The Irony of George W. Bush

Back in July of this year, 2006, a lot of people made a fuss when a live microphone captured a private exchange between George W. Bush and Tony Blair. The fuss came about largely because the President, though already established as something of a pottymouth, added a new entry to the catalog of his documented obscenities. Here's the key line:

"The irony is, what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over."

As you may remember, the release of this audio prompted a range of commentaries. News outlets had to decide how their obscenity policies worked when the President dropped an s-bomb while talking politics. A number of commentators noted that Bush uttered the line with his mouth full, chomping through his words as though the chefs of the G8 summit had served him gristly cud. More serious commentary addressed the content of the remark, weighing the accuracy of Bush's characterization of the Syrian role in the conflict between Israel and Hizbullah. I propose that all of these angles missed the most important point to be made about Bush's comment:

George W. Bush does not understand the meaning of the word "irony."

Let's assume that Bush was correct that "what they [the U.N.?] really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over." There's nothing ironic about that sentiment. On the contrary, it displays Bush's characteristically blunt cause-and-effect logic of diplomacy; in this case, one body pushes another, which pushes a third, and the desired reaction comes about. No irony, right?

Now consider this statement, made a couple of weeks ago as part of Bush's pre-election offensive against Democrats:

"You do not create terrorism by fighting terrorism."

Of course not! That would be ironic! When you have no understanding of irony, the word or the concept, it makes no sense that fighting terrorism (badly) can create terrorism, that a show of strength can create weakness, that the rhetoric of certainty can mask anxiety, that the public faces of moral self-congratulation can be overwhelmed by corruption.

Bush and his party have thrived on convincing voters that the biggest hammer is the best tool for any nail on any wall. The upcoming elections may be a referendum on Bush, but they will also be a referendum on irony, as many politicians of both parties now run on positions that assume the ironic consequences of Bush's policies and look for ways to escape them.

It may be that the failure of Bush's policies, by creating such wrenching tragedies that voters can no longer ignore the ironies beneath the President's unflagging certitude, will teach a generation of young people the notoriously tricky concept of irony. If so, the students will understand by example what the teacher himself does not grasp. How ironic.

Substantial Nits

I hereby define a Substantial Nit as a small matter of usage that has large consequences for a reader or listener's understanding of a significant point. In my judgment, most common nits, however worth picking they may be for other reasons, are not SNs. To qualify as an SN, a common mistake must routinely lead to significant misunderstandings; for example, I'm not interested in the stray case where the needless apostrophe in "The Simpson's" on the decorative boulder in front of my house might case a space shuttle to crash. By way of positive example, I begin the list with two charter members:

1. Percent vs. percentage points. For a recent example, I recently heard an NPR story that talked about an incidence of a disease rising by two percent. The story went on for a while, and I couldn't believe a two percent increase had created such a big story. At the end, the reporter finally mentioned the numbers--an increase of something like 4% to 6%, or two percentage points, but about fifty percent. No wonder it was a big deal! I find this to be a fairly common error that almost always makes a big difference in meaning.

2. Disinterested vs. uninterested. In a strict, old-fashioned sense, these are not synonyms. Uninterest is lack of interest in the sense of willingness to pay attention. If you stopped reading this entry before now, you were probably uninterested (as well as gravely misguided, of course). Disinterestedness means lack of personal or financial interest for the purposes of fair judging; Consumer Reports accepts no advertisements because it wants to make disinterested judgments. A lot of people now use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" and "unbiased" to mean "disinterested." I think that doesn't work. For example, I generally think that buying new cars is a bad idea (in strictly financial terms), and I have good reasosn for thinking so. I'm biased against buying new cars, but my bias is disinterested because I derive no significant benefit from the sale of used cars. More importantly, it's important for politicians and journalistic analysts to cultivate disinterest, but it's fine for them to have well-founded biases that they can explain and defend. It's hard to encourage the disinterestedness that's essential to productive discourse if we lose the word for it.

3. "Proof." Contentions and fictions do not prove things. Brad DeLong makes this point today in his memorial post about J. K. Galbraith, zinging the New York Times obituary writers' use of "proofs" to describe the arguments of some of Galbraith's detractors: "Proofs? I know many people who find Becker's and Stigler's arguments powerful ones. I know nobody who would call them 'proofs.'" I come across similarly inexact usages of "proof" and its variants frequently, often in new college students' papers, which sometimes claim that a given text "proves" something about life. For example, Pride and Prejudice might "prove" that women in Jane Austen's time could find happines by defying social convention and holding out for true love in marriage. A novel can imagine something of that sort, and a novelist might be said to argue it, but a novel cannot prove a sociological or historical claim. To insist on more exact usage of the terms of proof is to encourage public discourse to distinguish among the kinds of proof that various situations allow or require.

4. "Beyond a shadow of a doubt" (in a legal context). This is related to and narrower than SN #3. Almost as often as not, I find, news coverage of court cases will slip at least once from the phrase "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "beyond a shadow of a doubt." Wouldn't it be lovely if reporters and analysts routinely used the correct phrase and helped their viewers or readers understand more precisely the legal standard of a "reasonable doubt" in a given case?