345. "Bang Gang" Insouciance

What Stephen Holden finds remarkable about this movie showing teenagers doing group sex is its "shrugging attitude."  I notice that "Bang Gang" is French and I can see the shrug.  How many times in Paris, witnessing another incomprehensible street scene, have I seen the shoulders go up.  C'est la mani. Here, I suppose, C'est la jeunesse.

Our world leaders in insouciance they are, and I turn to them gratefully, especially when in doubt about my cool.  Should I show curiosity about that man in high heels?  Ah, there at the corner table, les épaules going up.  I'm as grateful as I was in Milan, seeing a gentiluomo cutting his spaghetti.

The opposite of "insouciance" would be "souciance" I suppose, but we don't have the word.  I could have used it when I tried to think of people opposite to the gang-bang shruggers.  Certainly my father would qualify.  I remember his being asked once to serve as a chaperone for a high-school weenie-roast.  My mother said he spent the whole evening chasing kids out of the woods and back to the campfire.  He was souciant.

It's a coinage to be pleased with.  You know it fills a gap in your vocabulary when you keep finding new fits for it.  I think of the boyfriend of the babysitter who thought my dad could be a chaperone.  He failed to use a condom (on some other weenie-roast, I suppose) and got her pregnant.  He was under-souciant.  Then he got souciant in their search for the baby after she, in her period of disgrace and despair, had given it up for birth-adoption, and they were finally married.  Then the long period you'd have to call "post-insouciance."  Not a shrug anywhere, even among observers.

The more you observe the world the more sockets you find the word fitting into.  WCTU people standing watch at saloon doors were super-souciant.  LGBT people detecting micro-aggressions are hyper-souciant.  Those fearing the uncool of super- or hyper-  become crypto-.  Contemporary professors with a weakness for Victorian values — or Platonic love, or Doric discipline — have to be crypto-souciant.

There was nothing crypto about my father, chasing couples out of the woods, and there is nothing crypto about my other opposite to the French shruggers, NYT columnist David Brooks, telling his readers to start talking as if people had souls.

That's a cry in another ballpark.  Maybe in another age.  Yet what's on the field is the same.  Say you're at a post-movie table in Cannes and the person next to you, Brooks, says, "You know, if public life were truly infused with the sense that people have souls, we would comfortably tell [young people] that sex is a fusion of loving souls and not just a physical act" (NYT 6-7-16).  What are your shoulders doing?  Where are the épaules of those around you?  What about Holden, whose cool in front of the sex scenes was itself pretty Gallic?  Can you even form a picture?

One thing our sense of incongruity shows is that Holden must be right in calling the insouciance of the movie's group-sex treatment "distinctively contemporary."  A few years ago in France the souciance of existentialists kept shoulders down.  "You are what you choose, and every choice counts."  So choose carefully.  You're constructing your essence. 

In the contemporary world, then, Sartre becomes one of the voices from the conservative past, where relations with Christians become more congenial.  If Sartre and Brooks, silenced at the table, meet in the washroom they'll make perfect sense to each other.   "The soul can be elevated and degraded at every second, even when you’re alone not hurting anybody," says Brooks.  "I hear existence constructing essence," says Sartre. "I'm with you."

Treating life as a series of choices, and seeing a choice in every moment, with nothing lost, is about as deeply souciant as you can get.  You're down there with St. Augustine ("Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow") and the saints who saw the crisis in every moment.  Not to mention the followers of Socrates, whose entire business was care of the soul.

Those are pretty heavy hitters, and if we can stay in the same ballpark I think they will win.  The thought momentarily cheers me, a longtime souciance fan, but then I think of what victory here might mean.  The end of insouciance?  Will I like that?

"Well," comes the voice of Socrates, "do you like the New York Times?  Would you like to remove the Arts section from it?  It's full of insouciance.  Hardly any in the Editorial section.  Will you be a one-section man?  Is that the good life?"

Oi, he's got me.  The very pieces that inspired this blog post, Holden's and Brooks's, appeared in the same issue!  Giving me pleasure, keeping me alive.  Giving me as good a life as I'm capable of.

218. For your collection of incomprehensible uses of the word "existential."

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Indeed, analysts said, the British Parliament's rebuff of Mr. Cameron, by rejecting his call for a response to the [gas] attacks, ended a period of foreign policy leadership by Europe's two defense powers, Britain and France.  It also provoked a kind of existential crisis, particularly for Britain, which prides itself on its "special relationship" with Washington.

— New York Times, September 5, 2013, page A8.

210. David Brooks's Bad People

Do you hear what I hear in David Brooks's column yesterday (7-5-13) in the Times?  In his words describing the Muslims running Egypt and justifying their removal?  He says "they have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets."  He says "they have a strange fascination with a culture of death."  I hear, "These are bad people."

In democracies being bad can't be admitted as a justification for throwing people out before an election.  You have to do bad.  Do something that prevents the election of somebody to replace you and you have done the one thing that democracies have to call bad, since it ends democracy. 

You can do something that will lead to the prevention of an election, or has a high probability of leading to prevention, and that could be bad enough to justify your removal, but still you must do something.  Do something. 

That's often complicated, tracing the doing, and that's where we rely on experts and columnists to show us what's been done, and where it leads.  They're like defenders and prosecutors, going over the evidence and following laws that define guilt.  Readers, like jurors, know that in democratic societies beliefs are not a crime.  Display bad ones to them and you're out of bounds.  "What are you, thought police?"

I think Brooks is a little embarrassed calling these people bad.  That's why he goes on to call them incompetent.  They are "incapable of running a modern government," they "lack the mental equipment," incompetence  "is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam."  I can believe what he says, and more.  Certainly Morsi and his Brotherhood didn't play it very smart after they took office.

The thing is, in a democracy we have a remedy for that.  At the next election we throw the evil, stupid rascals out.  That's what we have to do if our constitution does not provide for an impeachment process, as, I understand, the Egyptian constitution does not.

We in the West speak to the world for law and logic and constitutions.  We speak to the world for our national game.  America is Babe Ruth.  And oh what that does for us now when we think of trying to write a constitution that will fit in the actions we (Brooks, at least) are now approving.  "Governments will be removed by ballot, but if governments are run by very bad people, or very incompetent people, or very stupid people, they may be removed by the army."

I know.  You can hardly open your mouth now about Egypt without fourteen ironies and a satire leaping out of it.  But not all ironies are equal.  The ones roused by defenders of the army's action in Egypt take the cake.  And shove it down our throats.

But hell, gag on irony and there are many important actions you'll be incapacitated for.  Israel's security is important.  An Egyptian army in our pay ($1.3 billion a year) working with a sympathetic regime is a much firmer guarantee of that security than a regime sympathetic to Hamas promising that yes, yes, they will give us our money's worth.

So what, then?  Read Brooks and gag.  He's probably gagging too.  You just have to remember that watching Israel go down the tube could be lot more sickening than watching your democratic ideals go down.

119. Please, no more "up to"

On Sunday New York Times reporters told me again that "private creditors will take voluntary losses of up to 70 percent of Greek debt." Up to, up to, what does that tell me? For all I know one private creditor could have gone to 70 and the rest could still be at 50. The average could be 52.5.

A weatherman on television will use "up to" when he's describing a storm. "Up to 18 inches of snow fell." How little that tells me about the storm. One freak train of squalls off a lake can drop 18 inches of snow on one hill. What about the state and its cities? How deeply were they covered?

The television pitchman uses it. "Lose up to 30 percent more fat." I have no idea what that means.

If I hadn't been educated about storms, or taught to listen critically to pitchmen, I'd have been saying, "Wow, some storm, some diet program. Those are big numbers." And I, if uneducated, would have responded similarly to the Times statement. "Wow, what a generous offer. That's a big number."

It's pretty obvious that the pitchman is selling his diet plan and the weatherman his weather. "Isn't our storm, our news, exciting? More exciting than the Fox news?" Is the reporter trying to sell me on the generosity of Greece's creditors?

I doubt it. It's probably an accident. But even accidental words can trigger dangerous trains of thought. I see an uneducated mind going from generous creditors to unreasonable borrowers to all the stereotypes: prudent, hardworking Northerners, lazy profligate Southerners, grasshoppers, ants. The question is not whether the stereotype fits; it's whether a newspaper is going to contribute to it.

Maybe it's not an accident. The editors have let "up to 70 percent" through four times already. And it's catching on. A lot of papers follow the Times's lead. I know that excuses a scolding (always fun when it's the great NYT) but I'll settle for a warning: If you keep doing this, Gray Lady, up to 100% of the educated readers in every American household are going to be very disappointed in you.

92. "Concerted effort"

  

A piccolo player, no matter how hard he tries, cannot make a "concerted effort." Only the orchestra can do that. The result is a "concert." The picture of it settles the meaning: people doing something together.

So Mayor Bloomberg can't make "a concerted effort to rebut criticism that he was ignoring the boroughs" (NYT, 1-20-11) and tennis player Vera Zvonareva can't make "a concerted effort to knock Clijsters off stride" (1-20-11). They're piccolo players and the editors of the New York Times are having them and a host of others do only what groups can do. Twenty-three times in the last 90 days. Worse, they're having some of them "make a more concerted effort." Trying harder.

I know, it's a very small thing. A little spot. But these editors have already shown that they take exactness and efficiency — cleanliness — so far down the scale of word use that it's surprising that they have let this spot stay. Is it too small?

Posted by H. R. Swardson at 9:48 AM 2 comments

dictionarieseditorsNew York Timesusagewords

43. The Struggle To Be Fair.

 

It's terribly hard to be fair to Tea Partiers, I know, but Theda Skocpol and Chrystia Freeland have apparently managed to do it, Skocpol in an academic study of their views and Freeland in an International Herald Tribune piece (7-8-11) grateful to Skocpol and her graduate students for their "careful parsing" of the Partiers' thinking. The thinking, it turns out, does not lead to the contradictions commentators have noted, like accepting Social Security payments while opposing Big Government programs. It's more careful, and opposes those programs only when they favor "people who don't work" — in their term, "freeloaders."

That's the Tea Partiers' main concern, and it accounts for their rebuff, at the polls, of the New York State Republicans who thought their main concern was the Big Brother state. The Tea Party had "fixed on an issue" they had neglected.

"Fixed" on an issue. The word tells us they made it their number one priority. But that's not what they were doing in the IHT headline for Freeland's piece. There they were "fixated." "A movement fixated on 'freeloaders.'" That tells us that they were preoccupied obsessively with the issue, that they were attached to it, yes, but in an immature or neurotic way.  The headline writer has slipped into unfairness.

The word "fixated" does not appear anywhere in Freeland's piece, nor does she suggest anything it suggests. If there were any put-down words in it she has weeded them out. I see her (and Scopcol, and her graduate students) struggling to be fair to the Tea Party right to the end. I know it's a struggle the NYT and the IHT are engaged in mightily. And this could be such a little slip.  Maybe little smacks in this direction were what the headline writer's mind defaulted to, maybe he (or she) was prejudiced, but on the other hand maybe he was essentially fair-minded and just needed two more spaces for a good fit, maybe he was tired.  In any case he thwarted the Post's effort to be fair.  The fact that sometimes our fairest and best newspapers can't carry that effort to very end shows how hard the job is.