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Marjorie Garber and Erik Tarloff

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from: Marjorie Garber

Trippingly on the Tongue

Posted Monday, Sept. 11, 2000, at 5:36 PM ET

Erik,

Gosh--I never thought of myself as a "landlady." Even, or especially, an absentee landlady, which is what I would have to have been, since while you and your family were watching the leaves turn colors in autumnal Cambridge I was reading the Times West Coast edition in balmy Palo Alto. I guess I would have said something like "they rented our house" during a lovely--apparently for all of us--sabbatical year. (Glad you enjoyed it.) In fact landlady/landlord is one of those odd dissymmetries that makes the history of the language so intriguing. The primary cultural association of "landlady" is with lodging houses or boarding houses, whereas landlords, who can equally well be hosts (jolly or unjolly) were once upon a time also literally lords, or owners, of land. It's not quite so stark as the (oft-cited) difference between a "public man"--a statesman--and a "public woman"--a whore--but it's suggestive.

As is the "gravitas gap." I didn't mean to suggest that women don't have it, but rather that they are not said to have it. A quick scan of recent "gravitas" citations--and as everyone points out, there have been loads of them, for a while it was the buzzword du jour--makes it clear that it's largely a guy word, if not a guy thing. (OK, somebody in the Houston Chronicle did say way back in July, after the Cheney nomination, that Gore could "go for a win in the gravitas game" by nominating a woman, perhaps even our friend Dianne Feinstein, but I interpret that to mean as much about his gravitas as any that might attach to her. Interestingly actresses and other performers get the gravitas label, but other intellectually serious women (I liked your Three Graces, incidentally, Feinstein/Graham/Sontag), while widely respected and admired, aren't necessarily, or automatically, given that buzzy tag. It's a little like "magisterial." No reason why women shouldn't be called this--and I'm sure F/G/S, not to mention Golda, have been--but ...

Your account of Washington getting help with his speeches from Hamilton, Madison, et al., makes my point, I think--which is that, unlike them, most aspiring politicians, and non-politicians, today don't study rhetoric, writing, and speech. Maybe they study other recent politicians' speeches (or, as you suggest, Noonan's and Sorensen's), but in general there seems a real distrust of eloquence--or even grammatical correctness. Soaring periods, the high note struck by a JFK or a Martin Luther King Jr.--indeed anything that sounds like the Bible--are admired, but the idea that how words are put together is related to how thoughts are put together seems to be remanded to the work of specialist consultants. Certainly the classics were vital to the language of early presidents, and the works of Shakespeare were as important to Lincoln's style and thought as the Bible.

It's not about the "purity" or "authenticity" of the politico's voice, but about a sense of language, speech rhythms, and argumentation as part of learning to think. The ancient sophists were professional speechwriters and got no respect; they crafted arguments, rather than claiming "truth." (These rhetorical skills survive in the arts of successful trial lawyers, the sophists of our era.) John Milton, who was a politician as well as a poet, honed his language skills in exercises called "Prolusions" (e.g., "Which is better, night or day?"), the forerunners of modern debates. L'Allegro and Il Pensoroso (the joyful and the pensive or contemplative) are poems that come out of that tradition. In Shakespeare any time a character says he's going to speak like a "plain man" and eschew artifice, the audience is duly warned; what is coming next is artfulness (the wordsmith King Henry V, a k a Prince Hal, woos the Princess of France as a "plain soldier") or worse (Richard III; Iago).

So, my admittedly hyperbolic suggestion about barring speechwriters from the agora was a way of expressing the wish that there wasn't so obvious a divide between the training thought useful for a political career and the liberal arts. A wish, if you like, that politicians were more like speechwriters, rather than that they would dispense with the services of those invaluable literary pundits.

On the seriously grave question of Wen Ho Lee, I'm in complete agreement. What is it about this weird longing for atom bomb spies? I'd put it down to '50s nostalgia if it weren't so appalling and so dangerous. Los Alamos and McCarthyism seem to be indissolubly linked, even as the eponymous hero of the latter term seems to have faded from public view. We hear more about the supposed "McCarthyism of the left" than of the old original variety. A little while ago I screened, for a class, the classic documentary Point of Order about the implosion of Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings. I still find it incredibly chilling, and moving. ("At long last, sir, have you no decency ...?")

Now Joseph Welch--there was a master of eloquence. (It was perhaps predictable, given our culture's penchant for crossovers between public events and the entertainment industry, that Welch, too, wound up in the movie business, at least for one memorable picture, Anatomy of a Murder.)

Marge

P.S.: About that deposit ... I'll get back to you.

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Garber

Trippingly on the Tongue

Posted Monday, Sept. 11, 2000, at 5:36 PM ET
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Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Harvard. Her most recent book is Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses (click here to buy it). Erik Tarloff is the author of Face-Time (click here to buy it) and the newly published The Man Who Wrote the Book (click here to buy it). Click here to read this discussion from the beginning.
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Reader Comments From the Fray:


As for why women like Gore and men Bush? Simple: Romance and Presents. A big kiss for the wife, free pre-school for the kids and free medicine for Gramps. Gore's the national dream husband. Meanwhile, the men of America put their hands on their wallets which have just become perceptibly lighter, and furrow their collective brow as they tot up the trillions in taxes for the aforementioned goodies. Pikers! Don't they love their wives? How can they begrudge them the important things in life, paramount among them the free time to sit on the couch and watch Gore on Oprah? Gore's next initiative: a national program of heart-shaped chocolate boxes.

--Josh May

(To reply, click here.)

[Note from the Fray Editor: Hmm. That should go down well in The Fray. So, we are sure, will Tek's view that gravitas, like penetration, is male. Other ideas:]


Thanks Marge. You didn't mention reparations [see last week's Breakfast Table] and you got in the obligatory digs at George W. Bush. You have gravitas. Big time.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


The last female politician to have "gravitas" was Margaret Thatcher. She didn't care whether or not she was part of the old boy network. She did not sit around and whine about the glass ceiling. She did not toe the liberal/socialist line or care whether or not people loved her. She ignored all the experts, and just went with what she believed in and to hell with the polls.

--Dean W.

(To reply, click here.)


The gender gap is due to gun control.

I can't tell you how many working/middle class white men I've heard that say something like "I'm pissed with the Democrats that they keep making me vote Republican, but I strongly believe in the second amendment." For women (and men) who support or don't mind gun control, it's not a voting issue, because no one believes gun control will substantially reduce violence. And what's most irritating to this yellow-dog Dem is that actual steps Dems take are not that threatening, even if you are strongly against gun control. It's merely the rhetoric about "taking on the NRA" etc etc which is driving away working class white men in droves.
What's annoying to me is how the media is ignoring the issue. Media people will talk about the kiss, empathy, social programs (men don't want health care and education?), the Mommy vs. Daddy party, blah blah, but are completely oblivious to this particular 900 pound gorilla. And the polls don't ask questions on gun control either, so no-one sees how big (or small) its effect is. I find the combination of media obtuseness on gun control combined with endless (uninsightful) analysis on the gender gap really pretty irritating.

And Ms Williams, if you believe Wen Ho Lee was being railroaded, how come you haven't written any columns on it? Or on the fraudulent Cox report?

--Roublen Vessau

(To reply, click here.)
[Note from the Fray Editor: probably because she's actually Marjorie Garber. Marjorie Williams is over at Slate's Book Club.]


Erik, your story about Washington's steely (not wooden) character is true in essence, except it was Mad Anthony Wayne boasting after a cavalry skirmish that he was afraid of nothing in this world. Hamilton then gestured to Washington, who had just entered the room and was warming himself at the fireplace. "Go, then, and clap our general on his back, and hail him as a good fellow," said Hamilton. "No, I think I will decline the honor," replied Wayne.

Many share your outrage about Wen Ho Lee. Can you see why we reprehensible unreconstructed conservatives are always in such an uproar about the left's perpetual ambition to increase the power and reach of the Federal government? And I agree that the ACLU is a useful organization, though they should be admonished to change their name to the American Civil Liberties- Except-for-a-Phrase-in-Amendment-One-a-Clause-in-Amendment-Two-and-All-of-Amendment-Ten Union. Truth in advertising, you know.

--Aristophanes

(To reply, click here.)
[This is the post mentioned by Erik Tarloff in Monday's entry.]

(9/11)

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