Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Every so often I ask

Every so often I ask myself why I do this. Why do I keep reading stupid European columnists saying incredibly stupid things about America, things that they would pounce upon like a flaccid, over-cooked, smothered-in-cream-sauce-and-capers wedge of trout if we said such an ignorant, limited, foolish thing about their little plot of blessed soil? Why do I do this to myself?

Take this [expurgated] [expletive deleted] from the Independent. There are, of course, many things to criticize in the Bush administration. And what does this lackwit git seize upon? His foreign policy? His trade protectionism? His uncertain compromise on education?

Why no, of course not. The problem with our president is none of those things, you see; it's his grammar.

I consider myself something of an amateur grammarian. I reveal myself now as that difficult person who spoiled the curve on the SAT's. The Chicago Manual of Style is my bible; Strunk and White, my concordance. I have friends who can be found, in the midst of arguments, shouting "you are not supposed to talk like you write!", which is to say in complete sentences and without split infinitives or incorrect transpositions of "like" and "as".

All of which is to say that I am second to none in my horror of the sin in which the columnist has caught George W. in flagrante delicto: the misplaced modifier.

I have lost count of the times I have been ticked off in recent months, sometimes by quite senior politicians, for suggesting that George W Bush is a complete idiot. He is nowhere near as stupid as he seems, I have been told, a proposition that has some force solely because it is hard to imagine any world leader being afflicted with quite the degree of bovine incomprehension that the President habitually displays. On Monday, for instance, he was on cracking form, announcing in halting English – you'd think he'd be fluent by now – that a dangerous terrorist had been detained and "is now off the streets, where he should be".

As so often with Bush's pronouncements, what he appeared to say – that terrorists should be on US streets – was the opposite of what he meant. Unfair, unfair, his defenders will say: we have never claimed that our man is an accomplished public speaker.

Or they might point out that no one in the entire known universe, not even writers for the Independent, speaks in perfectly arranged sentences every moment of their life because that is not how the human brain is constructed; making sure that none of our modifiers dangled or modifiers were misplaced would slow down conversation to a crawl. The purpose of rigid grammatical rules, in writing, is to substitute for the redundancy inherent in conversation: the context, tone, body language, and ultimately, the ability to correct a misapprehension immediately which, should it occur with a piece of written work, would remain uncorrected.

Of course, this is not an excuse for horrendous grammar, in speech or in writing. Yet the lapses upon which the press pounces are inevitably trivial, evident only in transcripts of speeches; the speeches themselves, when viewed, are perfectly comprehensible. Of course, I may be setting the bar a bit too high in the case of this columnist; as a friend once remarked, the first thing she assumes when she hears that someone is a European journalist is that they are probably just a bit thick.

Of course, it may just be the language barrier. For example, Americans customarily view it as -- I'm afraid I don't know the word in your language -- wrong to use a complete clause as a parenthetical expression, especially when its content is not parenthetical but integral. However, since I understand that the journalist, being unfamiliar with the rules of our language, may have made this mistake inadvertently, I will not draw the logical inference about her total [deleted] stupidity that her article seems to suggest.

Fine, but my other reaction to the announcement – I am being unusually frank here – was, "You credulous git, do you believe every single thing anybody in the administration tells you?" US intelligence agencies are trying to deflect accusations that they failed to pick up warnings of last September's suicide attacks and desperately need the kind of crowing headlines – "US foils al-Qa'ida 'dirty bomb' plot" – that the announcement prompted.

Hello, I'm from the Royal Non-Sequitur Society. Tea cozies make lovely summer gifts!

Did I miss a memo? Was a transition edited out in order to save space for the earth-shaking observation that Bush does not deliver his informal remarks in gilt-edged, copper-plated sentences scripted by one of the itinerant Flauberts on his speechwriting staff?

I am lost. I was wandering around in Bush's grammatical errors, admiring the scenery, when the columnist coshed me on the back of the head and, while I was out, dumped me in the uncharted territory of his foreign policy mistakes. Now, like any kidnapped American tourist, I am in trouble. I don't know how I got here. I don't know why they've brought me to this place. And I haven't the faintest idea as to how I get back to somewhere I recognize, much less somewhere I'd actually care to be.

But the administration was soon backtracking, accused of exaggerating the importance of a US citizen known as Abdullah al-Mujahir, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and changed his name in prison. The deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, admitted "there was not an actual plan" to set off a radioactive device in Washington, and it now seems that al-Mujahir's research had not gone much further than surfing the internet. Nor is it clear why he was arrested while on a reconnaissance trip to the US from Pakistan on 8 May, after being under 24-hour surveillance since February, when further observation might have yielded valuable information about al-Qa'ida associates .

It must be the language barrier. The thesis of the article appeared, to my American eyes, to be that he was stupid. Then it appeared to be that he was a liar. I had attempted to synthesize these two into the thesis "Bush is a stupid liar", but this is seemingly belied by her plaints that he has put one over on Britain's senior politicians. With the new paragraph, however, I've given up. Clearly, she doesn't like the Bush administration, and harbors a sneaking fondness for those who wish to blow up things in America. But there does not seem to be any unifying thread holding it all together.

[Yes, I am starting my sentences with conjuctions. I revel in it. And occasionally, I do it just to prove I can. I dare you to correct me. I dare you. I'll have you up to your ass in incorrect idioms and dangling particples faster than you can say "William Safire".]

Meanwhile, a terrorist whose plans were at a rather more advanced stage succeeded in bombing the US consulate in Karachi on Friday, killing 11 people. None of this seems to have fazed the President, whose announcement about al-Mujahir coincided with a decision to transfer him to military custody, thus avoiding the embarrassment of having the more lurid allegations against him tested in open court. Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was not so lucky, having been foolish enough to make grand claims about al-Qa'ida operating in the disputed border territory of Kashmir without a shred of evidence. Rumsfeld's announcement during a visit to India on Wednesday collapsed under questioning from journalists in Islamabad. "I don't have evidence and the US doesn't have evidence of al-Qa'ida in Kashmir," he admitted.

Still looking for evidence to any of the originally identified theses. Stupid? Nope. Liar? Nope. Columnist went out last night on the premise that she'd just write it in the morning, but rosy-fingered dawn has found her too hung over to think straight? Ah. . . .

That is not to say I underestimate the threat from Islamist groups whose motivation is as much their complex and ambivalent relationship with secular modernity as the genuine grievances – the US's uncritical support for Israel and undemocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia – felt by moderate opinion in Arab countries. But what I am suggesting is that the response of Mr Bush and leading figures in his administration, with the exception of his sadly marginalized Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is akin to a bunch of ham actors staging a noisy hunt for pantomime villains. Think about the search for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, whose whereabouts appear to be as great a mystery to Bush, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft as they are to readers of this newspaper.

A-ha! She's found her nut graf! And I realize that I too, have been leading one of those noisy pantomime hunts -- and that was the point the entire time! She makes us think she's a marginally competent thinker with a thin veneer of recycled wit, when actually she's staging one of those elegant structural prose excercises that used to captivate writers before they abandoned elegance in favor of navel-gazing.

This reminds me of a story.

When I was in college, some of you may be aware that I majored in English. During my stay there, I perfected the art of working exactly hard enough on a term paper to get an A. This was not, I regret to confess, always very hard. In an ideal world, I would have worked as hard as possible, motivated by the pursuit of knowlege, rather than grades. However, in many of my classes, knowlege was rather thin on the ground, and pursuing it would have interfered with my other pursuits, of which more later.

At any rate. I was given an assigment in one class to write about similarities and differences between Uncle Tom's Cabin and a book called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which was a slave narrative from before the civil war. As I racked my brain for something to say, it occurred to me to comment on the fact that the actual slave narrative spoke much more kindly of the slave owners than did Uncle Tom's cabin, even though some fairly horrifying things had happened to the author's family. I therefore hit upon the idea of writing about Stockholm Syndrom, which you probably already know is the phenomenon whereby captives (in the epynoynmous case, hostages in the embassy in Stockholm) come, through a mixture of proximity and terror, to identify more thoroughly with their captors than their rescuers.

Tossed off the paper and handed it in. A month passed. Finally, I got it back from the graduate student who had graded it who said, "That was the best undergraduate paper I've ever read. I didn't understand all that stuff you said about Helsinki, but it was incredibly well-written and thought out." Now, keep in mind, I'd written the paper in a couple of hours and forgotten it as soon as I'd handed it in. I couldn't remember what I'd written about, but I was mystified as to how Helsinki might have entered into it. So I smiled and nodded and took back the paper -- A+ -- and read it as soon as I was out of the TA's sight.

I'd been so carried away with my Stockholm Syndrome idea that I'd forgotten to define the term.

Now, this was the backbone of the paper. If you didn't know what Stockholm Syndrome was, it was literally impossible to understand what I'd written about -- I tested this thesis by handing it to multiple friends who had never heard of Stockholm Syndrome.

The TA had given me an A+ because he didn't understand what I was talking about, and therefore figured that I must be smarter than he was, and therefore figured that my paper must be good. That, my friends, is the secret to success in this world; confuse them, then take the money and run.

And what does this have to do with the rest of this post? Well, at first glance it might seem to be an unrelated digression. But dig deeper. You will notice that while the individual paragraphs of my post may have nothing to do with each other on the surface, you are actually being cleverly led to the inescapable conclusion. Which is that I am not very clever, and also that I am insane. Which is exactly the same conclusion I have reached about the author of this piece.

It all comes together now, doesn't it? Take that, PoMo.

Readers of this newspaper, however, are not supposed to know that kind of stuff. It is not your job, or mine, come to that, to have advance knowledge of terrorist outrages. But we are entitled, in a world where what the US President says may affect all our lives, to expect something better than the overblown claims and ignominious climbdowns that are the hallmark of this ignorant, inept administration.

We are entitled, in fact, to direct US foreign policy, even though we have just proclaimed that it is not our job to know anything about potential threats, security issues, or US goals.

How will we do this, you ask? Luckily, the Psychic Friends Network is still operating in Britain.

Frantic displays of patriotism, random round-ups of hundreds of foreigners and unverifiable claims about imminent terrorist attacks cannot conceal the fact that its members do not know what they are doing; any day now, I expect to hear that Switzerland, or perhaps Belgium, has been added to the axis of evil.

You see how I have cleverly foreshadowed the discovery that this columnist is trying to fight a battle of wits with a regiment that's half-strength.

It is not just Mr Bush, as I naively hoped, who is absolutely clueless.

She fooled you all! You thought you'd found the nut graf earlier, but here it is; clever modern inverted design. And it is impossible to disagree.

No, I think we've all got our eyes on someone else who fits that description.

Posted by Jane Galt at June 18, 2002 11:19 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links