Once upon a public nuisance, I wrote that cellphoners had turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of language.
At the time, most everyone was starting to either joke or complain or both about the intrusions of ringtones and half-conversations on planes, trains, and buses, in stores, restaurants, classrooms, meeting rooms, concerts and plays, churches and synagogues, weddings and funerals. And, of course, THE CELLPHONE VOICE, AS IF THE ENTIRE WORLD WAS A PHONEBOOTH.
Running a small arts cinema back then, I was at times obliged to ask cellphoners to hang up or leave the hall. Invariably, they would act surprised and apologetic. More often than not, they would excuse themselves with a simple explanation: “It’s an emergency.”
The closer a cellphoner sat to the screen, the more intrusive and therefore regrettable my task was. One such night it happened early during Dr. T & the Women, a Robert Altman film midway in which a young woman takes a call during a gym class. As soon as she puts the cell to her ear, she covers it with her other hand, looks at the gym teacher and says, “It’s an emergency.”
With no attempt at a smile or a pleasant voice, the older woman snaps back, “Well, take your emergency outside and don’t bring it back!”
When it was over, a few patrons on their way out were laughing when they asked what I thought of the scene.
Oh, that gym teacher! Most satisfying of all was that she did not say “please.”
Today it may be an emergency that “emergency” has been surpassed, not by just one but two one-word jokes. If only I could figure out which is more laughable:
Bipartisanship or Unity?
There’s no question that “reach across the aisle” is the most ridiculous expression, and has been since the stonewalling side of that aisle resolved to make Obama a one-term president within hours of his inauguration. Within months some Republican senators, including John McCain, were voting against bills that they themselves had co-sponsored.
To cover their refusal to cooperate, Republicans accused Democrats of refusing to cooperate even while Obama and the Democratic-led Senate tried to appease them with a healthcare bill watered down far short of its original promise. Two years later, when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid outmaneuvered their budget-killing tax-cuts for the wealthy, all they had to do was reach, not across the aisle, but into the White House where Vice President Joe Biden was enthusiastic to “cut a deal” that reduced the anticipated revenue from $3.4 trillion to $600 billion.
Eight years after that, as Harper’s Andrew Cockburn put it, Biden in a 2020 debate “had the effrontery to boast that he ‘got Mitch McConnell to raise taxes by $600 billion’.” Senators Sanders, Brown, Whitehouse and others “grumbled.” On the debate stage, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett called it “a complete victory for the Tea Party… a terrible deal for Americans.”
But if you were paying attention, you know that these are but two of many stories of how Tea Partied Republican senators, still a minority, used the filibuster to enforce minority rule until they gained the majority and ran all over a minority that played by the rules–including the theft of a seat on the Supreme Court.
While I do not dispute the general rule, “Watch what they do, not what they say,” may I suggest a friendly amendment? Don’t be fooled by language that makes what they do possible.
By far, during Obama’s first two years, the phrase most employed by Republicans to describe bills proposed by a Democratic congress was an accusation: They are ramming this down our throats, or down the throats of the American people.
From healthcare to cabinet appointments to international treaties to innocuous procedural votes, it didn’t matter that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 59-41. The filibuster served the Republicans as a technicality that effectively enabled and disguised minority rule. Down our throats was the slogan that demonized any and everything proposed by Democrats.
In keeping with the mood and tenor set by the Tea Party, down our throats conveyed the anger and hate that Republicans sought to stoke. They did it so relentlessly and convincingly for so long that, in 2017, anger and hate won the White House.
If the recent Republican attempts to overturn the election and their blind-eye to insurrection were not enough to make their calls for bipartisanship and unity laughable, perhaps their complaints of down our throats will be. After all, we have no comparison for the former, but we can compare what Republicans are saying now to what they were saying between 2009 and 2017.
Once again after a four-year hiatus, we are hearing down our throats in the objections to what the newly-elected president and thin-as-can-be senate majority might do.
Most often Republicans are using it to defend the filibuster–implying that it is Constitutional. No so. The word appears nowhere in the Constitution, and filibusters do not exist in the House. Southern senators concocted it in the 1830s to suffocate legislation regarding slavery and later segregation–“a Jim Crow relic” as Barack Obama recently called it.
In effect, the filibuster is today being forced down our throats as deliberately and undemocratically as the rapid three-week confirmation of Amy Comey Barrett to the Supreme Court just four years after the ten-month obstruction of Merrick Garland–all by the same Republican senators.
How many examples do we need? How much time can we give them? Haven’t we already reached the point where we know that their calls for bipartisanship and unity are jokes? That their claims to acting in good faith are lies? Are we no more savvy or bright than gullible Charlie preparing yet again to kick a football teed up by a never-cooperative Lucy?
The idea that Biden is, at this writing, meeting with ten Republican senators regarding the stimulus package suggests that this is not a rhetorical question. That it needs be asked at all is demoralizing.
If only Susan Collins walked into the Oval Office carrying a football, it might be worth the laugh.
On the other hand, it’s encouraging that Pres. Biden issued so many executive orders so soon. And on substantive issues at that–with the bonus of eliciting Ted Cruz’s inane objection that the Paris Climate Accords were all for the benefit of residents of Paris. If that laugh wasn’t enough, he went on to say that it excluded Pittsburgh, a city whose voters he tried to disenfranchise just weeks before.
True, executive orders offer an easy target for the charge of down our throats–never mind that Trump signed more in his single term (220) than either Obama (147 & 129) or Clinton (200 & 164) in theirs.
You know what else is true? The Republicans are going to make that charge no matter what Democrats do. No matter which Democrats are involved, they will be accused of socialism. No matter what the proposals are, no matter their terms, their costs, their scope, Republicans will pummel every one of them with repeated accusations of government overreach, big government, class warfare, tax-the-rich, nanny state, welfare state, giveaways, political correctness, cancel culture, virtue signaling, and everything else in their Pavlovian glossary, all of them down the throats of the American people.
So why not “go big” as so many Democrats are saying? Even the up-to-now always-cautious Sen. Schumer is saying “go bold,” and he is now Majority Leader.
Many are comparing the crises at the start of Biden’s presidency to those facing Lincoln in 1861 and FDR in 1933. Consider their predecessors: Did James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian who stressed appeasement for the South, save the Union? No. Did Herbert Hoover, a technocrat with an eye only for the bottom line, save us from the Great Depression? No. They made things worse. It was Lincoln who went bold, FDR who went big.
Let the Republicans whine about it being down their throats and don’t even waste time answering the charge. If Democrats can’t end the filibuster, then they must side-step it with the ornate technical procedure called “reconciliation.” Pack the Supreme Court. Overturn Citizens United. Pass their stimulus package, no compromise. Pass the Green New Deal, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, universal health care, $15/hr minimum wage, a higher tax rate on all income over $400,000. Get rid of the Electoral College.
Everything depends on what public perception will be going into the 2022 election. Whether we want to admit it or not, say it out loud or not, America is a country that will blame the firefighters and praise the arsonists if only the arsonists offer simple explanations, truth be damned. Democrats say government can work while Republicans say it can’t, so by screwing it up, Republicans can claim to be right and reap the rewards at the next election. Even though they themselves screw it up, they create the perception that the fault is that of “our friends on the other side of the aisle”. This has been going on since Newt Gingrich cooked up his “Contract with America”–more accurately remembered as “Contract on America.”
By late-spring next year, if things are stalled, the public will blame Democrats. No matter if the real fault is Republican obstruction. Long for “unity” and “bipartisanship” if you feel so obliged, but call me Ishmael who kept answering such deceit with: No more!
At first there will be shock which Republicans will trumpet to alarm “moderates”–who would more accurately be called “inattentives” but that’s another rant–and Democrats’ poll numbers will go down for a couple months. But improvements will start to be realized and perception will change.
Unless it changes before, say, May of next year, Biden and the Democrats will be like firefighters blamed for arson only because some flames still rage. The alarm has been ringing for four years. The Democrats must move Now and let the public render a verdict Nov. 2022.
In a letter to a friend two centuries ago, America’s first great writer said that he aimed to make readers laugh so hard that their heads would be thrown back and their mouths would be wide open. That was when, Washington Irving reasoned, he would be able to throw in a pill–his point, his purpose.
Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King liked to use one of Irving’s scenes–Rip Van Winkle’s surprise at change when he returned to his village–to pop in a pill of his own. Recreating with pantomime and mugging the old man stumbling down the mountain trail with his long beard, bug-eyed at changes he saw, King had his congregations roaring with laughter before he paused and then bellowed as only he could: “Old Rip slept through a revolution!”
Down their throats.
Much like fake news–first used to describe simplified lies and distortions on social media before it became anything the right did not like, including truth itself–down our throats has a double meaning, one of which, though unpleasant, is medicinal and necessary.
Calls for bipartisanship and unity, on the other hand, are sugar-coatings. In a time gone by, a time as recent as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, Tip O’Neil and Ronald Reagan, they carried promise and often proved constructive. Today they carry nothing. Pure sugar for a hyper-activated nation that can stand no more.
If Republicans want to be bipartisan and show unity, they need to start facing reality and accepting truth–starting with expelling those who advocated insurrection from their ranks and denouncing crackpot conspiracy theories. If, without that, Democrats once again bend over backwards to appease them, it will be a self-induced emergency.
And it will be no joke.
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Mouth of the River 