Beyond Wooster

Over the years, George W. Bush has been maligned as an idiot for his malapropisms, which I always thought was not quite right: Bush isn't an idiot, he's a nitwit. I think the difference is, whereas idiocy implies a definitive lack of intelligence, nitwitism implies a perfectly fine intelligence that, due to a certain kind of breezy temperament, is directed with 100% force towards utter inanity. The nitwit isn't unintelligent so much as incurious; not bloody-minded so much as cheerfully uninterested in reason. And so it is not uncommon for a nitwit to have a certain imaginitive capacity with language, but for it to reveal itself in ways that no serious person can countenance--for example, the ingenious stupidity of a line like, "they misunderestimated me".

The nitwit par excellence is, of course, PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, and many observers have noted the similarities between the chummy, Edwardian, blue-blooded bachelor and the 43rd US president (both would do nearly anything to help out an old pal--although whereas for the former this meant ruffling the feathers of an aunt or two, for the latter it meant the destruction of New Orleans). So George W. Bush's distinct style of buffoonery has a bonafide literary pedigree, and is one that can be appreciated, I think, as a subtle form of genius. After all, Wooster is a nitwit, no doubt--but he is a nitwit who has in him the capacity to utter such inspired prose as, "In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts."

In the last few weeks, we have had to come to terms with a new and more advanced type of linguistic trainwreck, in the shape of Sarah Palin. Palin doesn't seem to be a species of nitwit--indeed, her responses to questions are so excessively incoherent that the entire exchange barely qualifies as an act of human communication. The things that Palin verbally responds to--which we would normally think of as questions--are probably better understood more generically as stimuli. For example:

Reporter's verbal stimulus: “Do you think that our continued military presences in Iraq and Afghanistan have inflamed Islamic extremists?”

Palin's response: “I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there. Do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that was some destruction. Terrible destruction on that day. But since Sept. 11, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.”

In another case, her response seems to press the Wittgensteinian limits of language's very ability to express any meaning at all:

Katie Couric's verbal stimulus: "Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?"

Palin's response: "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."

Unlike the Bush/Wooster engagement with language--with its Bach-like contortions of content and form, its feats of pure imagination, ingenuity, and Dionysian playfulness--the Palin escape from language hints at something that's darker, more subversive, and undeniably absurdist. She seeks not to expand language, but to diminish it as far as possible, to render it alien and meaningless and somehow outside the boundaries of authentic human interaction. She wants to make the audience aware of the limits of language itself, and she wants the awareness to be visceral. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen is her political credo, but she makes us know it not by remaining silent about that which she cannot speak, but by speaking about that which she cannot speak. Random noise, after all, contains just as much information as no signal, but it is tactically advantageous for the signaler: it costs nothing to produce, but time and resources must be expended on the receiving end to verify the absence of information. In the strategic space thus afforded, she airs her true "argument"--which is not an argument at all, but something that eludes language and even reason: the fact of Sarah Palin. There can be no reasons or words about the fact of Sarah Palin, of her Downs baby, of her moose hunting, of her good looks, of her accent--the concept of transition from actual to ideal is transcended by the simple fact of her being, and this juxtaposed with the fact of her campaign suggests--not through any function of reason, but by a sort of directed free association--the fact of Sarah Palin in power. The linearity of reason is dispensed with in favor of the more primal, more visceral one-dimensional point that just is Sarah Palin, reformer--that just is John McCain, maverick. There is no space left for anything that would have meaning; motion is a conceptual impossibility. Words, devoid of meaning, are consequently devoid of force, and their actions cease to cause equal and opposite reactions: words and rationales fly at Palin like bullets but she does not budge, and when she speaks there is no recoil. There can be no laws that govern data because there is but one datum: the fact of the datum. What particular shape that datum takes in any given circumstance is simply the one that most reaffirms itself. Yes. 1. Big. Go. Up. Bright. Fast. We hold on to it for dear life, and steadfastly refuse to accept that it can fail us. This steadfast refusal we call "American exceptionalism", and we have now invested it with so much significance that it keeps us from what ought to be our chief distraction: surviving.

...

It appears that I have gone mad.