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Trump Names Wile E. Coyote His Roadrunner Czar

President-elect Donald Trump has announced his intention to appoint Wile E. Coyote his Director of the Bureau of Roadrunner Affairs.

“He’s smart,” Trump said of his nominee, “So very smart, you wouldn’t believe. And very, very persistent. Everyone says he’s so persistent, you wouldn’t believe.”

Citing the importance of the position, Trump described roadrunners as “bad, very bad. Everyone knows how bad they are. They run all over the place, causing accidents. Thousands of people have died in accidents caused by roadrunners. Tens of thousands, actually.”

The President-elect expressed confidence in his choice: “There’s nobody better than Coyote for the job. He’ll capture these filthy, criminal roadrunners and deport them. That’s right, send ‘em back where they came from. And they’ll be the lucky ones.”

In response, the most famous roadrunner of them all, The Road Runner, was speechless, unable to manage even a “beep-beep”. Or a “meep-meep”.

A spokesperson for the Roadrunner community, who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution, had this to say: “Roadrunner Nation is fearful and stunned by the callousness of this appointment. Indeed, the only solace they have is in Wile E. Coyote’s lengthy record of unmatched incompetence. His decades of abject failure attempting to inflict lethal harm would be amusing if it weren’t so serious. Handing over the power of the federal government to such an individual is terrifying.”

A Republican senator, also speaking anonymously out of abject fear, said, “He nominated who, for what? Uh, OK, sure…yeah, I’ll get behind that. Whatever.”

*                                              *                                              *

In a more straightforward vein – and, 64 days before inauguration, it’s already nearly impossible to write satire more ridiculous than what’s actually happening – RIP to national musical treasures, who were not cheated in the time they had on the planet:

Drum master Roy Haynes, 99, who played with everyone who mattered for a reason
Alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, 98, whose bluesy, sassy approach helped shape the hard bop offshoot of bebop
Singer, composer, folklorist Ella Jenkins, 100, who brought the magic of call-and-response, among other essentials, to all, but especially to children.

We lost all three in the last eight days, as well as Quincy Jones at 91 on November 3 and tenor saxophonist and composer Benny Golson at 95 on September 21. Thank goodness we had them so long.

Ken Bossong

© 2024 Kenneth J. Bossong

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The Coarse In Our Discourse

It’s Not Just Unpleasant

One of the areas where we as a people are constantly lowering the bar is in the nature and quality of our discourse. The trend is having a direct and negative impact on the quality of our lives. Whether in person or from afar, whether spoken or in writing, and whether the writing be letters, emails, texts, or tweets, how we communicate with one another is declining before our very eyes and ears.

Whether you’re driving, standing on line at a store, listening to the radio, talking to a friend, or trying to get through a family gathering, it seems to be everywhere: dopey slogans in place of insight; personal insults rather than cogent argument; arrogance teaming up with ignorance (a terrible combination); misleading or misrepresented information; and coarseness or profanity where wit and humor would better serve. Manners, honesty, respect and humility seem in short supply.

All who disagree with me are not just wrong; they’re stupid. And their stupid opinion is typical of people like them. (See “Us vs. Them” post of 2/19/19.) In fact, they’re not just stupid. They’re evil.

What matters, it seems, is not that we arrive at the best possible solution; it’s that my side “win”. Whatever it takes to win is worth it. Here’s the thing about exaggeration, spin, prevarication, selective memory, and outright lies: if we must resort to these, something is wrong with our position. The same is true for corruption, threats, intimidation, coercion and personal attacks.

The Power to Persuade

Few books read in college made as big an impression as Richard Neustadt’s 1960 classic, Presidential Power. So much so that I cite its thesis here decades later. Of all the president’s powers, Neustadt says, the most important is the power to persuade.

One example that particularly resonated was Eisenhower’s sending of federal troops to desegregate schools in Little Rock. On the surface this would seem to be the act of a powerful president. The need for troops actually was an indication of weakness, however; a truly powerful president would have needed no more than phone calls with Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. (Sidebar: In addition to the book Presidential Power, I recommend the recording “Fables of Faubus” by Charles Mingus.)

In my experience, Neustadt’s point has considerable merit and goes well beyond presidential power. It would be naïve to ignore the impact money and the threat of force can have on decision-making. Over time, however, what matters most is the idea that persuades.

Calling someone an idiot is not persuasive; calling him or her a complete [expletive] idiot is even less so. Never once in my life when two people were arguing a point, and one of them calls the other an idiot, has the other said “You know what? You’re right. I’m wrong. I am an idiot to think that.” No, usually it sounds something like this: “Idiot!” “Moron!” “Jerk!” “Asshole!”….and so on. The two vow never to speak again; at least that’s marginally better than having fisticuffs ensue.

If the energy for name-calling is lacking, it can go more like this: Someone makes an interesting, cogent point and the other party dismisses it with “Whatever!”

The Importance of the Quality of our Rhetoric

I’m puzzled by much of what I hear debated. Take for example the battle between suspicion and embrace of the federal government, which goes back to the founding of our republic. If you think the federal government should take over and run everything, you probably have never worked for the federal government. If on the other hand you believe the federal government has no role to play in anything other than national defense and a couple other very limited and specific things, you have not been paying attention. No one is a bigger supporter of our combination of democracy and capitalism than I, but Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand makes mistakes.

Tens of thousands die in the Civil War to banish slavery’s evil blight from our nation and it takes a hundred years – A HUNDRED YEARS! – of Jim Crow before we begin to get it right. If it weren’t for federal legislation (such as the Civil Rights Act) and US Supreme Court cases (like Brown v Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia) it’s hard to imagine where we’d be.

Here’s the thing, though: Two centuries after declaring that all are created equal and one century after the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the law, we actually began behaving as if we meant what we had said. Our behavior began catching up with our rhetoric. It’s an outrage that it took so long, but note how important it is to get first principles – and their articulation – right. What we say about what we believe matters a great deal.

But Wait: Tearing People Apart Can Be Fun

Especially when they deserve it.

Some of the most effective satire ever written uses invective. This goes back at least to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Extraordinary skill is required, however. The biggest problem with mere name-calling and profanity is not that it’s naughty, but that it almost always lacks content. It’s something to say while we try to think of something to say. It’s easier than thinking and articulating.

When the greats of satire pile on, by contrast, they do so not only to make a point; generally, it is meticulously constructed to be the point. In his Epistle to Augustus, Pope gives his version of satire’s place amid the strife caused among friends and family by taunts that sting:

Hence, Satire rose, that just the medium hit,

And heals with Morals what it hurts with Wit.

So, when our traveling hero in Gulliver’s Travels is told by the king of the giants in Brobdingnag that he is a member of “the most contemptible race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl on the face of the earth”, Swift is unloading on his contemporaries. We know this because the passages setting up this moment consist of Gulliver describing to the king in exquisite detail how his society works. The invective is great, but the set-up is what makes it devastating. The matter-of-fact tone with which humanity’s foibles and the king’s assessment are recounted adds tremendously to the satire’s power.  

Passages both before and after also enhance the episode’s impact. The change of scale and perspective from the first voyage encountering the tiny, and small-minded, Lilliputians to the second one visiting the giant Brobdingnagians is loaded with content well beyond the children’s adventure story the book is sometimes taken to be. Swift is not done lambasting the human race at this point of the book, either. The (less remembered) final voyage, comparing the crude, human-like Yahoos to the vastly superior horse-like Houyhnhnms, is even more scathing.

Where does this leave us when it comes to letting deserving targets have it?

  1. Those of us who are the modern Jonathan Swifts, assuming there are any: go for it.
  2. Even for the satiric greats, though, invective is just one of their techniques, and not usually the most effective. Their most telling points are generally made more subtly and artfully with wit and brilliant juxtaposition of circumstance.
  3. While using humor well can be very effective, those of us not in Swift’s class as writers would be better served skipping ad hominem attacks and focusing on the merits of the issues.

Conclusion

Communication is difficult enough when we are trying hard to do it well. We must first have an idea or feeling worth transmitting and turn that content into gesture, language and sound. Then it must be received by the other and transformed into the content intended by the sender. Much can go wrong along the way, under the best of circumstances.

The coarsening of our discourse makes for extraordinarily ineffective communication. When the discussion needed is about really important matters, this is a big deal.

To be clear, this is not about us all being “nice” (although Rodney King’s quote after viewing the horrendous carnage that followed his beating – “I just want to say…can we all get along?” – has always struck me as a hallmark of lucidity and wisdom). Above all, it is not about “giving in” or abandoning beliefs and principles.

To spell out a few suggested takeaways:

  1. If we care about our issues as much as we pretend, we should be willing to discuss them on the merits, rather than taking the lazy way out so prevalent in our current discourse.
  2. If we care about each other, we should want to discuss important matters with respect for each other and some humility regarding ourselves.
  3. Ruined Thanksgiving dinners and broken friendships are bad enough, but there is enough at stake with the issues that polarize, and the next election looming, for us to insist that we all do better.

Now, I can’t believe I’m putting this in writing and then posting it for all to read, but sometimes I’m actually wrong about something – or someone. Sometimes I learn from listening to someone with whom I disagree. More subtly, sometimes my position strengthens or gains in nuance for having recognized that the other side has a point. Sometimes my supposed adversary and I realize that our interests are not diametrically opposed in a zero-sum game (4/2/19 post).

Woe to any candidate for any office who has no sense of this, who wants to win for the sake of winning, and who has too little regard for us (or the office in question) to bother seeking our support through persuasion.

Ken Bossong

© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong