267. "Evil" in the World

How variously we react to the word "evil."  George W. Bush, in his memoirs, thinks all the fuss about his use of "axis of evil" was over the word "axis," suggesting that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had formed an alliance like the one Germany and Italy had formed.  "Evil" was not worth remark.

Years later, as his memoirs appeared, others were still lamenting the consequences of all that the word had brought into play.  "Oh that Manichaean view of the world.  Oh the demonizing of enemies.  Look where it's left us."  A leader who inserts "evil" into a speech about another nation, as Ronald Reagan first did, has dropped a canister full of bad germs.

Reviewing all that George Bush was unaware of is a fool's task, I know, but here we've got a puzzle.  He and his advisors seemed to be doing their best to make themselves aware.  I can't count the number of places in Rumsfeld's and Gates's memoirs where, sometimes at Bush's insistence, they stop to "review all the assumptions" and make sure they haven't missed any "concealed hazards" in the course they have chosen.  They are highly motivated, they are bright, and they have gone to the best schools.  And yet, as revealed by their casual acceptance of the bomb-word "evil," they are clueless.  Where it may have counted most.

And it wasn't rocket science.  David Loy, a teacher like the rest in our liberal arts philosophy departments, could have told them right away what was in that bomb.  As he did after 9/11, explaining that "evil" is a term that people in our society, in contrast to a Buddhist society (he was living in Japan at the time), need in order to feel good about themselves.  "We can feel comfortable and secure in our own goodness only by attacking and destroying the evil outside us. If you want to be a hero, well, occasionally a natural disaster will do, but the best thing is a villain to battle.  St. George needs that dragon in order to be St. George."

Listen to Loy and professors like him and you, as soon as you hear "evil" come out of Bush's mouth, will start wondering whether Iraq was maybe George's dragon. 

You have a lot to go on.  Bush certainly was rooted in the Christian tradition that makes the opposition of good and evil most dramatic.  He himself had fallen into evil and been reborn into good.   He had chosen a speechwriter from fundamentalist Wheaton College, Michael Gerson, who spoke the language of moral dualism most readily.  And for philosophical justification of the Iraq invasion he chose, for a visit to the White House, a University of Chicago theologian, Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose bedrock convictions, according to colleagues, included "the existence of an absolute good and evil" (see Post #213).  For an alert student Bush will look like just the person who would reach for the word "evil," and start the whole Manichaean thing going.

Except he didn't reach for it.  It was fed to him.  By that graduate of Wheaton, Michael Gerson, who sees "axis of hate" in a draft of the State of the Union speech and knows right away it's not going to get the most out of Midwestern voters.  Change it to "axis of evil."  What's wrong with "hate"?   It's "not theological enough."

So we get the word that drove liberally educated people up the wall.  Graduates of Wheaton College are not liberally educated; they are theologically educated.  And this puts them in tune with voters in the Heartland, most of whom still gain their education in church.  This is power, votes in the Heartland.  Manichaeism is in the saddle.

In a liberal education you learn how to stand outside a culture and its vocabulary.  In English courses you learn how words work, and, drawing on what you have learned in history and philosophy courses, you get an idea of the dangers in words.  In the word "evil" you see, or give yourself a chance of seeing, how it turns eyes from threats to be avoided to natures to be abhorred.  "Evil" is an extreme abhorrence word.  And it brings a string of abhorrent-nature adjectives in its trail — vile, monstrous, wicked, vicious, base, depraved.  You see how those who use these words will be carried further and further from the external world and any threats it might present them with. You see (oh history, history) how it polarizes, how it turns opponents into demons, how it makes compromise or surrender difficult.

And that's why, when your president, in apparent innocence (I leave open the possibility that it was cynicism in his speechwriters), opens the bomb bays in his State of the Union Address and drops a canister like this you are going to be halfway up the wall with everybody else who has profited from a liberal education.

And the only way you can go is further up, because nobody in power, and least of all the president, will be noticing you.  With the painful consequences of the president's neglect of the complex external world in Iraq already, after three years, registering on the nation there he is, in the chapel at Camp David, having "one of the best preachers" he's ever heard confirm the stand he has taken.  "Evil is real, biblical, and prevalent.... Some say ignore it, some say it doesn't exist.  But evil must not be ignored, it must be restrained."  There would be a cost, but, according to Bush's memoir, the preacher reminded the president that "there has never been a noble cause devoid of sacrifice" and assured him that "the Scriptures put great premiums on faithfulness, perseverance, and overcoming.  We do not quit or give up.  We always believe there is no such thing as a hopeless situation."  A Christian up against evil can't compromise, and can't quit.  A liberally educated student, standing outside the Christian culture and vocabulary, will observe how easy it is to substitute "Islamist" for "Christian" in the preacher's vocabulary.

And he or she won't be distracted by the goodness or brightness or earnestness of individual Christians or those who help them.  Bush's helpers, the ones who went over and over their assumptions and listed again and again the hazards, were as good and bright and earnest as any you can find.  They thought hard.  They just didn't think broadly.  It was all theological or military.  They all might as well have gone to Wheaton or West Point.

So, another plug for liberal education and English courses.  Parents, direct your children to them.  Children, listen closely and study hard.  Everybody hope that the teachers understand the tradition they work in.  The further it spreads among citizens the wiser the country's foreign policy will be.  Start in the Heartland.

266. Nice Words

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"the bleeding edge of diversity"----transgenders

"artisanal manliness"----gigolos

"drug-brag"----books like Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Zoë Heller).

expressions that tell you the author is your kind of person: "The waiter was pleasantly distant." (Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers)

juxtaposition of the week: "she's not really a 'cool girl' who likes Adam Sandler movies and anal sex."  (Zoë Heller, New York Review)

265. The Big Speech that Could Have Saved the Democrats

 

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In the speech I have wanted to hear for a long time now, a Democratic president or presidential candidate gets publicly sick of being called weak or wimpy by Republicans.  Just because he has been acting deliberately and cautiously.  So he calls for national TV time, gets up on his hind legs, acknowledges that the Republicans are making his people look like egghead, nattering nabob, no-drama wimps, and spits in their eye.

 The classic case is the Republicans crowding Jimmy Carter into the wimp corner because he isn't doing anything effective about our embassy people taken hostage by the Iranians.  In the event Carter flutters around, his forces bungle a rescue attempt, and he moves further back into the cartoonist's cage —with his chicken neck protruding from the presidential collar more thinly every week.

Here's the alternative spit-in-your-eye speech, as it would be delivered to his PR people for politic phrasing: "Of course we're helpless here.  All civilized nations are helpless before barbarians who abuse another country's envoys in their own capitals.  These Iranian barbarians count on our civilization to keep us from picking up ten Iranians in this country for every American they pick up in theirs.  Which we could do if we had the balls.  Barbarian balls.  The thing is, we understand civilization and they don't.  We know that it's stronger than barbarism, and it shows it by its restraint.  Just because I'm restrained now doesn't meant I won't be ready to cream their ass when the time comes.  So where the hell do you get off, Republicans, calling my restraint weakness?"

The spit-in-your-eye genre includes the speech John Kerry should have made after Republicans faulted him for having called the Vietnam War a "mistake":  "Yeah, that's what a lot of us thought after we got over there and got into it.  I still think so.  I'm proud of being the spokesman for those thoughtful soldiers and the only thing I regret is that I didn't speak better. How about you, Dick Cheney?  How about you, George Bush?  Do you have anything to regret about your stand on Vietnam?  Do you think that war was not a mistake?  You know damn well we were weaker after that big military action than we were before because after the first Bush's success you crowed that we had finally "recovered" from Vietnam.  Maybe you need to ask yourself whether we're weaker or stronger now after the second Bush's big military action.  Maybe, now that you've raised the Vietnam issue, we ought to go into the whole matter of big military actions."  Then his speechwriters smooth out the language and maybe add a few digs about people who hadn't been anywhere in wars and never gotten into them.

The SIYE speech is an unequivocal rejection of the downplay, mute, ignore or distance-yourself-from advice presidents sometimes get from realistic, tuned-to-the-electorate smart guys on their staffs when their man faces an embarrassment. Apparently that's the kind of advice Vice President Al Gore got from his consultants when he separated himself from his president, Bill Clinton, who was handing on the great gift of peace and prosperity, but also handing on the embarrassing Monica Lewinsky scandal.  "Distance yourself, distance yourself," say the smart guys.

"The hell I will," says Al Gore, rolling up a ball of spit.  "This is the guy I spent eight good years with, who trusted me and made me vice president, and who gave the country peace and prosperity.  He gave me credit for helping with all that.  You think I'm going to renounce that accomplishment?  Desert such a friend and benefactor?  Just because at the moment he smells bad?  It's when you smell bad, and people know you smell bad, and you know they know it, that you need friends most. Well, I'm Bill Clinton's friend and I'm sticking by him, and you give me a speech telling the country that.  Let the Republicans make what they will of it."

Smart consultants say you shouldn't respond to negative portrayals of you.  You give them publicity and you let the other side guide the discussion.   But if it's a wimp you're being portrayed as you can't just lie down in front of such pictures.  That's wimpy.  So, I think, you go for what Michael Dukakis should have gone for when the Republicans, pushing his wimpiness, circulated that picture of his little face peaking out from under a tank-driver's helmet.  "Shit," he says, "you encircle Curtis Lemay’s baby face with one of those things and you'll get a wuss too.   You'll really get it with Winston Churchill."  That's the spit-in-your-eye one-liner, a compromise between ignoring a petty attack and over-playing it.

You can't spit in a he-man's eye, though, unless you've got some follow-up words that will keep him off balance.  Carter had the language of civilized diplomacy, all cocked and ready for those who called him weak.  Gore had the language of loyalty and gratitude, loaded with the tradition of honorable friendship.  

But Obama now, what does he have?  He's got more he-men calling him weak than those two ever had.  We who know how a wimp president can affect a Congressional vote, and long for some spit in the Republican eye, have to worry about that.

Well, he certainly has the language of civilized scholarship.  Just what the 33 scholars of international relations had when they signed the argument against the Vietnam intervention.  It's what John F. Cady, Ohio University's specialist in Southeast Asia studies, had when he tried to explain the force of anti-colonialist and nationalist sentiment in that area, and how it complicated the anti-communists' explanation of motives there.  It's what most speakers at Vietnam teach-ins had.  And a fat lot of good it did them.

There's the problem.  How can a president make a rock-em, sock-em point when the point can't be understood without a lot of teaching?  Teachers make concessions.  "Yes, the Bush team was smart and imagined all sorts of things that could go wrong, as on Rumsfeld's list; it's just that every list was circumscribed by their hormones."  Politicians don't have time to be teachers, and they get none of the concessions — to take time, to be a little boring, to talk a little down, to be a little elitist, to scold — given to teachers.  They work with what the schools have given them.

This is a bigger problem for Obama than for any president I can remember.  "To this generation, facing the challenge of militant Islam, the horrors of terrorism, the slaughter in Syria, the breakdown of order in Iraq, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the rise of Isis in the Middle East, the sight of Americans beheaded in the desert, to you I say: stand around and wait!"  Oh man.

If he can't make that speech, how is he going to make a spit-in-your-eye a speech?  He's spent six years reducing drama and avoiding dumb moves.  Showing his difference from George Bush.  Adopting a different vocabulary, starting with that non-starter, "war on terrorism."  There is no moderate alternative to Bush's inflammatory terms that won't be satirized.  Axis of Veniality?  of Propensity to Barbarism?  of Doubtful Rationality?

But there are some angles Obama can play and Nicholas Kristof, in a June 14 NYT Op-Ed ("Obama's Weakness, or Ours?") suggested one of them: scolding the electorate.  Spit in the voter's eye! 

The speech, again to his staff for translation into nice language, would go like this: "Fellow Americans, I just can't believe you're swallowing all this crap about my weakness.  You've been to school, you know how to distinguish smart from weak.  You know that George Washington was smart to avoid battle with the British, not risking the army he had to keep in the field till the French came.  You know what Fabius gained by avoiding battle with Hannibal's Carthaginians.  And you know what the Athenians lost by not holding to Pericles' advice to stay inside their walls until their navy could degrade the Spartan forces.  They lost their ass.  In Sicily.  Because they couldn't stand the sight of Spartans plundering and burning outside their walls.  Didn't have the guts.  Atrocity-watching guts.  So they listened to Big Balls Cleon and followed Big Alcibiades to Spartan Sicily, where they lost their entire ass, first the left cheek (5100 men and 134 triremes) and then the right cheek (5000 more men, 73 more triremes).   (There were, at the start, only 40,000 men in Athens.)  One of the dumbest moves in history.

"Right now, though, a U. S. president is going to have a hard time making any kind of move.  After Big Balls Bush got our ass burned in Iraq the American public isn't going to let him risk a finger.  That's moves.  Talk now, that's something else.  They still like big talk.  It goes, in their mind, with strong leadership.  Do you know that polls show three quarters of the American public (that's you, friends), a year after Bush had clearly led us into a quagmire, still giving him credit for 'strong leadership'?

"You've forgotten what your teachers taught you about big talk, how to see through it.  And I'm reminding you of their teaching.  First rule: consider the source.  You hear that 'we’ve got a leader who doesn’t understand U.S. obligations and commitments around the world and is not prepared to act on them,' and that 'we’ve got a problem with weakness, and it’s centered right in the White House.'  That's Donald Rumsfeld, whose balls you are familiar with. 

"You hear that President Obama (not mentioned by name) is hiding behind the weariness of the public. 'I fully understand the sense of weariness. I fully understand that we must think: ‘Us, again?’ I know that we’ve been through two wars. I know that we’ve been vigilant against terrorism. I know that it’s hard. But leaders can’t afford to get tired. Leaders can’t afford to be weary.'  Who is this telling us that President Obama is weak and weary?  Condoleezza Rice, whose president never tired, never weakened, in the cause of liberty in the Middle East.

"But OK, I'll accept these Republicans' conception of weakness.  I'm weak.  And if I'm weak then Pericles was weak, and Fabius was weak, and George Washington was weak, and Nimitz and Spruance were weak (for "timidly" holding back carriers) and at the present time the American public is weak (for having the brains to learn by experience).   The only part of the public that isn't weak is the high-testosterone low-information part, the part that eats up what Cheney is saying on Fox Network.  That's apparently a large section of the Republican Party.  Well, let me tell you about these Republicans.  They don't know shit about strength and weakness."

264. William Butler Yeats on Attack Ads

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Have you ever pined for more educated voters?  Have you ever tried, as the League of Women Voters has tried, to educate them?  As their teachers in school and college have?   Have you ever urged them to wrench their eyes from the TV screen and turn them to editorial and OpEd pages, hoping they would go on to journals and books? Have you tried to sneak in a subscription to a good news magazine (like The Economist) and hoped, just hoped, that it would lead to a really responsible journal (like the New York Review or Foreign Affairs), something that would keep their academic study going?  Well, you have company:

The Leaders of the Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

William Butler Yeats

263. Protestant Churches: Could Scripture Reading Be Reducing Our Attraction?

 This is going to sound like advice from one old Episcopalian coot to another but it's really advice to all Christian church leaders worried about their declining attraction to young people.  Even if you're not Christian you can imagine that worry: young person shows up, you do the sixteen different things recommended by psychologists, sociologists, salesmen, or your own diocesan expert, and he doesn't come back.  And each week you see more and more symptoms of a dying organization: multiplying analyses, lengthening meetings, emptying seats, whitening hair.

My advice is not original.  It is essentially that of the Episcopal Diocese of New York to its parish greeters or ushers: "Place yourself in the shoes of the visitor."  What I want to add is some urging to do that more realistically, and to act more radically after we've done it.

So here comes today's visiting young person.  What do you see?  If you live in a college town, as I did, chances are you are going to see young people much better educated than the young people in your day. If you live in a different town chances are you've got a lot of young people who went to colleges like the one in my town. 

That means that you could be looking at the heart of your declining-attendance problem.  A recent Pew survey firmly shows a progressive decline of church attendance with years of schooling.  If we take seriously the possibility that it's the schooling that's killing us we've got to look more closely at that schooling.  So we can be sure we're really getting into the shoes of the visitor.

To get in there fully, of course, we'd have to have sat in the classrooms he (or she, understood from now on) sat in, and been impressed by the teachers he was impressed by, and read the books they respect and assign.  We can't do that, but we know enough about the academic tradition to know that this is going to include tests for reliable belief (science courses, mainly) and lessons in the dangers of credulousness (history and political science courses, mainly).  And we know that from the beginning he is going to have been urged, in his composition and logic courses, to think critically — that is, skeptically.

And we'd have to have lived with him in his rooming quarters, and eaten and drunk and smoked where he eats and drinks and smokes, and absorbed the culture, finding out what's cool and what's not.  We can't do that but we know enough to make this important distinction: between those students who take their education seriously and those who don't.

All right, Episcopalian recruiter, here he comes.  You smile, you greet him, you lead him (and whoever has escorted him, hopefully an Episcopalian who can help with the liturgy, more hopefully an Episcopalian who can convey the attractions — the dignity, the elevation, the beauty, the power) to his seat.  You put yourself in his place.  You have joined the pre-service meditators.  The lovely Bach introit slides down from the loft behind you.  Rustles from the narthex, then the stirring processional, robes flowing past, voices at your ear, parts strengthening and fading, the glitter of precious metal, the forward-bending cross, the bobbing heads of the stair-climbers, then, elevated, the formation of officiants.  A pause, prolonging your expectation.  Then the solemn call to worship, the declaration of its purpose, the reminder of our need, the sense of shared resolve in breasts around you.  On with the grand project of human betterment.  A silver-haired, well-tailored gentleman in a business suit rises to the most elevated position and, in a cultured accent, gives us the first instruction: "When God saw what the people of Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he said he would bring upon them...."

I won't continue the reading but believe me, this First Lesson will come across as such a farrago of nonsense that the visitor, who wants to follow, won't be able to believe that he's hearing right.  Jonah doesn't want the city to be saved, he gets angry, he argues with God, he asks for death rather than to have God change his mind in this merciful way.  He sits down outside the city, pouting apparently.  God "appoints a bush" to give him shade, making Jonah happy, then he "appoints a worm" to kill the bush, then he prepares a dry wind and a sun so hot it makes Jonah angry enough to say, "It is better for me to die than to live."

The visitor waits for the moral, hoping for clarification.  Here is what he gets: "Then the Lord said, 'You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in the night.  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?'"

That's all.  The obviously well-educated gentleman, wise in years, waits the recommended three seconds (to allow the First Lesson to sink in), then says, "The Word of the Lord."

All right, you there, trying to get into the visitor's shoes.  You'll know you are succeeding when you find yourself actually listening to these words.  They are not just sounds, part of the ceremonial rumble toward the sermon. They are saying something, and you want to know what it is.

The visitor is listening the way he listens in the building he comes to you from, the one with the classrooms, and he is looking at this person up front the way he looks at the persons up front in the classroom.  He has acquired habits of listening and expectations of language that are hard for him to break.

Yes, there are things that he knows that will make trouble for us later but now it is important to remember what he does not know, or does not know yet.  He does not know that there are theories that explain all this nonsense, or put it in context, and make it more palatable.  He has never heard of the theory that the Lord shapes his words according to the understanding of his people, even if the words that accomplish his purpose with people at one time in history will appear as nonsense to people of another time (the Theory of Accommodation), he knows nothing about Christian Apologetics, he has been in on no discussions of "the truth of myth," or "necessary fictions," or "parabolic renderings," he has never attended a meeting of The Inquirers, the church's adult discussion group. He does not know the history of the Bible, he does not know the succession of covenants, he does not even know the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament.  And there is no foundation in him whatsoever for the love of the old words that repetition has built up in us, the aging ones.  He doesn't draw on any reserve of forgiveness.  He just listens to what he hears and judges the sense of it.

And I don't think he forgets, or puts what he has learned in separate compartments.  In university classrooms that's hard to get away with.  No, this that he has taken in, been forced to take in by its emphatic positioning (right there, wham, at the beginning of the service) and framing ("The Word of the Lord!"), will sit like a lump in his brain the rest of the service.  There'd better be a lively sermon, because his mind will return to it in every idle moment.

 One way to solve this problem is to make a good Anglican compromise.  Remove from the Lectionary (the collection of passages from which readings are chosen) the greatest shocks to educated visitors, substitute harmless or, hopefully, attractive passages, keep the ones the white heads will leave the church over, and move the whole thing to a less prominent position in the service.  And, oh yes, keep the Adult Inquiry class ready for the visitors who come back and need incentive to stay; they are your best future escorts of first-time visitors.

But the problem may be too deep for that solution.  The problem may be — can we Protestants possibly admit this? —with Scripture itself.  It just can't bear the weight we, to keep our tradition going, put on it.  Even with a delivered Accommodation Theory we're in trouble.  The visitor can still ask, "Why should I have to sit and listen to what's composed for primitives and children?  I am not a primitive and I am not a child."  And our more sophisticated reply, that for our kind of wisdom you have to become a child, will not, at this point, be understood.

 It's painful to admit that — in salesman's terms — our basic product is the problem.  It's so painful that we just can't give up trying to locate it elsewhere.  Surely if we display our social outreach, choose more singable hymns, make the service easier to follow, refresh the newcomers' packet, and professionalize the web site we'll pull out of this. 

Of course many passages from Scripture are painless, and some, both palatable and digestible, are pure pleasure.  Turkeys like 15 Pentecost (the Jonah passage) come along only once in a while.  The thing is, you don't know when your best prospects are going to show up, or how far their pain will be reported.  Furthermore, even on a good Sunday the Old Testament is likely to pain him.

We try to think about that pain.  We see that it is, as the education of our young broadens and deepens, going to get worse.  We realize, with a pang, that the problem that's killing us is a problem that Catholics, when the Jonah story was in Latin, didn't have.  Freely charm your visitor with music and ceremony.  Looks attractive, doesn't it?  Oh, oh.  Where is this leading?  Gott hilfe uns.

 Well, can't we make the pain go away by picturing a different visitor, one who doesn't take his education seriously?  "This nut's too hard to crack.  Forget him and go for.....?"  What, just the C and D students?  We become a refuge for "fellows whom it hurts to think."  That's a knock on Christians already.  A lowered aim puts us in an impossible position.

OK, this pain is going to get worse.  If it gets bad enough, and we see no other out, maybe we'll be ready to forget the Anglican compromise and go radical.  Forget the Lectionary, forget the three set readings, forget representation of all the voices that have told us what we are, forget "the Word of the Lord," and start over.  With the Bible, treated as a treasure of options.  Set before the local priest.  He, knowing his congregation and community and what kind of prospects will be coming through the door, chooses among them and proceeds accordingly.  Maybe he'll stick with the Lectionary, maybe he'll make a few substitutions, maybe he'll knock everything out except for the one passage he thinks he can get such mileage out of that he doesn't need anything else.  But one thing for sure: his every choice will be made in the light of what he wants to accomplish that Sunday with that audience, especially with his sermon.  He'll make sure that no off-putting passage goes out into the air without an explanatory, ameliorating sermon behind it.

Because we've lived by Scripture doesn't mean we can't die by it.  I know it's hard to believe that a few readings from the Bible are killing us, but why take a chance?  At least we can remove the passages that, if my sense of an educated visitor's response is right, inflict the deepest wounds.

262. The Use of the Word "Uneducated"

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Democracy's faith in the common man gives well-informed, carefully analyzing citizens of democracies a problem when they want to refer to poorly informed, carelessly analyzing citizens.  Ignorance and carelessness on the part of voters can be dangerous, and you want to use words that will discredit it, but you don't want to use words that discredit the common man enough to make you a danger to democracy.  The contempt in Bill Maher's "dipshits" could have made him a danger.  Slurs like his make smart "men on horseback" (macho dictators) an attractive alternative.

Thomas Jefferson freely referred to the masses of the cities of Europe as "canaille," a pack of dogs, which, if given power, would destroy "everything public and private."  Friedrich Nietzsche fought to defend himself "hand and foot" against people who confused him with the "anti-Semitic canaille" of those cities.  But no American can use "canaille" to refer to the masses in American cities.

Once Americans could get away with a term like "Know-Nothings" but not now.  We say "low-information voter," and are happy at not being thought elitists, since the opposite is only "high-information voter."

Plato's "the multitude" refers exactly to the group we are worried about, those who form opinions uncritically, but its discrediting power is lost if it's taken as mere quantification, as those who don't know Plato are likely to do.  The same with his "the many," which could be more strongly elitist, suggesting "we few," we smart ones.  "Masses" won't do since we don't have "classes."  Masses are those lumpen things that swelled up in Europe and got talked about by Karl Marx, that word-poisoner.

Set against those options, "uneducated" looks attractive, but we've got to be careful with it.  We don't want to imply a permanent condition or a kind of people.  Recognize that nobody is educated all of the time and everybody is educated some of the time.  Play safe, maybe, by using it only in combination with "in."  Poets are "uneducated in" worldly consequences. 

The Ukraine crisis gives us an excellent opportunity to see how this usage would go.  Say I sound off about the crucial issue, one way or the other ("NATO is justified in expanding to take in Ukraine." "No, no, it isn't.")  But I don't know much about the back story.  A friend directs me to two articles in the September/October issue of the periodical Foreign Affairs.

The first, by John J. Mearsheimer, is titled "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin."  It gives me the history of and reasons for Russian sensitivity to unfriendly powers on its borders, asks me to "imagine the outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico," and shows me how firmly Russian leaders expected Western diplomats to respect their concerns.

The second article, by Mary Elise Sarotte, is titled "A Broken Promise?  What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion."  It shows me that Russian expectations, at least with respect to a promise supposedly made to get Russia to approve the unification of Germany, had no reason to be so firm.  There was no promise.

After I read these articles I say that I have been "educated in the Ukraine crisis."  And I am willing to say that before reading them I was "uneducated in the Ukraine crisis."  But that makes me say that people who haven't read those articles are "uneducated."   That's too categorical, too much of a knock.  Better say that the readers are "better educated" than the non-readers.

Yes, I think we've got it, an accurate expression that preserves respect or the common man and keeps democracy safe.

Uh huh, and when SS men take over "Aryan" to justify smashing Semites' shop windows I'm going to refer to them as "less well educated" than men who have learned what "Aryan" really means?  I'm making "canaille," even "dipshits," look good.  Discrediting force must count for something in a word.

Such a problem.  The safer I make a word the more I weaken it.  But not everywhere.  How will it go in the circle of Economist, New York Review, and New Yorker readers?  Which would we rather the editors overhear (our constant hope), "Well, the Foreign Affairs editors are certainly better educated than the Economist editors," or "Well, the Economist editors have just joined the Know Nothings...or the canaille," or even, at the end, "gone dipshit"?  Remember, we're talking about that issue with spider Putin on the cover (10 July - 1 August, 2014 — see Post 253). 

I'm not sure of the discrediting force here but I feel sure the former expression, the one that makes them less well educated, will have some force on the editors, and maybe it will have enough to do some good.

Would it have enough to make up for what it fails to do in the streets, the daily media, where we so need good police work?  Have we turned our guys' billy sticks into ladies' fans?  With the SS on their rampage what would we be longing for?  "These guys are dipshits!"  Of course.  And we'd be defending, not jeopardizing, democracy.

It's easy, especially for academics, to undervalue verbal violence.  In skillful hands, in satire, in ridicule, in pointed abuse, it can substitute for physical violence, and make government crackdowns unnecessary.  "Yahoos!" says Jonathan Swift of the rabble in Houyhnhnm land.  "Yahoos!" says Whitney Balliett of the fraternity boys disrupting the jazz festival in Newport.  The sting brings order to the next jazz festival, without more constricting government orders.

261. A One-Question Challenge to Conceptual Artists

Let us agree that there are clear-headed, careful, deep thinkers among conceptual artists.  My question is, How, by their work, do you distinguish them from muddy-headed, careless, shallow thinkers?