Puffin’s Place

Some of the chattering class is wondering why the feminists are content to toss Michelle Obama under the bus after their group hysteria when Hillary Clinton pouts did not convert her into the Democratic nominee.

No real puzzle here. The US has always turned away from those suspicious blokes and blokenesses who chose to use words many of us do not recognize. Remember Adlai Stevenson? Because he had a vocabulary and a vision that stretched beyond our own, we decided he was a filthy intellectual and probably a commie and shuffled him off to—in his words—”sit in the sun and watch people dance.” We were no longer embarrassed by words and rhythms we were too lazy to understand.

So it is in part with Michelle Obama. Listen to a series of utterances by Hillary Clinton, the darling of the feminists. One prefabricated phrase follows another, cliche steps upon the heel of cliche. I offer a telling paragraph from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, one of the three seminal pieces about thought in several centuries:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

Now listen to Michelle Obama and notice the eerie impression that an actual woman is speaking. She says things! And saying things, as we now know, can create a good deal of chaos, especially if one says she is proud of her country for the first time in her life. No wonder the Hillarys flee to the safe non-thought language. When we listed to Michelle Obama we actually need to listen. We need to think. We need to make decisions. The sound of one hand mindlessly clapping has to give way to the grinding of brains.

Too damn much work, we say. And anyway Michelle Obama is not really one of us. If she were, she would not be using words we do not use and saying things we would surely never say.

And so the loyal feminists toss Michelle Obama under the bus as we long ago tossed Adlai Stevenson.

We wander back to the two-page dictionary that rules our lives.

We never even know what we almost had.

As Stevenson said on the death of Churchill, “There is a lonesome place against the sky.”