Well, it should be, and you should be too. You should be very careful, very very careful, as Megan explains, at great length, and with great vagueness, over at Bloomberg Review.
Sure, you should be. It was highly stupid, not to mention highly condescending—and even borderline racist—for Vice President Biden to warn blacks that Republicans intended to “make slaves of y’all.” And the numerous black liberals who have endlessly pelted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with implicit or explicit charges of being a “race traitor” have been playing the race card pretty vehemently as well. So don’t do that, y’all!
But if you read Megan, which takes some time, because she rambles a lot, explaining, entirely in the abstract, how people misuse words—although a George Orwell she isn’t1—when she gets down to cases, this is her case: “When I told my friends that Donald Trump was a white supremacist they told me ‘But they said the same thing about George Bush and Mitt Romney’!”
Well, yes, Joe Biden effectively did call the Republican Party the party of white supremacism. But here’s a couple of questions for both Megan and her pals: Did Mitt or George accuse the Mexican government of sending us “rapists”? Did they promise to build a “beautiful wall” and “make Mexico pay for it”? Did they promise to torture the families of accused terrorists? Did they promise to use torture even if it didn’t “work” (i.e., didn’t provide useful intelligence) for the sheer pleasure of inflicting unbearable pain on fellow human beings? I thought (and think) little of either George or Mitt, but neither strikes me as a vicious and compulsive bully. And I wonder why Megan’s friends aren’t capable of making the same distinction. I even wonder why Megan has such “friends”. I mean, would doing better be so hard?
- Orwell’s Politics and the English Language actually isn’t that great, but he does catch the celebrated Professor Harold Laski with his pants not merely down but entirely off. Confucius was a bit more pithy: “If names are not rectified then language will not flow. If language does not flow, then affairs cannot be completed. If affairs are not completed, ritual and music will not flourish. If ritual and music do not flourish, punishments and penalties will miss their mark. When punishments and penalties miss their mark, people lack the wherewithal to control hand and foot. Hence a gentleman’s words must be acceptable to vocalize and his language must be acceptable as action. A gentleman’s language lacks anything that misses.” ↩︎
