Stuck With A Pretty Sorry Lott, Et Al.
I write today of insults.
I’m for them, obviously.
Not the sort of schoolyard taunts now flying about Washington. Trent Lott calling the president “a spoiled brat” is about as lame and ineloquent as it gets. It is especially disappointing coming from a senator of the South, where colorful, elaborate boasts and insults were an important part of civilization.
The problem in America is not that we have a culture of conflict. It is that our conflict has no culture.
I first became alarmed by this trend during the 1992 campaign when President Bush stooped to denouncing Bill Clinton and Al Gore as “bozos.” That was a far cry from the sidelong elegance of old political zingers, when Alice Roosevelt Longworth shrank Thomas Dewey to “the little man on the wedding cake,” and Dorothy Parker, upon being informed that Calvin Coolidge had died, wondered, “How can they tell?”
Nowadays, we are more likely to have bullying badinage, like that leveled at George Stephanopoulos by John Sununu on “Crossfire:” “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
“How are you going to respond to that?” Stephanopoulos mused later. “‘Fat pig!’?” (Well, it’s a thought. No, one must do better.)
It is one thing for the radio star Don Imus to pepper-spray the world, as he did Friday, calling Martha Stewart “a transparent worm,” Architectural Digest “a cheesy rag,” Boris Yeltsin “that old drunk,” a Southern listener who called in “a goober-faced, trailer-park nitwit,” and other random targets “losers,” “fatsos,” “jerks,” “fools,” “dopes” and “muttonheads.”
But it is pathetic that a University of Pennsylvania study found that many of Imus’ favorite insults were shared by lawmakers on the floor of the House.
There is none of the wit that laces combat in the British Parliament. In “Scorn With Added Vitriol,” Matthew Parris compiles British gibes: “foul calumny,” “insolent young cub,” “noble and learned camels,” “the hamster from Bolsover,” and “the spawn of an adder.”
Winston Churchill memorably dismissed Clement Attlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” Disraeli said of Sir Robert Peel, “The Right Honorable Gentleman’s smile is like the silver fittings on a coffin.” Of Lord John Russell he said, “If a traveller were informed that such a man was the Leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshiped an insect.”
Here’s Bertrand Russell on Anthony Eden: “Not a gentleman; dresses too well.” And Alan Clark, the raffish Tory, derided Michael Heseltine, the deputy prime minister and a man of earned wealth, as someone “who buys his own furniture.”
Jonathan Aitken said of Margaret Thatcher, “She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus.” Her foes dubbed her “Petain in petticoats” and “Attila the Hen.”
Invective should have more respect for itself. Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.
The last master of the rococo cut is Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. A couple of years ago, the Democrat took aim at featherweight Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, chastising him - without ever using his name - and others for calling the president a liar. Mourning the growing incivility of Congress, Byrd dressed down these rowdy colleagues for their “maledicent language,” “contumelious lip,” and “intellectual pemmican.”
“There have been giants in this senate, and I have seen some of them,” Byrd said. “Little did I know when I came here that I would live to see pygmies stride like Colossuses while marveling, like Aesop’s fly sitting on the axle of a chariot, ‘My, what a dust I do raise!”’
Instead of calling each other nerds, weirdos and scum, members of Congress should take a cue from Shakespeare, who called politicians “the caterpillars of the commonwealth” and noted “a certain convocation of politic worms.”
Instead of his childish nyah-nyah-nyah, Trent Lott might have gone on ABC’s “This Week” and shot this arrow from “Coriolanus” at Clinton: “All the contagion of the South lie on you.”
And then, instead of blandly telling The Wall Street Journal that it “was probably a lot nicer than some of the things he could have said,” the president could have riposted: “Thou cream-faced loon. Go, whip thy gig.”
Then we’d really be getting somewhere.
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