Barack Obama seems to have a habit of calling women “sweetie”:
Back in Pennsylvania in early April, Senator Barack Obama took some heat for calling a female factory worker “sweetie,” in Allentown.
He did it again today at a Chrysler Plant in Sterling Heights, asking a reporter to “hold on one second there sweetie” when she asked, “How are you going to help the American auto workers?”
Obama later left a voicemail message apologizing to the reporter in question:1
Second apology is for using the word ’sweetie.’ That’s a bad habit of mine. I do it sometimes with all kinds of people. I mean no disrespect and so I am duly chastened on that front.
“All kinds of people” — sure! No doubt Obama calls Dick Cheney “sweetie” when they cross paths on the Senate floor.2 It’s easy to believe that Obama also uses “sweetie” as a pet name for Hillary Clinton, isn’t it?
The blogosphere has been buzzing inconsequentially, like a massive swarm of stingless and drunk bees, about what Obama’s “sweetie” really means. Is it just a charming tic he picked up in Kansas, or a cynical attempt to sound like a friendly diner waitress offering a coffee refill to a blue-collar customer — or does it reflect a profound sexism? It would be good for the Clinton campaign if it did reflect a profound sexism. But to argue thus you would first have to stipulate that sweeties are always and everywhere women, which sounds a little sexist itself. On the other hand, it would be useful if the Obama campaign could provide video of him calling a man “sweetie”. Everyone would love to see that, not excluding Rick Santorum.
My own intuitive impression, from watching the video of the Chrysler Plant incident, is that Obama reflexively called the reporter “sweetie” because she was not being in any sense “sweet”, but intruding bullishly on a photo-op moment (walking around a car!) rather than waiting for the scheduled Q&A. Thus, “Hold on one second there, sweetie” was an admirably elegant way of saying “Get out of my face, you lamentably rude person, and wait your turn.” But would he have used the term “sweetie” if the rude person had been a man? Or would he instead have said “Sir”, “dude”, or possibly “bitch”?
What name would you like Barack Obama to call you, readers?
From excitingly named station WXYZ, which just looks like someone lazily chopped off the nearest end of the alphabet. ↩
And Cheney mutters back “Go fuck yourself” as usual. ↩
Update: For those in a hurry, I have boiled this post and responses to it down into this handy schematic drama (which is also a pretty good précis of this old thread).
As far as I know, no one else in print has picked up the fact that Eric Hobsbawm implicitly believes the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 was “a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion”.
No one has picked up this “fact” because it is not a fact. It is a weaselly and fantastical insinuation that purports to be confident about what Hobsbawm believes while, at the same time, daintily acknowledging (”implicitly”) that he did not actually say it. As evidence for his assertion, Kamm links (faute de mieux, since no one else has recognised the brilliance of his discovery) to his own 2004 article in the Times. There, however, he was not so circumspect, and simply stated a falsehood:
Moving to more recent panegyric, Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.” He means the 27 Soviet divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to snuff out political reform.
Uh, no, Hobsbawm doesn’t mean the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, as cannot fail to be clear to anyone who reads the chapter in question. Hobsbawm quite explicitly means violence practiced internally by states on their own citizens: at the point of citation he is talking specifically about torture as an internal practice of states. The sentence Kamm cites appears, after all, in a sub-section headed “The Resurgence of Torture”, and here is the fuller context:
Let me now bring in Amnesty, for whose benefit these lectures are held. This organization, as you know, was founded in 1961, mainly to protect political and other prisoners of conscience. To their surprise these excellent men and women discovered that they also had to deal with the systematic use of torture by governments — or barely disguised agencies of government — in countries in which they had not expected to find it. Perhaps only Anglo-Saxon provincialism accounts for their surprise. The use of torture by the French army during the Algerian war of independence, 1954–62, had long caused political uproar in France. So Amnesty had to concentrate much of its effort on torture and its 1975 Report on the subject remains fundamental. Two things about this phenomenon were striking. In the first place its systematic use in the democratic West was novel, even allowing for the odd precedent of electric cattle-prods in Argentinian jails after 1930. The second striking fact was that the phenomenon was now purely Western, at all events in Europe, as the Amnesty Report noted. ‘Torture as a government-sanctioned Stalinist practice has ceased. With a few exceptions…no reports of torture in Eastern Europe have been reaching the outside world in the past decade.’ This is perhaps less surprising than it looks at first sight. Since the life-and-death struggle of the Russian Civil War, torture in the USSR — as distinct from the general brutality of Russian penal life — had not served to protect the security of the state. It served other purposes, such as the construction of show trials and similar forms of public theatre.
It declined and fell with Stalinism. Fragile as the Communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even a nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989. On the other hand it is more surprising that the period from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s should have been the classic era of Western torturing, reaching its peak in the first half of the seventies, when it flourished simultaneously in Mediterranean Europe, in several countries of Latin America with a hitherto unblemished record — Chile and Uruguay are cases in point — in South Africa and even, though without the application of electrodes to genitals, in Northern Ireland. I should add that the curve of Western official torturing has dipped substantially since then, partly, one hopes, because of the labours of Amnesty. Nevertheless, the 1992 edition of the admirable World Human Rights Guide records it in 62 out of the 104 countries it surveyed and gave only fifteen a completely clean bill of health.1
One might well want to argue with what Hobsbawm actually writes here (or anywhere else), but Kamm’s repeated claim is the specific and manifestly ludicrous one that this particular passage “means” or evinces a “belief” that the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring was “a limited, even a nominal, use of armed coercion”. Of course, it does no such thing.
Hypothesizing freely, I suppose such an embarrassing and easily refuted untruth can arise in one of three ways: i) through ignorance (not actually having read the chapter from which a single sentence is plucked); ii) through deliberate, cynical and malicious falsification; or iii) through mere gross and irremediable stupidity. Which explanation do you prefer, readers?
Cited from the paper, originally delivered as an Amnesty lecture, that was later reprinted in On History: “Barbarism: A User’s Guide”, New Left Review I/206, July–August 1994, pp44–54. ↩
This is my latest rant at Comment Is Free. Faithful unspeak.net readers might find some of it tediously familiar, but I hope they will at least enjoy the Brass Eye reference.
Since its electoral meltdown, the Labour party wants to send a message. Unfortunately, Labour’s idea of “sending a message” over the past decade has not meant saying something directly in a poster campaign or a massive round-robin email. The approved manner of sending a message is through tortuous Unspeak and idiotic legislation, and the subsequent public insistence that, however boneheaded its decisions may look, they will at least “send a message”. Thus the government chirruped that its plan to “upgrade” cannabis (a curious verb, as though the public were being encouraged to buy new cannabis because it was so much better than the old stuff) would “send a message” to the yoof that drugs are bad, mmmkay? This plan, of course, depended on young people being too deliciously off their faces to notice that the government’s own scientific advice was that cannabis didn’t actually warrant the new classification. It was impossible to hear ministers defending the idea without remembering the immortal line from Brass Eye, “There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact!”
Also engineered to send a message was the passage of the new Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, which contained a little-reported and spectacularly illiberal passage on “extreme pornographic images“, criminalizing the possession of images or videos that only simulated things the government thinks no upstanding citizen ought to find erotic. Defending this brave new foray into thoughtcrime legislation, Lord Hunt of the reassuringly named “Ministry of Justice” blurted: “It is appalling that this material is available and we have to do something about it.” To this government, to be seen to be doing something, no matter how lunatic and swivel-eyed, is much better than to do nothing at all, or to waste valuable time trying to figure out what it might actually be sensible to do. Headlines, after all, wait for no man.
Meanwhile, here at CiF Hazel Blears came up with the excellent wheeze that the government should “hold some cabinet meetings on housing estates”. Naturally, it doesn’t matter what new manner of foam-brained policy those cabinet meetings come up with. The mere fact of their being held on housing estates will send a message that her party is in touch with the people. Won’t it?
It is easy (and important) for the media to mock. But the people on the other side of the political conversation can’t disclaim all responsibility for our decadent culture of messaging-by-spectacle. When we are treated to the fabulously uncouth sight of Andrew Marr accusing the prime minister of being “a bit strange“, the moral high horse has not only been abandoned but whipped to death and boiled up for a TV dinner.
The widely promulgated narrative that Labour’s troubles now boil down to some supposed personality defects of Gordon Brown, rather than actual policy blunders, is itself a symptom of the fundamental dumbness of our political culture. John Cruddas MP bleated that Brown did not have the “emotional literacy” of David Cameron or even, bizarrely, dead-eyed puppet Boris Johnson (one of whose first acts after being elected was to casually accuse Ken Livingstone of a corrupt rush to shred documents).
So political judgment now comes down to awarding points to the moisturized rich boys of the New Tories for their ability to feign empathy, or for their comparative skill at giving good sofa on Sunday-morning TV. If you think that “emotional literacy” might matter less in a politician than, say, statistical or scientific or historical literacy, you’re a pedantic throwback, and really not the kind of person at whom government and wannabe-government communications are aimed. Still, “emotional literacy” does have its advantages: with it, you can send a message that is all warm-’n'-fuzzy feeling and no content whatsoever; and so, behind the scenes, you can carry on as usual with the business of screwing the people.
Gentle readers often email me with examples of Unspeak, but I don’t find the time to post about them, and sometimes even fecklessly forget to reply. Sorry about that. I am happy to announce that there is an all-new Unspeak™ Forum™, where all are welcome to post links and comments on political language, interesting stories, or anything else at all they feel like discussing with the hydra-brained Unspeak™ Community™. Register (required to keep out the spambots, I’m afraid) and introduce yourself.
The British government, net exporter of liberty, is going to make it a criminal offence, punishable by a prison term of five years, to have in one’s possession an image or video of adults consensually engaging in a non-criminal act.
This ludicrous situation has arisen in the new Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, which outlaws the possession of “extreme pornographic images”. What is an “extreme pornographic image”? It is, of course, the Bill tells us:
an image which is both—
(a) pornographic, and
(b) an extreme image.
Don’t laugh yet. It does explain itself further. First, what is pornographic?
(3) An image is “pornographic” if it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.
(4) Where an image forms part of a series of images, the question whether the image appears to have been so produced is to be determined by reference to—
(a) the image itself, and
(b) (if the series of images is such as to be capable of providing a context for the image) the context in which it occurs in the series of images.
5 So, for example, where—
(a) an image forms an integral part of a narrative constituted by a series of images, and
(b) it appears that the series of images as a whole was not produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal, the image may, by virtue of being part of that narrative, be found not to be pornographic, even though it might have been found to be pornographic if taken by itself.
Yes: we all know that if it’s got a good story, it can’t be pornography. And if it hasn’t got a story, it must be filth. Producing something “for the purpose of sexual arousal”, without even a story, is the business of evil merchants of libido-terrorism. Photographs of American torture and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, can’t be “pornography”, because everyone knows they were produced not “for the purpose of sexual arousal”, but for shits and giggles.
Well, these things are easy to decide. But now you are chafing at the bit to know what an “extreme image” is. Is it an image with extremely high resolution, like twenty TERAPIXELS? Or is it a painting like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, shocking to all notions of art and good taste? Or is it a racist Danish cartoon? The Bill rolls imperturbably on:
(6) An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following—
(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,
(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,
(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal,
where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.
Is or appears to be real? Here is the crux. Not satisfied with outlawing the possession of images of actual sexual violence, necrophilia or bestiality, the Bill seeks to criminalize the possession of images that only simulate them. As you can imagine, I am glancing nervously at my DVD of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò right now, and wondering whether some buffoon will consider that it was produced for the purposes of sexual arousal. Bizarrely, while the Bill’s definition of “pornography” seems designed to include the “Hey, it’s art!” defence, the subsequent definition of an “extreme image” seems to shut it out. Mimesis or not, it — or rather the consumer of it — is to be stamped upon.
So we have before us another case (as in the case of simulated child pornography) of thoughtcrime. The government, it appears, seeks to criminalize the possession of images that record people merely pretending to do something it thinks shouldn’t even enter virtuous heads. It is at times like this that one remembers to be grateful that the House of Lords hasn’t yet been completely “reformed”. In its debate on the Bill last week, Baroness Miller pointed out that the Bill’s new criterion of something having been “produced for the purposes of sexual arousal” is in conflict with the established criterion of the Obscene Publications Act of whether material is “likely to deprave and corrupt”, which already causes juries “difficulty” enough.1
All this talk of sex, meanwhile, seemed to cause a rush of blood to some noble members. Lord McIntosh confessed:
I spent nearly 20 years on one Front Bench or another, and during that time I never quite had the guts to say what I really thought about these issues. I never quite had the guts to quote Kenneth Tynan, who in a review of eastern erotic art said, “All my life I have enjoyed having erections, and I have been grateful to the people and the works of art that made them possible”. Now I have said it, and no one can accuse any political party of having any involvement in that.
But he then went on to make an impeccable liberal case against the Bill:
Before I went on to any Front Bench, I was involved in the proceedings on the Video Recordings Bill 1983, which became the Video Recordings Act 1984. Three of us — Douglas Houghton, Hugh Jenkins and I — fought against that Bill all by ourselves and to no real effect. The starting point was that what we do in our homes — the possession of books or images — is no business of the Government or the courts. What we have on our bookshelves is still not their business, but something has encouraged Governments of both persuasions to think that what we may have in terms of video recordings or pornographic images on the internet, or whatever they may be, is the concern of government.
Of course, if any of those images involves the commission of a crime in their production, an existing law deals with that, which none of us can contest. This is not an argument for child pornography, for bestiality, for snuff movies or anything like that. No one is defending that and there is a perfectly good law to deal with it. Having said that, what does it matter to the Government whether what we have in our homes for our own purposes is for sexual arousal or not? What is wrong with sexual arousal anyway? That is not a matter for Parliament or government to be concerned about. I am opposed in principle to interference in the private lives of adults as long as what they do does not cause harm to anyone else, or arises from or causes any offence under criminal law.
One small victory for the critics was that Lord Hunt of the “Ministry of Justice”, defending the Bill on behalf of the government, promised to introduce a defence for images recording acts of consensual S&M, which are also criminalized by the Bill as currently drafted (clause 6(b))— but that defence, it appears, will only be available if the possessor of the image was also an actor in the image. Own a video of strangers engaged in bondage and you’re shit out of luck.
On the matter of thoughtcrime, meanwhile, Hunt would not budge an inch. The bill must criminalize simulations, rather than being limited to images that show real crimes, Hunt said, “because the material itself, which depicts extreme violence and often appears to be non-consensual, is to be deplored”. And only Big Brother the government can save us from this tsunami of depravity:
As a society we have a duty to protect people. It is appalling that this material is available and we have to do something about it.
We have to do something — anything, even if it’s passing yet another crappy piece of ill-thought-out legislation. At least, you know, it will send a message. Baroness Miller responded:
[T]he Minister is in danger of leading his Government into becoming the thought police. There is no direct connection with committing a crime.
Of course, that did not stop them with ASBOs. And, as Miller was not successful in proposing her amendments to this Bill, it seems it won’t stop them here either.
Have you got any “extreme images”, readers?
It’s interesting to note that the established criterion for obscenity is at least predicated on some notional concern for the consumer’s moral welfare, whereas the new one talks about the intention of the producer, but is really worried about the consumer’s sexual arousal. ↩
Attention: there is a new album by Whitesnake available at Amie St. The first track goes like this:
You may imagine I am making the horns.
What’s that? You were expecting something about Unspeak too? Oh, very well.
“Radical cleric” Muqtada al-Sadr has, I heard a CNN news reporter say the other day, been “refusing to disband his militia”. Well, why should he? After all, everyone knows that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free state”, which is why America’s houses need to be stuffed with guns. Perhaps the complaint is that al-Sadr’s militia is not “well-regulated”. In response, al-Sadr pointed petulantly at the Badr Organization, formerly known as the Badr Brigade, and said “They’re a militia, why don’t you tell them to disband?” And the Badrs said “Hey, we’re not a militia: look, it says Organization in our name, how can we be a militia?” And al-Sadr said “All right then, I shall rename the Mahdi Army, from now on it will be called Mahdi, Brown & Root, is that better?” And so it goes.
By the way, Patrick Cockburn’s book on al-Sadr is good: here is my short review of it, together with a review of a book called Mindfucking, which I wish had lived up to its title. Of course, Unspeak is a kind of mindfucking.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, US military “analysts” who appear on TV and defend the administration’s policies are, um, administration stooges who basically say whatever they’re told to say. Who would have guessed? The report contains some lovely Unspeak. These sockpuppets, apparently, are known as message force multipliers, to help the Pentagon gain information dominance in the MindWar being waged against — who else? — the American people themselves.
Lastly, what is an “intellectual”? Darned if I know, given Foreign Policy / Prospect magazines’ new list of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, from which you are invited to vote for five. Apparently, General Petraeus, “military strategist”, is a public intellectual. Qué? (So, apparently, is Björn Lomborg, here described as an “environmentalist” although he isn’t one.)
Luckily, our old friend Christopher Hitchens is also on the list, and has written an essay explaining what a public intellectual is. Among other things, intellectuals are those people:
who care for language above all and guess its subtle relationship to truth
The subtle relationship of Hitchens’s language to truth has oftenbeenremarked hereabouts.
The list itself is interesting. There’s a pretty good showing for novelists — Coetzee, Eco, Oz, Pamuk, Rushdie — and unspeak.net favourite Slavoj Zizek also creeps in, to throw custard pies in everyone else’s face.
When you vote, you can also nominate someone who isn’t on the list, but should be. Defend your choice in comments!
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