Best Sentence XXV
MKFreeberg at House of Eratosthenes on Feb 12 2008 at 10:00 am | Filed under: Election 2008
The Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes out, this morning, to the lovely Michelle who is grousing away about my Governortron 2000’s virtual endorsements…and she comes up with this gem, apparently revisiting it from earlier…
As we have seen time and again, “bringing people together” is code for increasing the size and scope of government.
In my own experience, this hackneyed phrase has been seen to mean something a little broader, like “set up a policy I happen to like that would directly affect everyone, so it cannot be subjected to argument by anyone.”
It is directly oppositional to another hackneyed phrase, “make sure everyone has a voice” (or vote, or say, or representation, or that everybody takes part in deciding). Of course a lot of us don’t realize that these two cliches have a directly antithetical relationship to each other. That’s because cliches make us feel good. They don’t blaze a trail and they don’t involve any risk. They’re the pathways of the craven; those who aspire to be extraordinary while endeavoring, one moment to the next, to be as ordinary as possible. That’s how cliches get to be cliches.
And the ugly thing about human nature is we tend to be fair-weather friends to both. We don’t crave representation when we’re in the majority. We want it when we find outselves outvoted — at which time we have an unfortunate tendency to define “representation” as winning. Once we get what we want, there, we run into the thing Michelle’s discussing above. We want to “bring everyone together” — now, RIGHT now — when we’ve won. Make everybody else do things our way. At that point, we’re not so much into counting every vote, we’re more about “unifying” and “healing the divide.”
I would further add none of these little observations about human wisdom will be news to anyone who’s worked in politics for any length of time. Watch a skilled politician as closely as you can, across long stretch of time, you’ll see the successful ones recycle these little sound-bites exactly the way I’ve described above, on the occasions I’ve called them out. They play to our darker, less constructive base instincts.
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