But the two major parties are now divided by a common language: Democrats discuss “comprehensive health reform,” “estate taxes,” “undocumented workers,” and “tax breaks for the wealthy,” while Republicans insist on a “Washington takeover of health care,” “death taxes,” “illegal aliens,” and “tax reform.” When did the two major political parties create their own vocabularies?
.. Around 1990.
.. Americans have for decades signaled their political clique with specific terms—as when Southerners refer to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or Northerners call it the “Great Rebellion.” What is different today, the researchers said, is “the magnitude of the differences, the deliberate strategic choices that seem to underlie them, and the expanding role of consultants, focus groups, and polls” to entrench two separate political lexicons within the same polity.
.. For roughly 120 years, the probability of correctly guessing a speaker’s party by listening to a one-minute speech was about 52 to 55 percent, nearly random. But suddenly, in the early 1990s, rhetorical partisanship exploded.
.. “The 1994 inflection point in our series coincides precisely with the Republican takeover of Congress led by Newt Gingrich” and his Contract With America, they find.
.. In The C-SPAN Revolution, Stephen Frantzich and John Sullivan quote Newt Gingrich as saying he would have never been the Republican leader without C-SPAN. Fox News launched in 1996, and its success covering the conservative movement encouraged MSNBC to shift more and more leftward over the next decade, until finally there were two clear channels for partisan messaging.
.. Coming up with a catchy name for the Iraq War doesn’t change a single substantive fact about its outcome. Despite what you’ve heard, harping on the words “radical,” “Islamic,” and “terrorism” is not a foreign policy. It is the reduction of a complex international crisis into a diction contest.
When politics devolves into a war over word choice, it is probably a sign that all hope for a more substantive debate has already been lost.
Trump Is Getting Even Trumpier!
He doesn’t really speak in sentences or paragraphs. His speeches are punctuated by five- or six-word jabs that are sort of strung together by connections that can only be understood through chaos theory: “They want the wall … I dominated with the evangelicals … I won in a landslide … We can’t be the stupid people anymore.”
Occasionally Trump will attempt a sentence longer than eight words, but no matter what subject he starts the sentence with, by the end he has been pulled over to the subject of himself... Here’s an example from the Mike Pence announcement speech: “So one of the primary reasons I chose Mike was I looked at Indiana, and I won Indiana big.” There’s sort of a gravitational narcissistic pull that takes command whenever he attempts to utter a compound thought... McKay Coppins recalls the fusillade of abuse he received from Trump after writing an unflattering profile (he called Mar-a-Lago a “nice, if slightly dated, hotel”).Trump was so inflamed he tweeted retaliation at Coppins several times a day and at odd hours, calling him a “dishonest slob” and “true garbage with no credibility.” The attacks went on impressively for over two years, which must rank Coppins in the top 100,000 on the list of people Donald Trump resents... But Trump could not keep his attention focused on this through line — since the subject was someone else — so every 30 seconds or so he would shoot off on a resentment-filled bragging loop... you had to do a rough diagram of the Trump remarks it would be something like this: Pence … I was right about Iraq … Pence … Hillary Clinton is a crooked liar … I was right about “Brexit” … Pence … Hillary Clintons ads are filled with lies … We’re going to bring back the coal industry … Christians love me … Pence … I talk to statisticians … Pence is good looking … My hotel in Washington is really coming along fantastically … Pence... Donald Trump is in his moment of greatest triumph, but he seems more resentful and embattled than ever... If the string of horrific events continues, Trump could win the presidency. And he could win it even though he has less and less control over himself.
Ulysses (novel)
the judge stated that literature should serve the need of the people for “a moral standard”, be “noble and lasting”, and “cheer, console, purify, or enoble the life of people”.[37]
.. That style has been stated to be the finest example of the use of stream-of-consciousness in modern fiction, with the author going deeper and farther than any other novelist in handling interior monologue.[39]This technique has been praised for its faithful representation of the flow of thought, feeling, mental reflection, and shifts of mood
.. Joyce uses metaphors, symbols, ambiguities, and overtones which gradually link themselves together so as to form a network of connections binding the whole work
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses
Joyce’s novel employed the largest range of styles—a series of rapid innovations—ever seen in a single novel. Its first impression on the startled reader was a kind of intellectual blur. Most notorious was Joyce’s lavish use of the technique that became known, following Larbaud’s lecture, as interior monologue.
.. All the usual demarcations—between dialogue and thought and description—were now jumbled.
.. And this manic variation culminated in a final chapter where Bloom’s wife Molly, lying in bed, thinks to herself, with almost no punctuation, in a free flow of domestic, dirty associations: “I know every turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit….” This was the extra problem with Ulysses. Joyce’s stylistic one-man band included a linguistic obscenity that had not been used before so casually or comprehensively in literature. This not only upset the critics; it upset the lawyers, too.
.. In fact, the government’s reaction to Ulysses reveals how much nineteenth- century ideas about obscenity shaped twentieth-century ideas about radicalism.
.. This is Birmingham’s central insight. The anxiety about language was both sexual and political: it reflected a general fear of obscene, revolutionary subversives.
.. “Demon pantechnicon driver, busy with removal of old world into new quarters”—this was how Wyndham Lewis described Pound: a removal company for modernism.
.. Representing The Little Review was John Quinn—a powerful lawyer who was also a modernist patron. His central defense was that since Ulysses was “cubism in literature” its obscenity could be excused by its obscurity: since who could be corrupted by something he or she didn’t understand?
.. Also, the trial had madeUlysses famous—and Beach wanted her own fame, too. Her publicity campaign proudly exploited the glamour of the banned:
.. Ernst’s defense was that literature, by definition, could never be obscene. And Joyce’s novel was pure literature—its single loyalty was to depicting the vast infinity of human consciousness: its giant associations and lapses of attention. It was a courageous argument, and a persuasive one. Joyce’s subject, wrote Woolsey in his summing up, was “the screen of consciousness,” onto which were projected not just impressions of the present moment, but also a whole frieze of memories and associations. It was some of the most accurate literary criticism Ulysses had so far received.
.. “The supreme question about a work of art,” a character comments, “is out of how deep a life does it spring.
.. equally happy not just with obscenity but also with puns in Latin and French
.. For something is missing in Ulysses—which could be called romanticism, or the ideal, or the metaphysical; and its absence is the deep reason why Joyce’s early readers were so alarmed, and why it can still disturb
.. “What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism,”
.. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off…. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.”
.. But Bloom is a much larger creation even than Ulysses, and he remains the most thoroughly imagined character in literature—an achievement perhaps only possible because of the multiple styles of Joyce’s novel, which allowed him not just to describe Bloom’s fantasies, including some that are obscene, but also his height and the precise layout of his ideal home.
.. At this point, it seems that Joyce discovered that everything could be said. There was nothing that could not be transformed into language.
.. “His writing is not aboutsomething,” Samuel Beckett would famously write, “it is that something itself.” Joyce tried to make language become what it describes. He wanted to make it as literal as possible.
.. For what could be more realistic, after all, than a sentence where the word becomes the thing it described?
.. What seems to have happened, as the novel progressed, was that Joyce realized that if he could transform any phenomenon into language, it was also true that the literalism could be flipped the other way. Language itself could be treated as a thing, a phenomenon to be included in his epic.