We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident

The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to
throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

* * * * *

I am one of those liberals who people laughed at for suffering high levels of anxiety throughout the fall as the presidential campaign wended its lugubrious way toward an end that less worried people felt was comfortably inevitable. Reason suggested, the closer we got to November 4, that there was no way McCain-Palin could win, but I found it absolutely terrifying to have to contemplate even a remote possibility that we would find ourselves dealing with four disastrous years of an administration headed by a man who bragged about voting with George Bush 90% of the time, who said that he would be willing to stay in Iraq for 100 years, if that is what it took, and who asked us to accept, as a serious candidate for the Vice-Presidency, a woman whose past (and, as it turned out, present) is littered with ethically questionable behavior, whose politics are to the right of George Bush, whose temperament is meaner than McCain’s, and whose intelligence—or, at the very least—knowledge, is vastly inferior to what is needed to inspire confidence that she could begin to handle even one of the challenges that faces America’s next president.

In part my anxiety was a simple matter of my profound belief that we cannot survive as a stable country if there aren’t dramatic changes in both foreign and domestic policy, but at least equally disturbing to me was the prospect that I was going to have to face the fact that a majority of people in this country are capable of believing that the deliberate propagation of fear and hatred is an appropriate means of conducting a campaign in a so-called civilized world, that lies and innuendo are equally acceptable bases for making decisions as truth and reasoned explanations backed by facts are, and that taking direct action to fix the problems of the world is less important than keeping someone with a funny name out of the presidency. I tend toward cynicism, and I am seldom surprised to discover that people are driven by ignorance and selfishness rather than by logic and a vision of a better future achievable only by commitment to long-term goals that require short-term pain and sacrifice. Despite that baseline bias, I never seem to give up the hope that better nature will prevail and that we will awake one day to find ourselves living amidst the flourishing embodiment of the original vision of democracy that was enshrined in the constitution more than 200 years ago. Anxiety was the inevitable outcome of the roiling clash in my head between my hope of seeing some portion of my ideal realized and my fear of a reality that would reduce the achievement of my ideal to a laughable pipe dream.

The official declaration, at about 11 p.m. EST on Tuesday, that Barack Hussein Obama would be the next President, was, for me, a moment of great relief and joy. No one could miss the historic nature of the moment, of course, and my happiness was precisely that happiness: the knowledge, for at least one day, that the ideal is attainable, that reason and sanity do sometimes prevail, and that maybe people—a lot of people—aren’t nearly so scared, short-sighted, and foolish as I fear them to be. I have on my computer desktop this picture, created by David Sirota (a Denver based political writer) from a photo he took at the Barack Obama rally that drew 100,000 people in Denver on October 27, which seems to me to encapsulate the moment beautifully. The sun is out, the colors are bright, light reflects on the gold of the dome. The huge crowd stands as one, looking in the same direction, carrying the same message, hoping for the same thing. A metaphor. Sirota himself describes the picture as a picture of Democracy, more than a picture of Barack Obama.

Many other images seem to encapsulate the effect of the moment. This mosaic of next-day newspaper front pages forges another vision of unity across the country.

This photo of the next first family tells the story of a new future, completely different from what has gone before:

It promises not only a world of a different color, but a younger one, lit by an unknown, but definitely glamorous light. I got the picture from The New Zimbabwe Times, and its appearance there along with the full text of Obama’s victory speech, illustrates the scale of the influence of the choice, shows that a decision that important that far away says something significant about how small the world is, and about how many others have hopes similar to mine that America will set itself right again.

This cartoon, by Patrick Moberg, tells a similar story: the future is dramatically, strikingly different from the past.

Given the past, especially the recent eight-years’ past, dramatically different is strikingly welcome.

Finally, the image that first occurred to me as speaking for the moment is not a new one, but an old one. The Doonesbury cartoon from September 2, 1974 speaks volumes about hope:

The symbolic uncovering of one of the nation’s most famous symbols serves as an image of the potential restoration not only of the executive branch to its rightful status, but also of democracy itself, and, as we have already seen, of the standing of the nation in the eyes of the world. These are all potential, of course; it remains to be seen whether the hope will be justified, but for now, the sun is out.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008, was a great moment. A historical, once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-the-history-of-a-nation moment.

I was deeply distressed, therefore, to have the joy of that moment dramatically undercut less than one day later.

The celebration wasn’t even over yet the next day before we had to accept the news that Proposition 8 had passed in California. This was perhaps unsurprising—I had said all along that there was only a chance that it would fail—but it was a deep disappointment nevertheless. Bans on same-sex marriage passed on the same day in Arizona and Florida as well as in California. These measures are no more reasonable, democratic, or humane in Arizona and Florida, but they are perhaps more easily understood. Arizona went, of course, for McCain in the Presidential election by a nine-point margin, and though Florida went for Obama, the margin of victory there was small: 51% to 49%. In California, however, the presidential vote was nearly 2-1 for Obama: he won by 24 points. The results in Arizona and Florida are disappointing, but more or less consistent; the results in California are harder for me to accept because they stand as a glaring and sad contradiction. The results in California serve as an indisputable reminder that my fears about the potential of our worse nature to prevail cannot be completely mitigated by the election of Barack Obama. The results in California demonstrate that people are not yet mostly reasonable, that people can, and do, hang onto contradictory beliefs, and that people can, and do, live comfortably with priding themselves on their open-mindedness for their acceptance of one human characteristic, skin color, while concurrently discriminating against someone else for another human characteristic, sexual orientation.

A different set of images tells this story (I encountered these at Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic). One narrative line has to do with new or expanded hatreds that will arise out of the aftermath of the failure of the No-on-8 effort. This photo shows an early protest against the Mormon Church, whose members supported Proposition 8 to the tune of tens of millions of dollars:

This irony is a sad one: the claim the sign makes is largely true (though it conflates the Mormons with the entire pro-8 movement, which is neither accurate nor reasonable); several highly controversial ads did, in fact, use children as a means of escalating fear—in at least one instance, without the permission of the parents. Check out two here and here. Certainly the pro 8 arguments relied heavily on fear and hate: “It has already happened” (with the “it” not specified); “Save Marriage”; “Protect the Children”; these and other ominous phrases suggested none too subtly that catastrophic harm would come to American culture as we know it. This kind of fear-mongering naturally obscured the fact that there are already 17,000 married gay couples and a vast number, married and unmarried, who have adopted children. None of these has caused a cataclysm. So the protest in the picture is understandable and to a large degree justified; I, too, was enraged by the fact that the Mormon church, working in a heavy-handed manner out of Utah could and did intervene in a decision to revise the California state constitution, and I was even more enraged that their attempt to influence was so effective; but I am saddened by this sign because it is a tangible reminder that the inevitable result of a successful campaign of hatred is hatred offered in retaliation. This is why hatred is so bad: it regenerates in widening circles.

Another image, a political cartoon by Tom Toles, drawing for The Washington Post, demonstrates eloquently why it is difficult not to be angered and frustrated by the irony of California’s November 4 decisions. His cartoon refers to Proposition 8 and Proposition 2, an animal-rights measure:

How can one not be angered and frustrated by the realization that although California voters have risen up to accord equality to racial minorities, they have, at the same moment institutionalized a hierarchy in which chickens are valued, in some ways, more than homosexuals?

I resent the hypocrisy on abstract philosophical principles of fairness, but I also resent it because I have had, for 30 years, a very good friend who is gay. He and his partner have been together as a couple for coming up on 20 years; very nearly as long as my husband and I have been married. My friend and his partner have a stable relationship, they own a house for which they regularly make the mortgage payments, they have long been gainfully employed, and they pay taxes. In the past few years, they have adopted two children who were not wanted in a lot of more traditional households because they are both of mixed race. My friends have worked with their accountant to ensure that the children will be cared for financially no matter what happens to the two fathers, and they have worked together tirelessly to make good decisions about how to raise their children to be healthy, happy, and safe. My friend’s partner has given up his job in order to stay home, because they believe that having a stay-at-home parent is the best way to ensure that their children are well-raised. I admire my friends for working at, and achieving, the kind of relationship and the kind of family that we idolize, in this culture, but which we all too often fail to achieve. I resent deeply the implication that my friends are viewed as less deserving of public concern than chickens are.

The conflict and contradiction arise from ignorance, of course. Those who so fear the specter of same-sex marriage that they are driven to extreme measures to codify bigotry are mired in the twin false beliefs that homosexuality is a matter of choice, and that children exposed to homosexuals, especially if the “choice” is validated by formal public approval, will be convinced to choose a homosexual lifestyle. That ignorance is so far immune to any reasoned argument that points out, for instance, that straight people never experienced a moment themselves in which, faced with a choice, they decided to be heterosexual, that research shows that children of gay parents are no more likely to be homosexual than are children of heterosexual parents, or that modern science has demonstrated, based on studies of twins, that the highest predictor of homosexuality is genetic and the second highest is a trauma, such as abandonment by the parent of the same sex, when one is very young—before reaching school age. All current information indicates that there is at no point in anyone’s life a chance to simply choose, consciously and willfully, one’s sexual orientation. (Another excellent source of documented information is the book Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex But Were Afraid They’d Ask, by Justin Richardson and Mark Schuster.) People who oppose rights for homosexuals, however, do so because they hold old, deeply rooted beliefs, almost always based in religion, and because they are unwilling to try to find out more, because they are afraid that their ideas might prove to be wrong. These people don’t know my friends in California, and they don’t want to know them, because to know them really might turn out to be to love them.

The effort, then, thrives on a deliberate fostering of ignorance, and that effort has led to the formalizing of hypocrisy in the California constitution itself.

California’s constitution states:

(b) A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not
granted on the same terms to all citizens. Privileges or immunities granted by
the Legislature may be altered or revoked.

Proposition 8 states:

SECTION 1. Title

This measure shall be known and may be cited as the “California Marriage Protection Act.”

SECTION 2. Section 7.5 is added to Article I of the California Constitution, to read:

SEC. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

These sixteen words now enacted into law effectively negate the principle in the California constitution that all men are created equal and as such shall not be denied privileges granted to others, and in so doing they turn California away from the effort to realize the vision of the founding fathers.

A 24-point Obama win in California accompanied by a simultaneous 4-point homosexual loss is a 28-point signal that America is not yet ready to live all the way up to the promise of the Constitution. We’ve come a long way—far enough that someone who would once have been counted as 3/5 of a person will now assume the reins of the most powerful position in the nation—possibly in the world—and will do so with the legal blessing and whole-hearted support of a significant majority segment of the population, a majority not only of the electoral college but also of the voting population at large, a population comprising men, women, Caucasian, African-American, Latino, Asian straight, gay, young, old, rich poor, and a wide variety of other demographic identities. That’s a long road to travel, and we have accomplished something not to be trivialized; nevertheless, the Proposition 8 results remind us that we have not traveled far enough, not even in the states where the Obama result indicated the biggest margins of victory of reason and fairness over bigotry and discrimination.

I have been picking on California because the outcome of Proposition 8 there provides such a dramatic example of our capacity to fool ourselves into hanging on to wrongs, but the three states that enacted anti-gay-marriage laws in the 2008 elections were numbers 28, 29, and 30. The problem is widespread, and we need a widespread movement to counter it. Sadly, the man who has himself become the icon of social progress and who is now well-positioned to lead such a movement is himself a part of the problem. Barack Obama has made it known publicly that though he opposes discrimination, he also opposes same-sex marriage, believing instead that marriage should be between a man and a woman. He has not, so far as I am aware, been pressed to explain the contradiction in his thinking beyond saying that he believes Civil Unions provide sufficient rights.

Obama has demonstrated himself to be an extremely intelligent person; I have to think that he is aware of the irrationality of the ideological fence he has chosen to walk on this particular issue. I would like to hear his explanation for that choice. I would like to know whether he truly knows that if we are to eliminate discrimination, then we must offer same-sex marriage so long as we offer different-sex marriage and only took the position he took because he feared he could not otherwise be elected, or whether in fact Obama suffers from the same self-deluding hypocrisy that we have just seen out of many Californians who have managed to convince themselves that it is possible to proclaim oneself an advocate for African-Americans and chickens but not for homosexuals and still claim to be an open-minded defender of the constitution. I would like to hear Obama answer a question such as this one: “If Civil Unions serve sufficiently to protect the rights of gay people, then presumably, given your stance on equality and non-discrimination, you believe that Civil Unions also serve sufficiently to protect the rights of straight people. Why, then, are you married? And if you believe, as it seems you must, that marriage confers some further benefit that you deserve and chose to take advantage of, then why do homosexuals not deserve the same as you?” I would like to see all those who try to walk the line between bigotry and enlightenment answer the same question; I would like to see it made clear that there is no middle road. One either believes in equality or one does not. A stand for equality for some but not for others is, by definition, a stand for inequality.

We have made much progress; the concrete sign of that progress that we enacted this week by the long-overdue step of electing an African-American President is of immense historical, philosophical, and emotional value, and is justifiably a source of great joy for those who look for mankind’s better nature to assert itself more and more in years to come. Barack Obama ran on the narrative of hope: he promised us that change is possible, and that we can enact it if we but believe and then work for what we believe in. What I hope for now is that President-Elect Obama will have learned something from his own magnificent experience of what it feels like to find oneself on the far side of the wall of bigotry, with the crumbled remains of that wall on the ground behind him. My hope is that Obama will be able to lead the next charge of those who believe and those who are almost ready to believe in the next effort to eliminate one of the last remaining socially and legally acceptable prejudices. The hope I have for soon-to-be President Obama is that he will show us how to take one more serious step toward achieving the equality for all mankind that the men who founded the United States of America proclaimed as one of the fundamental truths of human existence.

by Patrick Moberg

http://www.patrickmoberg.com/

http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1974/09/02/

From Andrew Sullivan--a Timely Election Day Reminder

This excerpt comes from a posting on The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan's blog. The entry is entitled "Barack Obama for President." I excerpt here two particularly good paragraphs, but I strongly suggest that you read the whole entry, which is passionate and deeply insightful. You can read it here.

If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government. The domestic cultural and political reasons for an Obama presidency remain as strong as they were when I wrote "Goodbye To All That" over a year ago. His ability to get us past the culture war has been proven in this campaign, in the generation now coming of age that will elect him if they turn out, in Obama's staggering ability not to take the bait. His fiscal policies are too liberal for me - I don't believe in raising taxes, I believe in cutting entitlements for the middle classes as the way to fiscal balance. I don't believe in "progressive taxation", I support a flat tax. I don't want to give unions any more power. I'm sure there will be moments when a Democratic Congress will make me wince. But I also understand that money has to come from somewhere, and it will not come in any meaningful measure from freezing pork or the other transparent gimmicks advertized in advance by McCain. McCain is not serious on spending. But he is deadly serious in not touching taxes. So, on the core question of debt, on bringing America back to fiscal reason, Obama is still better than McCain. If I have to take an ideological hit to head toward fiscal solvency, I'll put country before ideology.

But none of this compares to the task of restoring the rule of law and Constitutional balance. Unlike McCain, Obama has never wavered on torture or habeas corpus or on keeping the executive branch under the law. His deep understanding and awareness of the Constitution eclipses McCain's. Coming from the opposing party, he will also be able to restore confidence that what lies within America's secret government - the one constructed by Bush and Cheney beyond any accountability, law or morality - will be ended or cleaned up. He can restore critically needed trust again - and force the Democratic party to take responsibility for a war which we all need to own, and take responsibility for, again.

I also highly recommend Al Gore's book Assault on Reason for a much more detailed look at the abuses of the constitution that have occured under the Bush regime. Gore traces the roots of the grab for Executive Power back through several presidencies (at least back to Nixon), and presents Bush as the masteful end result of our allowing the legislature to abandon its role in restraining the executive. A must read!

Amending the First Amendment

Earlier this week, Daniel Larison, whose blog Eunomia is on The American Conservative, posted a story entitled “Insulting Small Towns to Save Sarah Palin.” The story is no longer posted—in fact, it came down less than an hour after I first saw it. I don’t know why; I can only imagine that Mr. Larison discovered some factual inaccuracy which he would naturally not have been willing to propagate. In between the time I saw it and the time it was posted, though, I wrote a lengthy response to one throw-away comment he made. The remark was only tangentially related to his main point, and because the original story is gone I cannot reproduce it exactly, but it was a remark to the effect that we can’t hold Sarah Palin wholly responsible for her inability to use the English language properly because schools don’t teach grammar any more. As a high school English teacher, I am, naturally, likely to react strongly to such criticism, but as a high school teacher, I am also in a better position than Mr. Larison is to know both whether teachers try to teach grammar or not and, if they do, why failure, when that is the outcome, results. Here is the posting that was never posted:

Although I am largely appreciative of the thoughtfulness of your entries on this blog, I must take exception to the cheap shot at teachers included in this particular entry. (Yes, I am a high school English teacher myself.)

Unilaterally blaming teachers for the widespread problem of imprecise, incorrect, and even illiterate language use is an easy, but lazy, way to reduce a serious problem that is the result of deeply entrenched cultural change to glib and simplistic terms that, although easy to understand, grossly misrepresent reality.

A few grammar worksheets will not cure the ills of language misuse in this country. The ability to use correct, sophisticated, nuanced speech is not, and never has been, the result of schooling and nothing but schooling. Students who develop rich, sophisticated language do so not because they have the benefit of an hour a day with a competent teacher who actually knows how to diagram a sentence; they develop that ability because they have life-long exposure to rich language in a wide variety of settings.

Skilled language use is the result of thousands of hours of immersion in rich language--thousands of hours of reading and hearing complex ideas expressed in complex terms. The development of a sophisticated vocabulary is the result of extensive exposure to sophisticated vocabulary--vocabulary used carefully, deliberately, and precisely, not vocabulary dished up in a gallimaufry of words only loosely related in meaning to the words that are actually needed.

If a child has a baseline level of language exposure that prepares him or her to take full advantage of skilled instruction, then skilled instruction can help that student progress quickly to levels of excellence in language use that he or she would not otherwise achieve. But a student who comes to school with a background of language exposure at home that is measured in daily minutes in the single digits comes to school unready to understand the language of their teachers. The child who reads nothing (literally) other than what he or she can be coerced to look at by teachers (who often have to resort to standing over students and insisting that the reading be done in class, as they know it will not be done once the student is outside of their circle of influence), comes to school unprepared to understand the sophisticated relationships between subjects and verbs that confront them in high-level reading assignments. The child whose most regular and reliable language exposure is from sitcoms on television comes to school with a significant burden of disadvantage. No teacher, no matter how excellent, can reasonably be expected to supply, in an hour a day or less, the lifetime of language-rich culture that that child has lost.

That this is a tragedy is undeniable. The ability to use language correctly, well, and even beautifully is unquestionably a source of power in any individual's life. In many ways the self is realized through language, because our ability to define ourselves in relationship to others is most readily, profoundly, and intricately expressed in words. Sarah Palin's poor use of language is appalling because it is a direct reflection of her thinking, as all language use is a direct reflection of the user's thinking. Whatever one might think of Governor Palin's politics (and I am emphatically not a fan), the fact is that her poor use of language has isolated her from the good opinion of many people and has done significant damage to her hopes and aspirations. In my perfect world, no one would have a life so starkly limited by such a dramatic inability to express ideas, but rich language results from rich thoughts, and rich thoughts result from rich experience. Schools can only provide rich experience in tiny doses--doses which amount to a minuscule fraction of an entire life--no matter how hard they try and no matter how much they might wish to be able to do more.

To suggest that teachers should be able to make up for parental and cultural failure to promote intellectualism and cultural literacy, to suggest that teachers could do so if only they were themselves a little better versed in the rules of English grammar, is indeed a cheap shot, unworthy of someone who is normally himself much more thoughtful.

I reproduce the would-be posting here, because there is a further point, which was not relevant in a direct response to Larison, but which is relevant in the context of the egregious linguistic behavior of John McCain and, more particularly, his surrogates over the past several weeks.

The clear implication of the tactics employed by the McCain campaign in their attacks on Barack Obama over the past few weeks is that McCain and his staff are fully cognizant of the problem to which Larison was alluding: the deplorable weakness of the average American in terms of understanding the complexities of the English Language. I reason it out this way:
(1) Because McCain needs to attract a very large number of people to his cause, and
(2) because the strategy he has chosen to utilize is the launching of a large number of blatantly distorted or even false accusations against Obama, and
(3) because meek acceptance of those accusations as truth require listeners to simply take at face value whatever is said, ignoring connotation, imprecision, and pure falsehood,
(4) it follows that the McCain people have been counting on the fact that a large enough number of people would lack the facility with language that would enable them to readily identify the linguistic flaws in the arguments that the campaign has been promulgating.
(5) Which means, in turn, that the McCain campaign has deliberately exploited what it believed to be a weakness in understanding of the people they claim to wish to serve.

Indeed, in pursuit of votes, the McCain campaign members—particularly the surrogates—have, in speech after speech and ad after ad, used language to distort and misrepresent the truth. Here are some examples:

Example 1: I wrote in detail in a previous posting about Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “pallin’ around with terrorists.” Her language there is misleading not only because of the connotations of the verb “to pal around with,” but also because of the plural. If pressed, the McCain campaign will identify William Ayers as the terrorist with whom Obama has a past association, but they cannot name any additional candidates for the title of terrorist. The phrase Palin has settled upon may be catchy, but it is grossly misleading; however, only someone who is alert to the connotation of the verb, attentive to the use of the plural, and patient enough to do the research to find out what exactly the purported terrorist did and when, as well as when Obama had dealings with him and under what circumstances will be able to make an accurate assessment of the truth value of the statement.

Example 2: A radio ad that has been playing in Richmond over the past few weeks ends with the tagline: “Just as you suspected, Barack Obama is wrong for you.” That “just as you suspected” is a particularly egregious violation of what I consider to be a moral obligation to use words honestly; the construction suggests that the listener already had an idea, before hearing the ad, that something was wrong with Obama—Obama PERSONALLY, not his policies or his plans. Since anyone who did NOT have previously existing suspicions would know that, the language is designed to do two things: one, appeal to those people who did already have doubts, and two, to suggest to those who didn’t have doubts that they have missed something important. Since the assumption inherent in the statement is that ALL listeners suspected something was wrong with Obama, those who did not must have missed the point—they are not part of the club. They are the uninformed. This is the language of the bully, and it preys upon those who lack advanced enough skill with language to recognize the ploy for what it is.

Example 3: “Joe the Plumber,” actually Samuel Wurzelbacher, the man whom John McCain raised from the obscurity of the rope line to such a level of stardom that he [Wurzelbacher] has actually hired himself a manager in anticipation of making vast sums of money for public appearances, has been appearing at McCain rallies and on television as one of McCain’s acknowledged surrogates. The ludicrousness of a ploy which presents a completely uninformed citizen as an expert in the economy and foreign affairs aside, since Mr. Wurzelbacher is now formally speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign, his statements, too, are fair game for a truth value assessment. On Monday, October 27, he drew media attention to himself by concurring with a questioner at a rally that a Barack Obama Presidency would mean the “death of Israel.” When pressed, in an interview with Fox News’ Shepard Smith, Wurzelbacher alternately said that he had his own reasons for believing that Obama is an enemy to Israel (“I’ve done my own research…”) and saying that “"I know just enough about foreign policy to probably be dangerous....”

Wurzelbacher’s refusal to provide any concrete justification—even when pushed—for his claim about Israel followed by his disclaimer about his own knowledge and his suggestion that people go out and find their own reasons to agree with him [Joe] constitute a classic evasion of the type frequently used by people who don’t have any facts to support their arguments, but it is a blatant ploy and even the most unsophisticated listeners might be expected to recognize it for what it is except for the fact that the McCain campaign threw its weight behind “Joe,” establishing him as an expert in foreign policy. The official McCain campaign response to “Joe the Plumber’s” pithy foreign policy analysis was this (view the Fox News video): “While he’s clearly his own man, so far Joe has offered some penetrating and clear analysis that cuts to the core of many of the concerns that people have with Barack Obama’s statements….” This tactic is deliberate, and it was designed to countermand what would otherwise have come off as garden variety ignorance and turn it into bona fide credentials. The McCain campaign, in other words, set out to mislead the public into seeing “Joe the Plumber” as a legitimate authority.

Example 4: On Sunday, November 4, in yet another interview with Fox News (whose editors are apparently indifferent to the fact that the last time they gave him a platform he disgraced himself and the news show by trotting out blatantly contrived fiction as fact), Wurzelbacher declared that “…there’s too many questions about Barack Obama and his loyalty to our country.” When challenged by the interview to clarify whether he is actually doubting whether Obama is a good American, Wurzelbacher said this: “Oh, you know, his ideology is completely different than what, you know, democracy stands for so I have some questions.” He didn’t clarify what Obama’s ideology is, he didn’t justify his definition of that ideology, he didn’t explain how that undefined ideology stands in opposition to democracy, and with the phrase “…I have some questions,” he employed a tactic that the McCain surrogates have been relying on heavily: non-specific innuendo. “I have some questions” without specifying the questions suggests that “Joe” is in the know about some “things” about Obama that we don’t know. It suggests that Obama has not been honest, and it conveys a vague threat that if we don’t find these things out in time, we’re all going to be sorry. Wurzelbacher has rapidly taken on the coloration of the environment in which he has come to rest, and he is just as rapidly mastering the art of ominous innuendo.

One of the nuances that we all need to be aware of is that Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher might very well be motivated by the fact of his sudden celebrity. The fact that he has hired a publicity firm suggests that he is not driven to assist Senator McCain out of purely ideological motives, and it suggests that “Joe the Plumber” has reasons that transcend the election to make outrageous statements that keep him in the media spotlight. Only people who are able to really listen to what the plumber has to say and attend to the words he uses, as well as informing themselves of Mr. Wurlzebacher’s other activities in pursuit of what he apparently thinks could be a substantial windfall and then draw the conclusion that “Joe” decides what to say not based in any particular expertise of domestic or foreign affairs or out of any true interest in serving the public good, but rather based on pure self-interest can be expected to discount fame conferred upon him by the McCain campaign and instead hear the deeply ignorant nature of his remarks. McCain’s people are counting on the fact that relatively few people will have the time or dedication or the savvy to put all that together, and they continue to parade “Joe the Plumber” out at their events like the goose that laid the golden egg. They are clearly unconcerned with any standard either of wisdom or veracity.

Final Example: Perhaps the most insidious ploy of the week past is the one Sarah Palin resorted to on Friday, when she suggested, indignantly, in a radio interview, that her first amendment rights have been violated by the press, members of which have nefariously been reporting that she has been engaging in negative campaigning. Here is the text of her remarks (audio here):
"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."
Myriad assumptions embedded in this claim are false, but unless one is a user of language sophisticated enough to identify the assumptions and assess their truth value, and unless one understands the demands of logical argumentation well enough to know that premises must be both true and valid in order for an conclusion to be true, one is very likely to accept the statement on its face and to believe what Palin clearly wants us to believe: that she is the victim of massive effort on the part of the media to silence her in violation of her constitutional rights. Glenn Greenwald at Salon did the analysis better than I could, so I recommend you read his column for a clear explanation of just how far off-base the Governor is in her interpretation of First Amendment Rights.

Given that Sarah Palin has, in fact, completely misrepresented the First Amendment, we have two potential explanations as to cause. One possibility is that Palin herself believes what she claims, in which case she is woefully ignorant not only of the First Amendment but also of the implications of the language which she herself has been employing in her campaigning effort. The only other option is that Palin knows perfectly well that she is offering a gross distortion of both her own tactics and of the First Amendment, in which case, she has chosen deliberately to wield language as a power against those who are not as adept as she is at recognizing the true implications of words. In the first case, she is far too inept to be taken seriously as a candidate for any position of authority and decision-making, and in the latter case, she is too cruel, for any deliberate manipulation of those who know less is just that: cruel. Personally, I think that Palin is more ignorant than manipulative; but I don’t think the same of McCain. I think he knows what the ramifications of his chosen political tactics are. I think he knows that much of what Sarah Palin says reflects both an ignorance of the true state of affairs and a deeply distressing inability to speak English well. I think he knows that most of what “Joe the Plumber” touts suffers from the same two flaws, and I think that McCain has decided that he doesn’t care—that he wants to win more than he wants to treat people with dignity, and so he has shown himself to be willing to wield both Sarah Palin and Sam Wurzelbacher as weapons against people who understand even less than Palin and Wurzelbacher do what the implications of what the McCain surrogates say. And so I think that McCain is abusing the power of his intelligence and his ability, and I know that any person so clearly willing to do that is not a person who can be trusted with the most powerful job in the country.

Larison chose, as the aspect of a widespread ineffectuality with the English language he wished to highlight, the failure, as he perceived it, of the public school system. I think it’s at least equally important to consider one particularly high-cost result of that failure: the use of words as a weapon against those who don’t know enough to see it coming. The constitution guarantees certain rights pertaining to our freedom to say what we want to say; it does not, and cannot, guarantee that all citizens have the language facility necessary for them to be able to take advantage of the right. The constitution cannot protect those who lack the skill; we have to agree, as human beings, to do that for each other.