Going Nucular Page 15
That distinction is more a matter of perception than of reality. But there is a difference in the way the two media present themselves to the public, which is implicit in the forms of address that each of them uses. Apart from formulaic openings like “Good evening, everyone,” television news shows almost always address their viewers in the singular: “Up next, protecting yourself from Internet scams.” “Should the tires on your car have an expiration date?” Or think of the famous scene in Network where Peter Finch, playing a newscaster, tells his audience: “I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’” Note—your head, not your heads.
That’s the same convention used in print. A newspaper financial columnist would hardly advise readers that “It’s a good time to buy yourselves new cars.” And the confiding tone of Jane Eyre would be severely ruptured if Charlotte Brontë had begun the conclusion with the sentence, “Readers, I married him.”
The singular presupposes a one-to-one relationship between a speaker and an addressee. It’s the picture implicit in the word “broadcast” itself, which originally referred to scattering seeds by hand in the hope that some of them would find a favorable landing place. In that sense, as the critic Raymond Williams once said, it’s something of a misnomer to describe television as a mass medium. For the most part, television news speaks to each of us as an individual citizen, even if the communication is reproduced in millions of places at the same time.
But like other radio talk-show hosts, Limbaugh prefers the plural: “I’ll tell you what, folks . . . ”; “ You Dittoheads out there . . . ,” “Some of you may say . . .” That form of address suggests the presence of a group of people—an audience, rather than just a listener-ship. It has the effect of creating an “us” and a “them”; it turns radio into a kind of crowd phenomenon like a concert, where individual judgments are subordinated to solidarity with the group.
The image of a group of addressees is well adapted to the coy pomposity of Limbaugh’s radio persona—he plays his audience like a comic working the room. And it helps to explain why the remarks he makes on the radio don’t engender the same public indignation as the far milder things he says on TV. It would be like getting shirty about the content of a Margaret Cho performance—if it bothers you, don’t buy a ticket.
Right-wing radio commentators don’t have a monopoly on this device. You hear it from disc jockeys, shock jocks, sports talk hosts, and even from some of the left-wing hosts on the Pacifica stations (though not on NPR, where the plural is generally reserved for requests like “Send us your letters”). Limbaugh and his fellow conservatives have merely been adroit at using the device to create a setting for political entertainment—not surprising, given that many of them cut their teeth in other radio formats.
But the choice of a form of address isn’t inherent in the media themselves. You occasionally hear those plurals on TV children’s shows, and they’ve begun to show up in the mouths of hosts on Fox News. “You guys have made me the poster boy for the American dream,” Bill O’Reilly told his audience in a recent commentary segment. If that intimate tone works anywhere on TV, it’s on Fox News—the closest thing on TV to the political talk stations on radio, fair-and-balanced wall-to-wall.
There was a time when radio talk shows had the same public status that we now accord to TV. In the 1930s, the “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin provoked repeated national controversies with weekly broadcasts in which he praised the Nazi regime and charged that “International Jewry” was responsible for Bolshevism and the Depression. Coughlin’s audience ultimately reached 16 million, proportionately far larger than Limbaugh’s 20 million listeners today, even though the NBC radio network and a number of local stations banned him from their airwaves. (In 1938, the management of New York City’s WMCA announced that carrying the broadcasts was not in the public interest, because they brought “religious or racial strife and dissension to America.” )
Nowadays, of course, most of Coughlin’s views would be beyond the pale even for AM. But a modern-day Father Coughlin would have pretty wide leeway to be offensive or crude, so long as he stuck to radio and was careful to address his listeners as “youse.” That’s the modern standard of media civility—you can say pretty much anything you want, as long as you keep it to the 20 million like-minded people in the room.
The Politics of Polysyndeton
The stylistic differences between the left and right aren’t just a question of the words they use, but the tunes they sing them to. Take a piece by the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan on the resurgence of patriotism, or as she calls it, “the simple idea of the goodness of loving America.” The nation that won the war had nothing to do with big-city elites, she says; it was “a bigger America and a realer one—a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality.”
And and and and and and and . . .—that repetition of conjunctions is what rhetoricians call polysyndeton. It does a lot of work for Noonan here. Each of those and’s implies an “and not”—an opposition to the urban cosmopolitans who don’t have religious feeling, don’t study the Bible, don’t love their moms, and don’t have garage bands, most likely because they don’t have garages. They’re the people Noonan describes as the “intellectuals, academics . . . , and leftist mandarins,” not to mention the “local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants.” (And they would be . . . ?)
Then too, the and’s flatten the differences among all those unlike things—replace the conjunctions with commas, and all of a sudden the thought emerges in all its vacuous incoherence: “a place full of religious feeling, cultural energy, Bible study, garage bands, sports-love, mom-love, sophistication, and normality.”
Fresh Air Commentary, April 29, 2002
Noonan’s prose often dances to that rhythm. “It was daring and brilliant and brave” . . . “You want to really feel it and experience it and smell it and touch it and thank God for it” . . . “It’s hard to describe how exciting and moving and idealism-inspiring it was” . . . “now, in 2002, with so much more equality and working together and living next door to each other and sending our kids to the same schools and Boy Scout meetings.”
But then a lot of columnists use this device, particularly the ones on the right. From David Horowitz: “They hate you because you are democratic, and tolerant and unbelieving. They hate you because you are Christians. . . . And they hate you because you are Hindus and Buddhists and secularists and Jews.” From David Brooks: “America does seem at once crass and materialistic and strong and indomitable.” From Jack Kemp: “Bob Dole has . . . unfurled our banner of growth and opportunity and hope and cultural renewal.” It’s as if most of the American right was off at a retreat on the day when the rest of freshman English class was covering the serial comma.
William Bennett writes that “Real fatherhood means love and commitment and sacrifice and a willingness to share responsibility and not walking away from one’s children.” And Michelle Malkin writes in a letter to American soldiers: “You hail from Middletown and Middleboro and Greenville and Redding and Thousand Oaks and Maple Tree.” (And South Central and the Bronx, she might have added, or is this another garage-band thing?)
True, you won’t hear this rhythm from conservatives like William F. Buckley, George Will, or William Safire, none of them writers who are given to flights of gush. And there are liberal writers with a weakness for the device, like the tirelessly expansive Molly Ivins. (“Being a congenital optimist, I naturally believe all this will change, that we will have another surge of progressivism and reform and hell-raising and fun and justice.”) But even so, this pattern is about five times as likely to occur on conservative sites like townhall.com or in National Review as in liberal publications like the Nation or the American Prospect.
It isn’t as if polysyndeton has an inher
ently political meaning, or any inherent meaning at all. It has roots that go back to King Lear’s “we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues/Talk of court news,” and it has been used since then by writers from Lewis Carroll to Bob Dylan (“And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it, And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it . . . ”). But the pattern has a particular cadence in American writing, where it signals plenitude and immediacy, as if you’re laying down your thoughts one scoop after another. It bubbles up whenever people are waxing sentimental about dogs, baseball, or the English language—particularly about the English language, I’ve noticed. And it’s a staple of eulogies and of course book blurbs, where it’s often compounded by alliteration—“wise and winsome and witty and warm.”
Ultimately, this is just another one of the things we can blame Walt Whitman for, along with all the writers who mimicked his voluble spontaneity. (“The early lilacs became part of this child,/And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,/And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf . . . ,”)
But it’s not likely that Peggy Noonan picked this up directly from Whitman, much less from Allen Ginsberg or Gary Snyder, who were fond of Whitmanesque phrasing. If you listen to Noonan’s sentences, you hear another, even more familiar voice:
Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?
No, but you . . . you . . . you’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others.
It’s all there in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s the pattern that playwrights and screenwriters of the thirties and forties used when they wanted to evoke the artless wisdom of the common man—you think of the scene in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where James Stewart says:
Get up there with that lady that’s up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. . . . There’s no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties.
That’s what Noonan and the others are aiming for with this pattern—the rhythm of the simple feelings that are obvious to everyone but the clever people who make life too complicated. But the device is apt to sound a bit more calculated and self-conscious when you run into it in the Wall Street Journal, particularly in an age as knowing as ours is. Back in Capra’s time, people didn’t make it a point of pride to be in touch with their feelings, or dwell on the simplicity of their ideas. Reading Noonan’s column, I kept thinking of the recent remake of Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, with Adam Sandler in the Gary Cooper role.
At the end of her piece, Noonan says, “Is this corny? Too bad.” Well, no. Capra was corny, and so were Robert Riskin and Nunnally Johnson and Jo Swerling and Sidney Buchman and Clifford Odets and Robert Sherwood, even if they were clever and lived in big cities and didn’t go to Bible-study classes and talked too loudly in restaurants. But what Noonan does isn’t corny, it’s kitsch.
The Speech That Turns Mere Presidents Into Talk Show Hosts
“Every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union.” The beginning of President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech echoed the phrases that Ronald Reagan was fond of using in the exordiums to his annual addresses: “In keeping with time-honored tradition”; “a constitutional duty as old as our republic itself.”
Other presidents haven’t usually bothered to make those observations, which would hardly come as news to the assembled legislators to whom the speech is ostensibly addressed. But Reagan understood that the occasion was really contrived for other ears—and that its effectiveness as television would be all the greater if it seemed to be a tradition that wasn’t fashioned with the tube in mind.
“By law and by custom”—well, yes and no. The Constitution says only that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.” And while Washington and Adams made annual addresses to Congress, the practice lapsed with Jefferson, who compared the address to a “speech from the throne,” a symptom of the Federalists’ dangerous desire “to draw over us . . . the forms of the British Government.”
The New York Times Week in Review, February 2, 2003
Jefferson’s misgivings were still very much on people’s minds when Woodrow Wilson resurrected the annual address in 1913. Senator John Sharp Williams, a Mississippi Democrat, derided Wilson’s speech as “a cheap and tawdry imitation of the pomposities and cavalcadings of monarchial countries.” Those criticisms weren’t entirely stilled until after World War II, when Congress came to accept the speech as a presidential prerogative that should be received with respectful civility. By 1956 the political scientist Richard E. Neustadt could note “the almost total absence nowadays of vocal criticism or surprise at annual presentations of the president’s program.”
State of the Union addresses have been broadcast since Calvin Coolidge’s 1923 speech was carried over the radio. Harry *S. Truman’s 1947 speech was the first to be telecast. And Lyndon B. Johnson moved the address to prime time in 1965. But it was one thing to televise the speech and another to turn it into a television show. The credit for that transformation goes to President Reagan, who signaled the new order in 1982 when he pointed to the gallery to honor Lenny Skutnik, the man who had dived into the icy Potomac to save a woman after a plane crash. That was the precedent for the bathetic “Skutnik moments” that have punctuated the addresses ever since, as well as for seeding the gallery with military leaders, foreign dignitaries, and ordinary citizens whom the TV cameras can cut to to dramatize the president’s message in human terms.
More important, the 1982 speech demonstrated Reagan’s realization that once the audience in the chamber was made a visible participant in the occasion, television viewers would settle into the familiar role they assume with every other kind of television talk, from Oprah to Firing Line to the local happy-talk news show—as the privileged onlookers for whom the exchange is really being transacted.
The effects on the language of the speeches have been dramatic. In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower described his program in dry and unemotional language directed at the legislators themselves.
It is expected that more than $12 billion will be expended in 1955 for the development of land, water and other resources; control of floods, and navigation and harbor improvements; construction of roads, schools and municipal water supplies, and disposal of domestic and industrial wastes.
After Reagan, there would be no more plodding sentences like that one. Now the president’s object is to characterize his program in stirring terms that make a coded appeal to his own constituents, but which are vague enough to land with the television audience—and which will command a deferential reception by the opposing party’s members, who are obliged by the rules of the genre to respect the pretense of a direct address.
It makes for a kind of political Simon Says, as the opposition tries to decide whether to respond politely to the superficially bland appeals of the address or more truculently to their coded messages. “Instead of bureaucrats and trial lawyers and HMOs we must put doctors and nurses and patients back in charge of American medicine.” Representatives Pelosi and Gephardt could greet that line with a disdainful look, recognizing the proposal to limit the legal responsibilities of health care providers. But Democrats in less safe seats would as soon not have to explain those niceties to their constituents or risk looking sulky on television.
James Fallows, a speechwriter for Presiden
t Jimmy Carter, observed once that the effectiveness of the State of the Union speech has less to do with what the president says than with the repeated applause in an impressive setting. That’s why the speech always raises the president’s standing in the polls. But the ceremony wouldn’t be nearly so effective if it actually appeared to be a made-for-TV event. Hence the importance of those invocations of custom at the beginning of Reagan’s and the younger Bush’s addresses, which suggest that the form and language of the speech are really dictated by the president’s traditional role.
Like Jefferson, viewers today may see in this dangerous monarchial tendencies. But the British monarch’s annual speech from the throne makes an explicit reference to the limits of the sovereign’s power. It begins when the royal usher knocks on the door of the House of Commons, which is slammed in the official’s face in a reminder that no sovereign is permitted to enter the Commons. The present-day State of the Union speech wouldn’t have any place for a ritual that seems so churlish (a term derived from the Old English word for peasant). The president delivering his address isn’t like a monarch, whose dutifully respectful reception is conditioned on the hard-won limitation of her temporal powers. He’s something much more commanding than that—the host of his own television special—and refractory subjects can display their disagreement only by sitting on their hands.
I Seeing the News Today, Oh Boy
Every new form of journalism announces itself with a new syntax. In the mass-circulation dailies of the 1870s, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst gave us the compressed urgency of the modern newspaper headline. In the 1920s, Time magazine dramatized events with pert new coinings like socialite, cinemactor, and politricks, and with the inversions that Wolcott Gibbs parodied famously as “Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind.” Later, television news programs heightened the immediacy of electronic coverage with the pointer words that linguists call deictics—the “Now this” style that Chevy Chase parodied as “Here now the news.”