of defeat before an ad-libbing game show host who was seemingly trying to lose – a black comedy that is 100% in America’s rich stupidity tradition – Democrats have gone all-in on this theory of foreign infiltration. House speaker Nancy Pelosi even said as much in a White House meeting, pointing at Trump and proclaiming: 'All roads lead to Putin.'"

Openly calling dissenters "Russian Assets" has become a norm in US discourse. Shameful. 

To be clear: Vladimir Putin is a thug, but his ascendance to power had much to do with awful policy decisions made by NATO and bipartisan majorities in the United States after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. We failed to support genuine democrat movements in Russia (as we have failed to do all over the world), and as a consequence made the "strong man" more appealing to the Russian people. But instead of examining and reforming our now almost 30 years of crapola policy toward post-Soviet Union Russia, the Democrats would rather revive a kind of Cold War redbaiting, casually and maliciously maligning even sincere critics as "Russian Assets." Trump and Republicans in general have nothing positive to contribute toward Russia policy, but being unimaginative, ignorant trolls does not make them "Russian Assets." 

*Commonplace #5: "Concerns Mount." We need a definitive glossary of all the bullshit terms and phrases that are a result of our politics being held hostage by military-industrial-complex interests for all these years. Take a look at this lead paragraph from a CNN story on Joe Biden's announcement that the US will finally leave Afghanistan: 

"Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women's rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country."

So apparently we are supposed to stay in Afghanistan forever. Hey, why not? The US has as many as 800 military bases in around 80 countries and territories around the world, and "concerns mount" any time an effort is made to close any of them. 

It's interesting that we rarely see "concerns mount" when it comes to domestic policy. For example, it's hard to find a story about the pandemic that says something like, "concerns mount that lack of universal healthcare during a time of massive unemployment will enhance the misery inflicted by the pandemic." 

Next Month:  Five More Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces!