I grow tired, again and after some rethinking, of what is sometimes called “edginess.” Or “attitude,” or “snark.” Three fine traditions, these, and well-placed in the rhetorician’s bag of tricks, each of them the precise and fitting tool for one task or another. And yet we rely on them too heavily. Maslow’s dictum about hammers turning everything into nails is relevant here. When the only rhetorical tool you have is an insult, everyone you talk to begins to resemble an idiot.
And I recognize the irony (sensu stricto) in my saying such a thing, of all people. I have flung sarcasm from one end of the political world to the other, it seems at times. Sarcasm is the weapon of the angry and powerless. I am, more than is comfortable, angry. I am, to a first approximation, powerless. I have been one acquainted with “yeah, right.” Who among us has not? It is a normal reaction to seeing your comfort stripped away, your water poisoned and your family endangered, to seeing the thousand little things that make up a good day sold off, one by one; to seeing the Orwellian equation of Freedom and Slavery embraced unambiguously by those around you, provided the freedom involves shopping and the slavery is confined to Saipan factories. Who with a healthy soul would not be outraged to the point of chronic sarcasm?
And yet that sarcasm corrodes the soul.
Stale sarcasm left pooling too long in the heart congeals, clots, becomes cynicism. The cynic hears a full-hearted cry and he resents it. The cynic insists the cry comes from a heart as clotted with sick sarcasm as her own. Open your soul, limn carefully and fervently the extent of your wound, and the cynic will ask what your angle is.
The cynic will accuse you of all the sins in his heart, of self-centered obstruction and circular firing squads. It is the cynic’s suspicion that sincerity conceals sabotage. The cynics will doom us. “Forward movement comes from relationship,” a friend told me this week, and she was right, as she usually is. No coalition comes without shared vulnerability. No victories come without mutual honesty.
And yet the cynic strategizes, wondering how best to manipulate his allies to his best advantage, and counts himself “tough-minded” and “pragmatic.”
I long these days for a pragmatic honesty, a tough-minded vulnerability. Strategy is easy; comity is hard.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Politics
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