At this time of the year in central
New Jersey the fruiting of the tomatoes ought to advance more rapidly than the
spread of crisis through the West Wing of the White House, but this week the
Big Boys in my garden have been dramatically outpaced by the Bad Boys in
Washington. In particular, in the short
week since I last presumed to put pixel to screen I learned that the President
had just appointed a new Director of White House Communications and that he had
fired his Director of White House Communications. Being, like, a really smart person, I soon
enough figured out that these reports involved the same guy.
His name was, and undoubtedly still
is, Anthony Scaramucci. I don’t think I
had ever heard of him before. As one
definitively not in the know I certainly did not know that he was a freebooting
financier rich beyond the dreams of avarice, that his friends (both of them)
call him “the Mooch,” that his wife recently filed for divorce from her couch
of accouchement, or numerous other details easily gleaned from news outlets
factual or factitious. I have to
acknowledge a serious deficit in my knowledge of what I shall call popular
culture—the category to which I am inclined to assign much current political
news. One should not try to make a
virtue of ignorance of any sort, but with the limited and apparently shrinking
bandwidth of my cerebellum I have had to be pretty ruthless about sticking with
my priorities. It is not too easy to
shock today’s students, but about thirty years ago I appalled a whole roomful
of them by not knowing who Michael Jackson was.
I apparently thought it more important to know who Michael Palaiologus
and Robert H. Jackson were—information, in the context of that particular
classroom, of which I was apparently the sole possessor.
In any event, Mr. Scaramucci,
though his portfolio involved the facilitation of “communication,” was clearly
outraged that there had been some.
Communication, I mean. So he
called up one of the communicants, a journalist at the New Yorker, demanding to known the identity of the
communicator. He pursued his telephonic
inquisition into leaks and leakers with vigor and determination—not to mention with
considerable obscenity and verbal violence.
A junior high school teacher of mine once expressed horror over an
eavesdropped exchange between two of my rowdier classmates by saying “That’s
the kind of language army men in barracks use!”
She set my imagination racing. As
my life developed I never made it into the army or even into a barracks, but I
am pretty sure Mr. Scaramucci met the standard.
The New Yorker journalist,
eager that we the people should know the truth, reported the conversation more
or less verbatim. Then the New York Times, similarly motived, gave a full report of the New Yorker’s report. Rather to my surprise there was a swift
popular uproar from a citizenry I had thought deeply submerged in
revulsion-fatigue.
In a gesture of apology born of a
firestorm of outrage, Mr. Scaramucci allowed as how he might be guilty of using
“colorful language.” Uhn uhn. You want colorful language? Read the opening lines of the Purgatorio. You want obscene, disgusting, violent, and
degrading language—language that exposes the speaker and sullies the hearer? Read the transcript of Mr. Scaramucci’s
“interview” with a journalist.
One group who have been somewhat
muted in their criticism is the official league of conservative pundits. But then I have been pretty disappointed in
many of them since the revelation of the President’s “Access Hollywood” tape
when, to cite Edmund Burke on a thematically related topic, I
thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards. The foundations of
the conservative frame of mind, to which I find myself ever more explicitly
attuned as I grow older, are respect for the human past, the just appreciation
of its achievements, and a recognition of the fundamental value, for
communities no less than for individuals, of grounding, stability, and
tradition. One of the presumed founders
of Toryism, Lord Falkland in the seventeenth century, is believed to have
articulated the conservative principle thus: “When it is not necessary to
change, it is necessary not to change.”
The specific topic he was addressing, ecclesiastical governance, is
today a large yawn, but his principle is one, with aphoristic repackaging,
espoused even by many self-identified “progressives”: if it isn’t broken, don’t
fix it.
Neither the President nor the Mooch
is responsible for the lamentable degradation of American verbal discourse. The rot set in long ago, and the agents of
decay are many and varied. I think my
old-fashioned teacher would now find that the linguistic norm of most middle
schools in the country is a cut below
that of army men in barracks. But they
are responsible for adopting it, if only for ten days, as the appropriate mode
of “communication” from President to people.
Sad.
