The Weekly Screed (#555)

Civil political discourse in America: A few actual rules
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — On a balmy August night in Madison, Wisconsin, four of us had finished dinner at a downtown pub. Fuller and I were ranging across the Square, beneath the ghostly grandeur of the state Capitol building, arguing fiercely the “individual mandate” in President Obama’s health care plan. I didn’t take notice then, but Fuller and I were jointly violating two unwritten rules of civil discourse that I wish to God somebody would write down.

We were bickering, first of all, over a settled issue. There was no point in ruining everyone’s fun by revisiting a law — passed more than a year ago — whose prospect for repeal is currently nil. Rule One, then — for Fuller, for me, for every elected official at every level: If you can’t do anything to change what you’re yelling about, hush!

We were also flouting the “I Don’t Know” Rule, a precept that guided me through the years I edited a weekly in Massachusetts. It worked like this. Any time a member of, for example, the Board of Selectmen, professed knowledge on a topic outside the normal range of civic affairs — like, say, entomology — he or she put his or her dignity in jeopardy. My office was a few blocks away. There, I compared the board member’s entomology to the actual bugs. A quick fact-check decided whether he or she was a) correct, or b) the laughingstock of the week. It’s a fatal flaw among politicians, journalists and know-it-alls (of which I’m two) to refuse to say “I don’t know,” even when we don’t know. But, in my years at the News, I instilled in many local bigwigs (and myself) the importance of these three magic words. I tended to use them much more in those days than I have since. I should get back in the habit. Shouldn’t we all?

Alas, Fuller and I — both old reporters — ignored the rule. We presumed to interpret the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause, although neither had memorized it, nor did we have a copy in hand. Nor could either of us recite the peregrinations of the Commerce Clause through the federal court system over the last decade. This would’ve amounted to genuine expertise, which we had not. In sum, together, we knew bupkes about what we were hollering. So, Rule Two: If you don’t know, say so. Then shut up.

Applying just these two standards to political debate from D.C. to Sacramento, would carry our leaders leaps and bounds toward the “civility” they all say they crave.

But I’ve got a few more, to make things even politer.

Rule Three: Swear off all conspiracy theories. I know. It’s hard. My favorite, for instance, is a rock-solid certainty that Karl Rove personally arranged the convenient pre-election airplane crashes that killed Senators Mel Carnahan (2000) and Paul Wellstone (2002). My friend Jacques, for another example, knows absolutely that Hillary Clinton garroted White House Counsel Vincent Foster in the Lincoln Bedroom, after which agents of the Secret Service, NSA, FBI and Elvis (who’s not dead) took turns putting bullets in Foster’s head, and then planted his corpse in Fort Marcy Park.

Great stuff. But, in the cause of civil discourse, I am willing to not only forsake all my dark fantasies about shadow governments, October surprises, black helicopters, the Carlyle Group, the Koch brothers, the grassy knoll, and the evil legacy of Prescott Bush. I’ll even unfriend the Webnuts who grind the rumor mill. But you’ve gotta do it, too.

Rule Four: No more pledges, no more vows and no more sacred oaths. Political conversation is tyrannized lately by single-issue zealots who require blind fealty — they actually write up a contract that you gotta sign— to a very particular pinched position on profoundly prickly problems like Israel, immigration, abortion, marriage, animal rights, light bulbs, collective bargaining, the Divine Right of Grover Norquist, you name it.

It should be recalled that in Stalin’s USSR, “pledges” — often called “confessions” — set a precedent for preventing differences of opinion. Before you signed, you’d be — after a fashion — softened up. Convinced. Afterwards, the state normally had the good taste to blow your brains out, because, hey! Once you’ve pledged, who needs ‘em?

Rule Five: Enough already with anecdotal evidence. No more tales of woe, or inspirational vignettes. One tear-jerking tableau — or ten tableaux — do not prove your case. Evidence of something being wrong, or right, in the body politic, requires more than a touchy-feely object lesson. Offer facts in abundance, provide numbers from impartial sources, elicit testimony from experts who know their ass from their elbow, and then — if you must — tell us your touching tale about the little old lady in Ohio who symbolizes every dull fact and every tiresome data point already presented.

(I know. I started out with an anecdote. But then, am I really trying to prove anything here?)

Rule Six: Eschew talking points. The art of the “talking point,” a diversionary device invented by consultants to keep candidates “on message” and prevent straight answers to serious questions has become so endemic that normal humans, shmoozing across the back fence, can be heard regurgitating verbatim the Power Point “bullets” they’ve just heard on Fox News or “Meet the Press.” If this perverse ventriloquism continues its spread, we are in peril of devolving into a nation of Mortimer Snerds.

Rule Seven: Trust no one who begins a sentence with “The American people…” The verb that follows these three tendentious words is always either “want,” “know,” or “believe.” Nothing sensible — or sane — can emerge from this construction. There are more than 300 million Americans. Anybody who professes to identify even one viewpoint shared agreeably and universally among this vast, free, educated and contentious sprawl of individuals has to be so full of crap that not one word he utters after he invokes “the American people” can be regarded as remotely credible.

Rule Eight: Listen for the phrase, “God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.” If you hear it, rest assured that every syllable that preceded this hackneyed benediction was an offhand lie. Avoid saying this yourself, lest your friends, neighbors and even your family suspect that you’ve turned into a counterfeit Christian who wouldn’t understand the Second Commandment even if he could remember it.