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June 16, 2006

Orwell’s Ghost Winces

by AltHippo @ 1:06 pm. Filed under Uncategorized, rhetorical fallacy, hacks

There are a couple of posts up at Carpet Bagger that are worth considering as a pair. That may have been the intent, I don’t know. They clearly point towards a common theme of mine: the use of bogus rhetoric and charged language in argument.

The first concerns the House floor debate on Iraq, and the ongoing effort of Republicans to tie Iraq to 9.11. Here’s a sample from Dennis Hastert:

“America’s response started high above a corn field in rural Pennsylvania. Brave men and women armed with nothing more than boiling water and dinner forks and broken bottles stood up as Americans always do when our freedom is in peril and they struck back…. We in this Congress must show the same steely resolve as those men and women on United Flight 93, the same sense of duty as the first responders who headed up the stairs of the Twin Towers.”

In the second post of interest we see the Vice President being toasted by Sean Hannity, allegedly a member of the fourth estate:

Hannity: Well, I got to admit, these are good times for the administration. You got — Zarqawi is dead, revenues are up significantly, the deficit has been cut significantly, the president’s trip. And I’m also told there’s some breaking news that a high-value insurgent has again been captured in Iraq just now.

These quotes were just the sort of thing that Orwell complained about in Politics and the English Language. As he put it:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

This was of course written in 1948. What has changed in the last 58 years is that lack of precision in language has become the goal, not its opposite. If you are a politician (or a talk-show host) all the better to avoid being tied to a clear intent. That way you can’t be held accountable.

What’s more, instead of argument what we have is a recitation of images, as if from a dream, a technique whose value in persuassion has been market-tested. In Hastert’s case we have: “corn field in rural Pennsylvania,” “Brave men and women,” “freedom is in peril, “steely resolve,” “Twin Towers,” etc. Everything else is irrelevant; the emotional theater created by invoking this series of images is the whole point.

Hannity goes beyond merely suggestive imagery. Note how he slips in two questionable “good times” in between two concrete events: Zarqawi is dead, and the president went on a trip. Fair enough. Hard to disagree with that. But the part about revenues and the deficit? Two of these things are not like the other two.

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7 Responses to “Orwell’s Ghost Winces”

  1. eRobin Says:
    June 16th, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    I’m sure the orders from the WH are to conflate every possible event with the “president’s week of greatness.” Watch for the list to get longer as the “reporting” goes on.

    On a bright note: the AOL front page poll yesterday was all about BushCo’s big bounce. Except that people weren’t buying it. All the poll results were decidedly against Dear Leader. So that’s something anyway. Although, I have to admit, the Big Lie is only just starting to be told. Next week the plan will be to discuss the big bounce as conventional wisdom and how other events have been colored by it - like the midterms.

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