Squirrels and Democracy

Essay in progress (w GKH):

HRC criticized DJT as unfit to lead because he could fly off the handle over an insulting tweet, get distracted by a minor outrage. Is the opposition, collectively, guilty of the same thing?

Was the Hamilton tweet affair a case of the left half of the country having a "squirrel!" moment and thus taking its eyes off the nomination of some seriously scary men to cabinet and agency head positions?

More generally, does our hair trigger ability to pounce on racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, culturally appropriative, or personally insulting comments, our readiness to rush to join in on an internet "take down" of someone who says or does something ideologically scandalous, reduce our capacity for thoughtful and effective counterplay?

Does the other side know this, at least implicitly, and take advantage of it? Are we duped into thinking that accumulating likes from people who already are like us is effecting positive change?Are we sometimes party to a media loop in which we react to something, react to one another reacting, and then satisfiedly watch ourselves on the news (or as something trending online), basking in the solidarity of shared outrage?

Weber famously described politics as the long, slow boring of hard boards.  Has the internet become such a drug of instant ideological gratification, has it so enabled instant, coordinated outrage that the demos, too, is unfit to rule?

Institutional Reports and TagAlongs

While talking with GKH about writing today, I figured out what was wrong with a draft of an institutional report I read yesterday: it was packed with tag-alongs: words and phrases not invited to the sentences and paragraphs I was trying to read.  Their presence unnecessary and their company unwelcome, but all such familiar rhetorical faces that authors forget to play the doorman, ticket taker, bouncer, or maître d'hôtel and so all comers were admitted and seated.  Too polite to thin their own ranks, some sentences meander from initial cap to final period like an oversubscribed progressive dinner.  Some paragraphs careen down the page like overstacked, overstuffed pickup trucks you hate to drive behind for fear they'll tip over and spill their load.  And things that need saying and arguments worth making are left to fend for themselves, like a shy guy trying in vain to get a bartender's attention in a crowded, noisy pub.

This phenomenon is a variation on what Orwell had in mind when he wrote that "modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug" (1946).  He was advocating for elevated political discourse, but his characterization of it as "language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought" works for institutional uses of language too, which are too often, as Orwell says of political language, as if "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

When it comes to reports, perhaps we'd do better to charge by the word instead of paying by the hour.