Tag: political writing

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Disengagement from the Political

William Hogarth, The Humours of an Election, 1755

Looking over the back issues of this blog I realized how much political writing I’ve inflicted on you. Much of that dealt with topics other than Trump whom I tried to avoid after going at him full bore in a former blog, jazzinsideandout.com, now deleted. Yet, as for many of us, he became a near obsession for me that has persisted into recent years.

I also wrote speeches and coached a lot of political folks over time so that, in a way, politics became a real passion. Now I feel trapped in the political world Trump et al. have created, obsessing over the insistent daily news reports of indictments, trials, MAGA defectors, poll numbers, mass delusions and conspiracies, Republican collapse, all of it. With elections looming in a year, this stuff has recently gotten much more insidious and virulent. Politics right now is sickening.

Many of us must feel like we’re locked inside some mad media carnival of craziness, powerless to escape. For breakfast we get fried pickles and funnel cake served up by WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin; then comes a later ride on the CNN Tilt-A-Whirl, where the same stories go up and down, round and round daily.

The Democrats are also victims of their own madness. They refuse to confront the real issues the public is concerned about. Like Biden’s age which worries some 77% of voters, while two-thirds want somebody else to run. The government glosses over their consistent gripes about the economy and inflation. It’s hard to believe but the administration’s measure of core inflation doesn’t include food or energy, the two volatile areas of most concern for people.

I often look at these developments with feelings of schadenfreude, especially on the Republican side since the party seems to have embarked on a singular road to ruin.

I don’t want to be called an elitist, but in some ways I am. I want to balance my long-shot liberalism with the more stable truths of music, art, history and literature. Well, that’s become pretty difficult. Right now, I’m rereading Thomas Mann’s great novel from the 1940s, Doctor Faustus, and the book is full of political implications. (Does everything have political implications?)

The author’s mad genius of music, Adrian Leverkhün, makes his Faustian deal with the devil for musical mastery. One reviewer notes that Zeitblom, the book’s narrator,

fatally turns a blind eye, distracted by social events and awed by Adrian’s genius. He misjudges Adrian in the same way that the [German] nation misjudges Hitler until it’s too late. (And if this doesn’t make you think of Donald Trump, you haven’t been paying attention).

So much of what I read these days seems to echo or predict Trump and the ensuing nightmare he has brought us. American Midnight by Adam Hochschild presents the horrifying history of America’s descent into racial and anti-Red madness from WW I to the 1920s. The parallels to what we are now living through—hatred, violence, corruption, political chaos—are manifest on every page.

Once we understand such history, escaping its relevance is practically impossible. Yet what’s relevant is not always what’s significant, and you can’t read significance into everything political today, which is what so many of us do. Getting away from the news is hard, so you need to live by other truths. Sadly, the older we get, the more we become creatures of habit and custom. Independent thought becomes more difficult.

And finally, I do have my doubts about achieving any kind of genuine detachment about politics. It’s too ingrained in my life, and you have to dig into your soul to find the resources to keep sane. Still, it becomes a matter of keeping one’s mental health in balance. If everything becomes significant, nothing is significant.

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Really Bad Political Writing

‘Tis the season for such dreck, but of course it’s always the season. No one pays much attention to George Orwell anymore, but he did a great service to us all in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Here, God bless him, is an excerpt:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line”. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. . . . When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. . . .

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Bad political writing and boring political speeches are so prevalent today that we have come to take them for granted. Below are some recent specimens. Disclosure: I used to write political speeches, which I’d never want to reread at this juncture.

Margaret Hartmann in NY Mag (her vapid opening sentence in a piece about Trump’s nuclear documents): “Normal people probably shouldn’t insist the government’s allegations against them are a complete fabrication if they know it’s highly likely that the Feds have evidence that proves them wrong.”

Matt McManus in Aereo (a liberal socialist writing about bad left-wing writing): “As Thomas Piketty points out, one of the motivators behind the recent surge in right wing populism—itself a distinctly postmodern phenomenon—was a sense that that the left has cut itself off from its humble working class roots and evolved in a Brahminesque direction, spouting impenetrable wisdom about vaguely radical change on behalf of marginalized people in prose that requires ten solid years at graduate school to understand.”

President Biden’s Remarks at the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial Ceremony, Sept. 11, 2022: “And to all our service members and their families, our veterans, our Gold Star families, all the survivors and caregivers and loved ones who have sacrificed so much for our nation: We owe you. We owe you an incredible—an incredible debt, a debt that can never be repaid but will never fail to meet the sacred obligation to you to properly prepare and equip those that we send into harm’s way and care for those and their families when they come home—and to never, ever, ever forget. . . . When future generations come here to sit in the shade of the Maple trees that shelter the memorial and grown tall and strong with passing years, they will find the names of patriots.”

The President’s speeches have gotten more feisty since he decided to go after the MAGA Mafia. Still, one wishes that he could stop the cliché responses to events and speak the language of the people directly. As Orwell put it, “one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”