1.
In today’s publishing world, it pays to be a doomsayer. We have an inexhaustible appetite for reports of literature’s demise. Go ahead, dust off that article on how the novel is dead for the thousandth time — only make sure you add that the whole industry is dying with it. Are you a publisher, the sort of person who purports to sell books? Give interviews with leading periodicals in which you admit that publishing is “at a crossroads,” and that we have lost the necessary magic to accomplish the nearly 600-year-old trick of turning printed matter into gold. Bring on the articles by journalists that remind us how journalism as we know it is passing away! Algorithms write our articles, videos replace text as the primary medium of communication, and soon all media will consist of an endless feed of indistinguishable information, which our children will scroll through lazily while they suck a ground-up mixture of kale and insects through a straw.
There’s something flattering about all this hand-wringing. It provides us with a sense of self-importance, to imagine we live in unprecedented times. One nice part about the apocalypse is the way it soothes one’s existential crisis. People who write, publish, and criticize literature have never been a particularly self-confident bunch, and the current climate — in which more than 300,000 books are published in America every year, not counting self-published titles — can encourage feelings of irrelevancy. Why write yet another review of yet another novel, when you can proclaim the absolute end of literature? Better to be a prophet than a drudge. Even authors can take comfort in the idea of a post-literary age, where the fact that all the great novels have already been written relieves us of the responsibility of writing our own.
Alas, all it takes to dispel this flattering illusion is a quick glance at New Grub Street, a novel by the English writer George Gissing. The book concerns itself with the self-aggrandizing and ultimately desperate lives of so-called “literary men” (and women) in Victorian London. This was a world that Gissing, a financially strapped, critically respected, and solidly middle-tier (what we would nowadays call “midlist”) author, knew well, and he renders it in harsh, bitterly funny terms. The resulting portrait of squabbling critics, disappointed writers, and the final triumph of literary middlemen is so obviously comparable to our own time that it ought to serve as required reading for anyone planning yet another thinkpiece on contemporary publishing.
Gissing’s greatest achievement in New Grub Street is his clear-eyed assessment of the complete uselessness of most literary production. In a crucial early scene, the young scholar Marian Yule sits in the Reading Room of the British Museum, struggling through some research, and has a vision of her own irrelevancy:
[Marian] kept asking herself what was the use and purpose of such a life as she was condemned to lead. When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market…She herself would throw away her pen for joy but for the need of earning money. And all these people about her, what aim had they save to make new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made out of them? This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print — how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit.
Gissing wrote this passage in 1891, but it could just as well have been written today. There was already enough literature for a human being to read in his or her lifetime during the Victorian Era; the fact that since then the overall number of books has grown by many orders of magnitude hasn’t changed the equation, any more than pouring 60 cups into a tablespoon is any different than pouring 60 gallons. The fear of one’s own irrelevancy in the face of so much text is ageless.
New Grub Street ought to be required reading for anyone interested in how cultural history repeats itself. This is partly a result of how clearly it reflects so many contemporary issues — a confusing publishing marketplace, a general lack of faith in the uses of literature — but also a result of the tone in which it treats them. As a frustrated, middle-tier writer with scores to settle, Gissing had no illusions about being exceptional. Like Marian Yule, he was half convinced of his own irrelevancy, and he wrote about his own era cynically and clinically, in a style that spared no one, especially himself.
2.
Most of the characters in New Grub Street are not novelists. Instead, the book focuses on the class of “literary men” who spring up as a kind of support system to literature: critics, scholars, and editors. Ambitious, prideful, obsessed with status and social class, these pygmy giants spend as much time making a name attacking each other in the editorial pages of literary periodicals as they do writing about books: a situation with which the contemporary reader is no doubt familiar.
The king of all these critics is Jasper Milvain, the ambitious young man who serves as the novel’s ostensible villain. I say “ostensible” because, to a modern reader, Jasper is delightful, for much the same reason as the novel as a whole is delightful: his ability to cut through the bullshit inherent in his milieu and expose the cynicism underneath. Orphaned and poor, Jasper is plain about his ambitions: he plans on amassing enough cultural power to be offered the editorship of a literary journal, at which point he will have the economic security necessary to allow him to write and publish whatever he likes. Until then, however, he’ll write whatever he needs to get ahead: a decision that makes the more idealistic members of his profession uneasy:
‘You, now,’ pursued John. ‘What do you write about?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ [replied Jasper.] ‘I make a saleable page or two out of whatever strikes my fancy.’
‘Exactly! You don’t even pretend that you’ve got anything to say. You live by inducing people to give themselves mental indigestion — and bodily, too, for that matter.’
‘Do you know, Mr. Yule, that you have suggested a capital idea to me? If I were to take up your views, I think it isn’t at all unlikely that I might make a good thing of writing against writing. It should be my literary specialty to rail against literature. The reading public should pay me for telling them that they oughtn’t to read. I must think it over.’
Reading this passage, I was reminded of a certain kind of current thinkpiece that suggests writers stop writing, since there are already too many books in the world.
At heart, Jasper is a hustler. For him, the literary world isn’t a matter of talent, but of connections, just like any other industry. “To have money,” he proclaims “is becoming of more and more importance for a literary career…A lucky man will still occasionally succeed by dint of his own honest perseverance, but the chances are dead against anyone who can’t make private interest with influential people; his work is simply overwhelmed by that of the men who have better opportunities.”
Having recognized the reality of the literary market, Jasper serves it; he writes flattering reviews of influential people, produces insults on commission, and composes an endless stream of what he calls “rubbish of fine quality,” in which he takes a certain amount of pride.
“Many a fellow could write more in quantity,” he claims, “but they couldn’t command my market.”
Jasper is smart, shrewd, and fully aware of his own limitations; Victorian convention demands that Gissing make him the novel’s villain, but it’s clear that he has a great deal of affection for him. Now that a century has gone by, he seems like a hero for our time, if not theirs; the swashbuckling innovator with only the slightest scruples. By investing his villain with such energy, Gissing side-steps the moralistic hand-wringing that often accompanies cultural criticism. A lesser writer might have taken a more moral tack: the literary world is a farce, and isn’t it a shame. Gissing does away with the second phrase entirely.
3.
But it isn’t simply Jasper’s gleeful cynicism that makes New Grub Street so perfect for today’s reader. The novel is full of small episodes that line up so perfectly with the current literary world that one wonders whether anything has fundamentally changed since the late 19th century — or if the age of Internet traffic is simply a reversion to the era of yellow journalism.
One of the novel’s funniest figures is a character named Whelpdale: a failed writer who is desperately seeking other modes of employment. At the beginning of the novel, he’s hit upon his first successful scheme, which even Jasper considers outrageous:
You don’t know what he’s doing? [Jasper asked.] The fellow has set up as a ‘literary advisor.’ He has an advertisement in The Study every week. ‘To Young Authors and Literary Aspirants’ — something of the kind. ‘Advice given on choice of subjects, MSS. Red, corrected, and recommended to publishers. Moderate terms.’ A fact! And what’s more, he made six guineas in the first fortnight; so he says, at all events. Now that’s one of the finest jokes I’ve ever heard. A man who can’t get anyone to publish his own books makes a living by telling other people how to write.
Any resemblance to current writers stumping for pay, whether living or dead, is of course purely coincidental.
But Whelpdale’s finest and most successful achievement comes at the end of the book: his development of a revolutionary magazine. Having gotten his hands on a paper called Chat, Whelpdale decides to rename it Chit-Chat, to make every article “no more than two inches in length” and to make it appeal to “the quarter-educated.”
‘No, I am perfectly serious,’ [Whelpdale continued.] ‘Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention…their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat.’
Jasper had begun to listen seriously.
‘There’s something in this, Whelpdale,’ he remarked.
Indeed, the publication of Chit-Chat is a wild success, and Whelpdale (something of a failure throughout most of the book) eclipses even Jasper’s ambitions — to the point where he ends up marrying Jasper’s sister, much to the critic’s chagrin. In the race to the bottom, Whelpdale is the undisputed winner: the BuzzFeed of his day.
(Or is BuzzFeed just a pale imitation of Chit-Chat? Hard to say.)
But Gissing’s jaundiced eye towards “literary advisors” and publishing ventures is equalled by his attitude towards the business of fiction writing. The two novelists at the center of New Grub Street are hopeless idealists, and their ideas themselves are so absurd that at first you don’t recognize their relationship to certain contemporary aesthetic trends.
Take Harold Biffen, a novelist so poor he can’t afford an undercoat, but who is convinced he’s hit upon a revolutionary strand of aesthetic purity: total realism. Unlike other novelists, who are afraid to confront the truth of life straight on, Biffen plans to illustrate it in all its banality:
‘For my part, [Biffen continued,] I am going to reproduce [common life] verbatim, without one single impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest reporting. The result will be something unutterably tedious. Precisely. That is the stamp of the ignobly decent life. If it were anything but tedious it would be untrue. I speak, of course, of its effect upon the ordinary reader.”
The resulting book, Mr. Bailey, Grocer, is just as tedious as Biffen suggests; near the end of the novel, Biffen actually succeeds in publishing it, but despite a favorable review from Jasper (an example of the villain’s kind heart) it sinks like a stone.
Gissing is engaging in a bit of self-parody here, being a social realist writer himself — but despite its evident ridiculousness, Biffen’s concept of total realism should be familiar to contemporary readers. What separate’s Biffen’s theory from someone like David Shields and his inexhaustible desire for the “authentic” presentation of reality, as opposed to the too-neat, “artificial” pleasures of fiction — or from the work of Karl Ove Knausgard, which so many reviewers have acclaimed for being boring in the most interesting way?
These satires seem fresh for several reasons. The first is that very little has actually changed in literary culture since the 19th century. The poles between which our discussions always vacillate are the same; on the one hand a flexible, inventive shysterism, born of necessity: Chit Chat, BuzzFeed, and the Ten Books You Must Read If You Ever Want to Get Laid Again; on the other hand, the sort of artistic puritanism that convinces artists that their purpose is greater than simply pleasing the public, of calculating the effect of their books “upon the ordinary reader:” the great power plays of aesthetic judgment.
But the second, and perhaps more important reason, is that Gissing’s honesty refuses to valorize anyone. He is cruel to both the critics and the deluded authors they criticize — and he saves his harshest criticism for himself.
4.
New Grub Street’s ostensible hero is a novelist named Edward Reardon. Reardon is in some sense Gissing’s self-portrait; like his hero, Gissing was critically respected, but had failed to earn a living from his work, and wrote New Grub Street in an effort to pay his creditors. He considered the novel a piece of hack work, and Reardon represents the worst version of his own failure: one of the thousands of semi-talented writers who discovered that their abilities didn’t guarantee them a readership, much less a living. Having produced a few novels that were well-received but which sold poorly, he finds himself short on funds and afflicted with writer’s block, struggling to support a wife and child.
The portrait Gissing paints of Reardon is unflinching. He is occasionally charming but generally short-tempered, prone to sickness and lacking in courage; his unwillingness (or inability) to play the game at which Jasper Milvain succeeds so spectacularly dooms his family to poverty and destroys his marriage. If he is in fact a self-portrait, the resulting picture shows the extent of the self-doubt and contempt Gissing held towards himself at the time of the novel’s publication.
It was this state of ambivalence, however, that allowed Gissing to put paragraphs like the following in Reardon’s mouth — paragraphs that expose the novelist’s work as quixotic, if not idiotic:
What is reputation? If it is deserved, it originates with a few score of people among the many millions who would never have recognised the merit they at last applaud. That’s the lot of a great genius. As for a mediocrity like me – what ludicrous absurdity to fret myself in the hope that half a dozen folks will say that I am ‘above the average!’…I admit that everything is relative. There is no such thing as goodness or badness, in the absolute sense, of course. Perhaps I am absurdly inconsistent when — though knowing my work can’t be first-rate — I strive to make it as good as possible. I don’t say this in irony…I really mean it.
This would be touching, perhaps — a testament to small heroism — if it weren’t used an excuse for why Reardon’s family needs to give up their apartment and move to the worst part of London, simply because of his strivings.
All this makes New Grub Street a particularly potent corrective to the current cottage industry centering on “the writing life” — in which literary production is seen as glamorous, in which photos of writers’ desks appear on Pinterest and readers obsess over the perfect pen with which to write their buried masterpiece. The lesson of Gissing is that most novelists are bitter failures — always were, and always will be. If there’s any heroism in the writers he represents, it’s the bare fact of their persistence in the face of certain defeat. Mr. Bailey, Grocer might be a parody, but for its author, it’s a triumph. What more could an aesthetic puritan ask for?
Though it has its fair share of funny moments, New Grub Street can be a bleak read. It was written by a man who had seen his fair share of dreams dashed; practically anybody with any shred of decency meets a bad end, and its picture of society is as corrosive as it is perceptive. But for a contemporary reader, this bitterness can be clarifying. In an era in which “the writing life” is more important than the writing — Whelpdale’s job as “literary advisor,” grown to monstrous proportions — there’s something bracing about the book’s presentation of just how sordid, unprofitable, and unrewarding literature can be. It’s an unsympathetic (but also unpitying) look at a literary era. I eagerly await the writer who produces a similar look at our own.
In a Slate piece published back in the fall, Kitty Burns Florey took on the unenviable task of diagramming the utterances of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, clearly has a unusual predilection for sentence diagramming (which I’m pretty sure the Army Field Manual prohibits as a form of torture.) Nonetheless, her project was more journalistic than aesthetic; she suggested that diagramming a sentence “provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator.”
Perhaps, rather than having some grammatical genius that allows him to seem for confident and masculine than he may actually be, he is merely a product of several years of Warriner's English Grammar.
These are not even the words of Obama, but that of his speech writer, whose job is to make him look good. Therefore, diagramming a sentence from his speech should say nothing about the Messiah.
Kirk, Tx.
Kirk,
What we think we know can often prevent us from learning new things. Last year's Time piece on Obama's speechwriting process:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837368,00.html
Neil
Kirk,
Are you saying Obama's speechwriter is scripting not only his prepared addresses, but ostensibly spontaneous responses to press conference questions (which was the context for this sentence)? I'm not sure I follow your line of argument, but would be happy to know more…
Neil,
The article does mention "the 27 year old wunderkind," Favreau who helps him with his speeches, so which are Obama's words and which are Favreau's?
Garth,
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates. He is the slickest politician since…well, Bill Clinton, so polishing answers just as with speeches would be easy to imagine. After all, any politician who can convince the American people that a trillion dollar spending bill is going to stimulate the economy certainly gets props from me.
Kirk, Tx.
PS Garth, at least we agree on Bolano.
Goodness. It must be hard work, Kirk, patrolling the entire internet for instances of flattering or admiring statements about the new President of United States which can be turned into sneering implications that those who flatter or admire him have switched off their brains.
How do you find the time?
@Goodness. Or rather, how does someone find the time to diagram the president's speeches?
Kirk,
A speechwriter can only do so much. Like Obama, George W Bush had a team of 3 competent speechwriters yet he couldn't even put together two words coherently. The job of a speechwriter is to write in the speaker's own voice, not be the voice. If you're implying that Obama is just a voicebox, you're sorely mistaken. You've got to be pretty good with language to make the president of the Harvard Law Review.
What troubles me about this sentence is not its grammar, but its content. Obama sees the important issue of bringing to book people who abused executive power under Bush administration as "looking backward"? Ethics are at issue here, and unfortunately Obama has failed to live up to his own pre-election standards on the question of accountability. Check out the delays and settlements he recommended in the subpeona of Rove and the nod he gave to the Justice system to basically uphold security certificates and such from the Bush era. He is not willing to deprive himself of the vast and unconstitutional powers that he inherited from the Bush administration. This will be the most serious credibility issue with his presidency.
Could we have some similar diagram also for Bush speech? please.
I totally agree Obama is a great communicator, which in most instances today means he reads well from a teleprompter. And I concur that Bush was perhaps the worst communicator we've ever had. Laughable. But actions speak louder than words, so after all of Obama's campaign promises he has a mountain to climb.
Kirk,Tx.
Kirk,
It's your cult that wanted Bush's War, so that they could act out The Left Behind series, for "Jesus". I'm not surprised that logic and facts are regarded as the enemy.
Sorry I don't fall into your category of Republican Evangelical. I am an atheist that happens to be a conservative in most cases.
If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!
Kirk,Tx.
I don't think magic-talking is a sign of respect. If american people were to be treated as adults the truth would plain and clear (adults can handle the truth, right?). Instead everybody is left to draw his own conclusion (magic talking alert!). The wrongdoers will be prosecuted, or not? Keeping an eye on the future is more important than justice or not? The same political-correctness-BS just in a nicer package.
This MUST be put up side-by-side with a Bush quote. Please, I'm begging.
I've met Obama (I was at the University of Chicago when he taught there). This isn't from a speechwriter; he's always spoken like this.
The sentence analyzed exposes one of Obama's serious weaknesses – lack of precision and clarity.
When Obama's finally gotten to the period at the end of the long sentence, the listener has no more insight into Obama's views or probable future actions than they did before he uttered the first word of the sentence. While a casual observer (or an Obama worshiper) thinks the question has been answered, it was not. He could either prosecute everyone in sight within the Bush administration (of course, only for "clear" violations), or he could do absolutely nothing (of course, in the interest of "looking forward").
I am hopeful that Obama's seemingly intentional ambiguity and failure to take a clear position is a political technique he reserves for dodging domestic issues and that he lets experienced people craft his messages for the international stage. In international matters, failure to communicate effectively and clearly can have serious consequences including unnecessary escalation of tensions to the level of warfare.
The article makes fun of Bush 43 for the statement: "You're with us or you're against us" [I believe the author used a fragment of Bush's sentence here, but that's not material to this discussion]. However, the purpose of speaking is to communicate. It is reasonable to agree or disagree with Bush's position, but it's impossible to not better understand Bush's position and attitude after hearing this statement – he views sitting on the sidelines on the issue of terrorism to be equivalent to supporting terrorism.
If you watch his many interviews or read his two self-authored books and countless articles dating back to his law school days and early marriage life and on through the present, you will see that Obama has always talked this way. His themes, views, syntax and delivery have been remarkably consistent. Say what you want about him, but his voice – with or without a speechwriter's help – is authentically his. To say otherwise is mere ignorance or delusion.
To all who believe Obama's statement is obfuscating but that there's clarity in Bush's "you're with us or you're against us" statement: You are wrong.
Obama here says we will enforce the laws, but he's not about to set the government toward consuming itself with second-guessing all dubious Bush Administration decisions; that should evidence emerge of clear wrong-doing, your title and your friends will not save you from justice, but that his administration is not about to launch a comprehensive witch hunt. This is pragmatic.
Bush's alleged clarity is anything but pragmatic. If an overall long-term ally like Mexico or France opposes our invasion of Iraq because they find our charges of Iraqi terrorism-abetting to be unpersuasive — are they now "with" the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11? Is Russia "with" the terrorists, or Syria — or Hamas? It would seem they are. And yet we permit them to go on existing — which makes us "with" the terrorists, doesn't it? Sorry, but I never saw the clarity in Bush's black-vs-white jingoism.
I am pleased to have a president with an adult ability to examine the world and address its complexity. That serves the national interest well.
Logosfera, I would argue that letting people come to their own conclusions is, in fact, treating them like adults–especially when compared with the paternalistic alternatives that you offer.
Secondly, in Obama's answer you can find answers to every question you raised. Will wrongdoers be prosecuted? He says yes, when it is clear that they in fact did wrong. Is keeping an eye on the future more important and "justice" (which, in fairness, is not synonymous with "looking backward" which is what he actually said)? Yes, he says he's more interested in looking forward than dwelling on the past. These are not contradictory–He's more interested in the future than the past, but when clear wrongdoing is occurred then those accountable should be prosecuted.
I think you do a great job showing how Obama's brain works as it is manifest in his construction of syntax and design. He's a remarkable thinker, strategist and writer. I think his sentence structure demonstrates all the complexity he brings to the issue, his understanding of opposing ideas, and an aesthetic sense of parallelism and rhythm.
It's an odd world we live in when sentence structure *is* construed as indicative of morality, but actions aren't.
Stop addressing Kirk the Texas troll. Internet 101, people.
The commas are misplaced in that sentence. Here I fixed it for you!
"My view is also that nobody's above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards"
Unfortunately this quote didn't contain the one mistake which I observe fairly regularly in Obama's speech: the use of "a" before a noun beginning with a vowel. For example, he says "launch a attack" instead of "launch an attack." I've also heard several friends who were raised in Hawaii speak similarly, so maybe it's a local Hawaiian thing?
The semicolon was correct. When the first clause contains commas, the punctuation mark before the conjunction should be a semicolon for the sake of clarity.
Yr pedantic trivia for the day
Anonymous @ 6:01:
It isn't clear what you hope to imply about the comparative morality of the actions of Presidents Bush and Obama, if anything, in this thread about clear communication.
No one here is claiming that sentence structure indicates morality, only that it indicates a person's thought patterns. Sentences that become complex without becoming unclear indicate something very promising about the mind producing them. That's all.
Using "a" for the *unstressed* article in all positions is hardly localized to Hawaii; I've heard it all my life. I say it – and I've never been to Hawaii. Many people do it, even if they wouldn't write it; it's simply a phonological feature of a large number of English dialects. You may call it a "mistake", but the difference between "an" and "a" has been a fluid one in English for a long time.
@Ridger–
I think it's the glottal stop that arises between the "a" and following vowel sound that reminds me of the spoken Hawaiian language. Hawaiian is replete with consecutive vowels that are separated by glottal stops. I was just wondering if that found its way into English as spoken in Hawaii.
As for it being a "mistake," I was taught that it was incorrect, both in speech and writing.
Why does it matter that it's unstressed??
What with all the sentence diagramming? He still didn't say anything. Typical politician – platitudes and no substance.
The second "that" clause isn't really parallel to the other two, because it's subordinated to the "if" clause
In my experience as an applied linguist specializing in the American accent, "a" and a following vowel sound overall tends to be more of a male characteristic, and then secondarily, a sub-30 trait.
"I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates."
Non sequitur; you asserted that these were Obama's speech writers words, not his — strongly implying that they were part of a speech. Your response simply confirms what was evident from the first — that you're a grossly dishonest person.
Can we go easy on Kirk, folks? He's been commenting here for a while and is a Bolano fan, which is two marks in his favor, and while his first comment did strike me as a bit piquant, I'd like to invoke (invent?) the law of proportional snark.
Beautiful, how elegant, like a flower!
Thanks Garth!
Nothing against Obama or his supporters. His English is that of a well-healed Ivy Leaguer, I just don't agree with his policies.
Bolano Rules!
Kirk, the "Texas Troll"
Sheesh … You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't.
"You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't."
Seeing as his two wars and 5 trillion dollars of national debt are still with us, I see no reason to let up.
Kirk,
You are welcome to disagree with Obama's policies, but your critique is not based on much more than unexamined assumptions and rigidified bias, with a liberal (muahaha) dose of snarkiness thrown in for good (read: bad) measure.
This, unfortunately, is a dire disease of the conservative mind. The previous President and his slavish followers being prime examples. Listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh only releases more toxins into the body politic and offer no cures at all.
"Bush Derangement Syndrome" not letting up? That's nothing — 8 years later, conservatives are STILL blaming stuff on Clinton.
Kirk, Obama's been in office a few weeks. Bush was in there screwing things up for 8 years. I'm not willing to talk down the new president, on whom we all depend, for a few years yet.
I want him to have his chance to make things better, and I'll support him in much of what he does in his early days in office.
Considering that conservatives spent 7 years shrieking about how unAmerican it was to question the president — calling the rest of us traitors and haters (and a lot of you are still doing it) — I'd think you guys would be willing to give THIS president a little leeway.
@Kirk: "If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!"
Really? This administration is going to play looser with logic and facts than the *Bush administration*?! Now we *know* you're a troll.
There is everything to respect about the wise words of a thoughtful, respectable and intelligent president of the United States – something we have not enjoyed for a while.
But the sentence in question is remarkably simple; so much so that if it represents such cause for celebration by the author, one would wonder whether he too shared this property.
I refuse to believe that we have reached the stage where anything uttered in public that is not incomprehensible garbage is reason for elation. Things have surely not grown that bad yet.
I never said anything about Bush…
As I stated before Obama is an eloquent communicator but what he is communicating is his desire to make us a socialist nation.
After 7 years of the New Deal, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau said that all the money that had been spent had not worked. Trying to spend our way out of recession is an exercise in futility.
Kirk, Tx.
I'm thinking Bush supporters are just jealous that our president is no longer as stupid as they are.
@Kirk, that's a "well-heeled Ivy Leaguer", not "well-healed".
– a not-so-well-heeled Ivy Leaguer in VA
i kinda like your post! :D love it. thanks for posting :D
I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook.
The funny thing is, the GOP lost this election, and they're not bright enough to notice they continue to lose ground. Their talking points just aren't getting any traction, except among the very small number of Sarah Palin syncophants.
Keep on digging in your heels, Republicans, and do your best to wreck the country even more than George Bush managed. Stay right out in the open, spreading your lies, where we can see you. The rest of us will get on with business while you squabble in the mud.
Hank,
Obama wants to "spread the wealth," how is that not Socialism?
I believe that the GOP message is getting traction…They're certainly not going down without a fight about this "stimulus" package.
Again, George Bush is no longer in the White House!!!
But I would rather have the country wrecked by Bush than utterly destroyed by Obama's policies.
Furthermore, I believe that those that pulled the lever for Obama will live to regret it when they are giving half of their paychecks for programs that only make individuals and businesses more reliant on government.
Texas Troll
I'm sorry, but I just find it hilarious that Obama making the US a "socialist nation" (which I don't think will happen) is regarded as a bad thing. I, personally feel that we should work to close the ENORMOUS gap between the rich and the poor, and since those who are well-off obviously aren't doing it themselves, I think the government should assume more responsability for that.
"I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook."
Sorry, but there are more than knee-jerk conservatives who think that running a huge deficit is fundamentally immoral. The impulse to control and direct is not unique to the right; you on the left employ the same tools for different ends. The real issue is individual liberty vs. statism, *classical* liberalism versus collectivism, whether progressive or conservative.
Nationalization of the banking sector doesn't amount to socialism? Read some Von Mises. Please.
Very erudite, I’m sure. I think by now we’ve all concluded that Obama is a thinker, that he doesn’t go off half cocked like Bush and his ball-and-Cheney. But what bothers so me about Obama’s use of language is his frequent grammatical mistakes. He says things like: America is doing our duty. Correct version: American is doing ITS duty or We are doing our duty. He says things like: President Bush has invited Michelle and I to the White House.
How can someone who has attended Harvard and taught constitutional law not be able to master such mundane and fundamental concepts as which pronoun agrees with its noun? I honestly can’t understand. His grammar is helping to dumb down America.
Even Mrs. Obama uses this construction. She said, “I am a woman who loves my husband.” She too has been privileged to receive a wonderful education, but helps to dumb down the language.
Come on, Obamas! Start cracking those grammar books with your kids!
Mae
Socialism aside, I’m no “grammar queen,” but this sentence needs a lot of work. Too many “that’s,” a useless “also,” and if one moves “forward,” why would they not alternatively move “backward” (minus the s).
For example:
–My view is that no one is above the law. But if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, people should be prosecuted as ordinary citizens. In general, I am more interested in looking to the future, rather than the past.–
If Obama could put together a really great string of words off the cuff, then, he might be considered a great speaker. Otherwise, in my opinion, he needs all the help he can get–including a teleprompter.
I’m anxious to see an update to this article. How does “word salad” fare in the realm of sentence diagramming.