Going Nucular Read online

  Within a few years, though, the party had fallen apart, and over the first half of the twentieth century, “populist” became an increasingly quaint and old-fashioned word, used mostly to disparage demagogues like Louisiana’s governor Huey P. Long. It was only in the 1960s that a new generation of politicians began to reclaim the label. In 1972, C. Vann Woodward wrote an article in The New York Times Magazine called “The Ghost of Populism Walks Again,” marveling at the way the label was turning up in “improbable and unaccustomed quarters.” It was laid claim to not just by the New Left but by many on the right, who divested it of the awkward connotations of class struggle that had alarmed their own ideological ancestors.

  The New York Times, August 15, 2004

  Over the past two decades, populism has been 15 times as common in the press as it was during the Eisenhower years. But now it can refer not just to those who speak for the downtrodden, but to anyone or anything whose appeal seems down home, down to earth, or down market. In recent press articles, I’ve seen the word applied to Michael Moore, John Edwards, Garth Brooks, Steven Spielberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fox News, Burger King, Donald Trump, Muktada al-Sadr, the Google IPO, and Oscar de la Renta’s new mid-price fashion line.

  Nowadays populism sometimes comes down to no more than what mode of locomotion you favor. In Boston Magazine, Jon Keller speaks of John Kerry’s difficulty in “convincing southern NASCAR dads and Wal-Mart moms of the populist empathy of a windsurfing New England multimillionaire.” National Review’s Jay Nordlinger writes that “President Bush is engaged in a little populist campaigning himself today—he’s going to Indiana and Michigan, for a bus tour.”

  Sometimes, in fact, the word doesn’t seem to mean much more than “popular.” “I know that’s the populist view to say those things,” said Rep. Porter Goss on CNBC after Sen. Carl Levin suggested that American credibility had suffered in the wake of intelligence failures.

  Along the way, populism has lost not just its capital letter, but its connection to the sense of “the people” that the name was derived from. That’s “the people,” not as the populace or the citizenry, but as what William Jennings Bryan described as the “unnumbered throng” who were oppressed by the corporations, the money interests and the trusts, “aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless.”

  Those antagonisms sound creaky now, like “the people” itself. The “money interest” has yielded to “the elite,” as populism has become a matter of “values,” rather than class. “What divides America is authenticity, not something hard or ugly like economics,” as Thomas Frank suggests in What’s the Matter With Kansas?, a look at how the new populism has captured the imagination of the state that gave birth to the old one.

  True, “the people” still exerts a nostalgic hold on some. When the Republicans descended on New York City for their convention, two New Yorkers distributed a “People’s Guide to the Republican Convention,” a title that made it clear that the guide was compiled for the benefit of protesters, not delegates. And Vice President Al Gore used the phrase in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention of 2000: “They’re for the powerful. We’re for the people.”

  But “the people” were absent from the speeches at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, except when accompanied by minders like “ordinary,” “hard-working,” or “good.” Nowadays, “power to the people” is a slogan used by both Microsoft and IBM. And “man of the people” invariably has a sarcastic inflection. The Boston Herald styled the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate as “Man of the People Kerry.” On CNN’s “Capital Gang,” Mark Shields wondered how “that populist man of the people, George W. Bush,” would deal with the New York firefighters who had been waiting for a raise since September 11, 2001.

  The sarcasm usually reflects skepticism about the candidates’ authenticity, rather than about their policies. (“He is not a man of the people, this French-speaking windsurfer,” said Richard Reeves of Senator Kerry—transportation again.) Populism used to be a matter of speaking for the people; now it’s a matter of speaking like them—dropping your g’s, strategically mispronouncing nuclear, and peppering your speeches with references to motor sports.

  The old-style populists made no concessions to popular style. The “Cross of Gold” speech that secured Bryan the presidential nomination at the Democratic convention of 1896 (and a place at the head of the Populist ticket, as well) is remembered today for its stirring peroration: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” But the speech was also studded with allusions to Cicero, Napoleon, Jefferson, and Peter the Hermit, and it included a 1200-word disquisition on bimetallism and monetary policy that began:

  Let me remind you that there is no intention of affecting those contracts which, according to present laws, are made payable in gold, but if he means to say that we cannot change our monetary system without protecting those who have loaned money before the change was made, I desire to ask him where, in law or in morals, he can find justification for not protecting the debtors when the act of 1873 was passed, if he now insists that we must protect the creditors...

  And so on for another four or five paragraphs of redoubtably fustian syntax. The average sentence in Bryan’s speech was 104 words long; the average sentence in George W. Bush’s 2000 acceptance speech was less than 15 words long.

  Rhetoric changes with the times, of course. But even if you simplified Bryan’s diction and syntax and pruned the florid turns of phrase, the speech wouldn’t come off now as “populist,” but as artificial, ponderous, and more than a little wonky. Yet at the time, it kept audiences rapt. What seems most remote about that bygone age is the image of thousands of farmers, shopkeepers and small-town mechanics flocking to railroad depots to hear their champion repeat the “Cross of Gold” speech as he campaigned across the West in the summer of 1896, the scene Vachel Lindsay described in his poem “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan”:

  . . . the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes, and sunshine,

  Every rag and flag, and Bryan picture sold,

  When the rigs in many a dusty line

  Jammed our streets at noon,

  And joined the wild parade against the power of gold.

  Were the people merely more patient listeners back then, or have politicians lost the knack of speaking to them without condescending?

  Geezers, Gerries, and Golden Agers

  I was talking to the 20-something son of a friend of mine in New York about his vacation plans. “I’m going to grandma’s place in Florida to spend a week with the gerries,” he said. It took me a moment to realize that the word was a truncation of “geriatric.” It’s a useful item for sorting out the generations—if you still think gerry refers to Germans, then it may very well refer to you.

  It’s too soon to tell whether gerry will catch on. But it’s normal for the generation that’s coming of age to coin names for the one that’s passing from center stage, not just in its slang, but in its official vocabulary as well. Recently, the Progressive Policy Institute held a panel to promote its proposal for a Boomer Corps, a national service program for older Americans. According to the PPI’s Mark Magee, the name was chosen to suggest a range of activities broader than those traditionally associated with retirees. But some people have worried that boomer might acquire more derogatory connotations as people over 65 come to constitute a quarter of the population, particularly if it’s perceived that they’re getting a better deal on Social Security than younger people are.

  It wouldn’t be the first time that words for old people went from positive to disparaging. In the eighteenth century, gaffer was a term of respect for old people, most likely derived from godfather , and fogy was simply a word for a veteran; by the beginning of the nineteenth century both had become derisive words. Around the same time, codger, old guard and superannuated acquired pejorative senses, joined later in the century by ne
w disparagements like fuddy-duddy, coot and geezer.

  The New York Times, March 28, 2004

  The historian David Hackett Fischer argued in Growing Old in America that those shifts reflected a dramatic change in society, as deference to the old was replaced by contempt and neglect. The difference is symbolized by a shift from the age-becoming fashions of the eighteenth century to the youthful ones of the early nineteenth century: powdered wigs and loose, full-cut coats and gowns yielded to diaphanous dresses for women and to toupees, tight trousers, and high collars for men. And while historians are divided on whether the condition of the old really declined in that period, it’s clear that people were referring to old people more irreverently.

  Age-disparaging words are the natural by-product of a cult of youth, so it’s not surprising that so many of them appeared in the Boomer Age, whose fashions and language are a constant reminder of what a drag it is getting old. Since the 1950s, the language has added dinosaur, fossil, blue-hair, cotton-top, gerry, and trog, as well as flip terms for parents like rents and p’s. Gays speak of trolls, who hang out in bars called wrinkle rooms. And that’s not to mention British imports like wrinkly, crinkly, and crumbly, which taken together sound like a law firm out of Bleak House.

  The circumlocutions and euphemisms people use when speaking of the aged are equally revealing. The Victorians coined of a mature age and 70 years young, a turn of phrase first credited to Oliver Wendell Holmes. The twentieth century brought senior citizen, golden ager and Third Age. (The last is supposed to designate the productive years between retirement and dependency, but it has been suffering from bracket creep at the upper end—most people seem to find three ages quite enough and are in no hurry to enter a fourth.) And the comparative older has been redeployed as an absolute term—when somebody talks about “older Americans” nowadays, we’re no longer tempted to ask, “Older than whom?”

  Granted, some of those phrases reflect a new perception of age as an important social issue. However fulsome senior citizen may sound, it’s the first term to acknowledge the old as a political constituency. But apart from the useful new use of “older” and the ironic “senior moment,” most of these euphemisms are too forced for everyday conversation. And even in political and business contexts, they’re often replaced with even more oblique phraseology. Banks have abandoned “senior accounts” for “Classic checking” or “Renaissance checking,” and the airlines’ programs for older fliers go by names like “AActive American Traveler,” “Young at Heart,” and “Silver Wings Travel Club.” Euphemism is like waxing a floor—you have to keep reapplying new coats as the old ones yellow.

  The condescension of our euphemisms and the impertinence of our slang both testify to our discomfort about confronting the facts of age head-on. As G. K. Chesterton remarked 80 years ago in his essay “The Prudery of Slang”:

  “There was a time when it was customary to call a father a father. . . . Now, it appears to be considered a mark of advanced intelligence to call your father a bean or a scream. It is obvious to me that calling the old gentleman ‘father’ is facing the facts of nature. It is also obvious that calling him ‘bean’ is merely weaving a graceful fairy tale to cover the facts of nature.”

  True, these facts of nature leave every Western society a bit ill at ease. The British, French and Germans talk about the old with the same mix of irreverence and euphemism as Americans. But only the United States makes youth an essential feature of its national self-conception. As C. Vann Woodward once put it, we see ourselves as “the eternal Peter Pan among nations,” even if by world standards we’re at best early-fall chickens.

  The youthfulness of our generational language may make it even harder for us baby boomers to come to terms with our lengthening demographic shadow. Linguistically, though, we’ll have to reap what we have sown. As Chesterton said of the young people of his own age, “As they have no defense against their fathers except a new fashion, they will have no defense against their sons except an old fashion.”

  Word Index

  -able (suffix)

  AC/DC

  Acronym

  Affectingly

  African American

  Against-ism

  Ageism

  Aggressively

  Agitation

  Ain’t

  Alegar

  Allegiance

  All-fired

  American

  Analogue watch

  Ancien régime

  And

  Antimacassar

  Anti-Semitism

  Apocope

  Appeasement

  “Aren’t I,”

  Arguably

  Assassins

  Assets

  Asshole

  Attrited

  “Axis of evil,”

  Bakelite

  Ban-lon

  Bastard

  Be

  Bee

  Been

  Best of breed

  Bias

  Big Brother

  Bigot

  Big-shotism

  Bitterly

  Blacks

  Blog

  Blue-hair

  Boomer

  Boss

  Brick-and-mortal retailer

  Broadcast

  Bullfrog

  Buoyantly

  But

  Caisson

  Cakewalk

  Caledonian

  Capitalism

  Capitalist

  Castrate

  Casualty

  Caucasian

  Celibate

  Cellophane

  “Chablis-and-brie set,”

  Chaise lounge

  Champions

  Chaste

  Chasten

  Chastisement

  Chastity

  Choice

  Christendom

  Churchillian

  Churlish

  Churn

  Cinemactor

  Clancular

  Class

  Class warfare

  Clavecin

  C.O.D.

  Codger

  Collateral damage

  “Collective mind,”

  Color-blind

  Colored

  Communism

  Communistic

  Communist sympathizer

  Community

  Compassionate conservatism

  Compromise

  Compromised

  Comsymp

  Concupiscent

  Conservatism

  Contact

  Conventional oven

  Coopetition

  Coot

  Copy

  Corporate

  Corporate responsibility

  Cotton-top

  Couple

  Courting

  Cowardly

  Craven

  Crinkly

  Crumbly

  Crusade

  Cubiculary

  Culture

  Cummfu

  Cyber- (prefix)

  Cyberpoetry

  Cybersex

  Cyperessay

  Dacron

  Dadburned

  Dagos

  Dar-al-Harb

  Dar-al-Islam

  Dar-al-Kufr

  Darn

  Dastardly

  Dating

  Day baseball

  Death squad

  Democracy

  Depreciationwise

  Despicable

  Deuteroscopy

  Dickensian

  “Digital commons,”

  Dinosaur

  Dirty

  Disinterested

  Docudrama

  Doggone

  Domestic security

  Domino effect

  Don’t fuck with me

  Doomsday scenario, the

  Doublethink

  E- (prefix)

  E-bills

  E-commerce

  “Economy, the,”

  Effervescence

  Effing

  Eggheadism<
br />
  E-mail

  Enormity

  Envy

  Er

  E-statements

  Ethnic cleansing

  Etiolated

  Euonym

  European American

  Evil

  Excess

  Executive

  Extra affirmative action

  Extremist

  Face-to-face conference

  Fairness

  Faith-based initiatives

  Family

  Family values

  Fascist

  Favor

  Fellow traveler

  Fogy

  Foobar

  Ford

  Formica

  Fossil

  Fracas

  Freaking

  Freedom

  Free enterprise

  Frogs

  Fubar

  Fubb

  Fuck

  Fucked up

  Fucking

  Fuck you

  Fuddy-duddy

  Gaffer

  Gallic

  Gee-whiz

  Geezer

  Gerry

  Ghastly

  Gluttony

  Goddamn

  Godfather

  Go fuck yourself

  Go-it-aloneism

  Gold ager

  Goldarn

  Googlebombing

  Googlewashing

  Greed(y)

  “Greed is good,”

  Guerilla war

  Hard times

  Have

  Heartburn

  Hell

  Hellebore

  Henimgwayesque

  Hero

  Heterosexual marriage

  Hibernian

  Highbrow

  Homeland

  Homeland security

  Home movies

  Homophobia

  Hopefully

  Horrific

  Housewife

  I- (prefix)

  -ible (suffix)

  Ice box

  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,”

  Imperialist

  Inclusiveness

  Indescribable

  Indivisible

  Inexcusable

  Infamy

  Infidel

  Infoganda

  Insurgent

  Intelligible