Wednesday, August 24, 2016
My Friend
If someone in a suit or at a podium addresses you as “My
friend…”, bury the silver in the backyard and send your children to relatives
in the country. This person is not your friend.
A classic example is Mitt Romney’s response to a campaign heckler:
“Corporations
are people, my friend.”
Now, the Democratic fundraisers who clog my inbox pounced on
the astonishing tone deafness of Romney’s assertion, and I certainly got that.
However, it was the “my friend” that dragged serious fingernails across my
blackboard.
“My friend” denies the smackdown that is being delivered.
You are my friend, and I’m saying this in the spirit of telling you that a bit
of toilet paper is trailing from your shoe. Not only are corporations made up
of people, my friend, but you should be aware of the legal doctrine of corporate
personhood, which goes back to the 1886 Supreme
Court decision in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific. Because we are friends, we
will ignore how pathetically limited you are not to have realized all this
before. And likewise, you will surely be
pleased to defer to my knowledge and worldly-wisdom. Right, my friend?
Several such bullying verbal mannerisms now pollute our
public and business discourse. For example, there’s the rhetorical “guess
what?” Critical to this micro-aggression is that the person who prefaces a
revelation with “guess what?” never gives you the opportunity to guess. No, he
or she – actually, “he”; this is pretty
much a guy thing – he barges on ahead and lays down whatever argument clencher
he is going to use to bludgeon you into agreement. Listen to alpha CEO “Neutron
Jack” Welch: “You
think you're a nice manager, that you're a kind manager? Well, guess what? You
won't be there someday.” What is the
purpose of the “guess what,” the apparent opportunity – given and snatched away
– for you to exercise your own store of knowledge? It’s the big kid, pretending
to let you take your hat back but instead lifting it out of your reach. It
establishes who is in control, who knows the things worth knowing, who is able
to pierce the veil of appearances and give you the straight dope, all the while
suggesting that you are participating.
And by the way, if you believe you are participating you are
as gullible as he thinks you are. Which
is, by the way, another one on my list. The “by the way” abuser uses the
phrase’s studied casualness not, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, to
introduce “a chance idea,” but to startle you with a vital fact you may not
have known but that he knows so thoroughly it’s just one more item for him to
toss out and for you to catch. Here’s Donald Trump on the campaign trail in
June 2015: “Our
enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the way, and we as a country are
getting weaker. Even our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work.” Wait a minute – our
enemies are getting stronger and our
bombs don’t even work and that’s a “by the way,” a minor little tidbit? Well,
perhaps it is if you move in the same circles as the Donald.
Now I should note that I have so far failed to find anyone
else as worked up about these phrases as I am. Is this just another one of
those things like the misuse of “literally,” or like “no problem” passing as an
acceptable response to “thank you”?
Should I simply chill, and wave goodbye to yet another train that has
left the station?
NO!
The condescension in these phrases strikes me as bad for the
Republic. There’s nothing wrong with the people who run things knowing more
than the rest of us. It actually has a lot to recommend it. The problem arises
when they start to be jerks about it. It’s not just that nobody feels good
being on the receiving end of a “guess what.” The real downside is that these
usages reinforce a smart-dumb dynamic in our relations with power. By never
being given a chance to guess, we are conditioned to wait to be told things. As
dangerously, the tellers are conditioned to think themselves in sole possession
of truth.
I’ve given up hoping this stuff will fade out by itself, and
while I may be a crank I’m not a fool: I have no illusion that any amount of my
carping will cause a mass mending of verbal ways. But guess what, my friends, if
we join together on this... Oh wait, forget I said that.
