Pun Salad

[B]efore we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls - our souls are broken in this nation.

It put me in mind of an old Underground Grammarian essay, "The Witching Our", by the late Richard Mitchell. You can find it about 40% down this page. Mitchell was bemused by a mass-mailing that claimed "it is up to you and me to protect our young and needy." He replied:

Your sentiment, sir, is surely well-intended, and does you, I suppose, some credit, but I fear that you have made some mistake. Your young and mine are unlikely to be the same young. I will admit, nay, affirm, that in the case of your absence and my presence, I would indeed think myself bound to undertake, should it be necessary, the protection of your young, or any other young, for that too seems a duty rightly laid on us all by Nature and Custom, but I confess that I find your stern admonition at the very least premature, and perhaps even a bit presumptuous. Do you mean to imply that should the occasion arise when your young need protection and when I alone am nearby, that, except for your admonition, I would probably not protect them?

Mitchell was having a bit of fun here. But the point I took away is that whenever people use first-person plural forms in an obviously false way, they are often engaging in a particularly nasty bit of obfuscation. Often more than a bit of self-delusion is going on too. Some current examples:

• "We must rise as a nation with unity of purpose to protect our jobs, protect our homes, and provide health care for our families."

• "Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us. […] The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children."

• "The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more."

About the only vaguely justifiable use of "our" above is "our democracy."

Other than that: when Joe Politician talks about what "we" need to do about various things of "ours", he never means it in the same sense that (say) your spouse would. For example, "unacceptable for our children" in the second quote above doesn't really include the speaker's own children; Malia's and Sasha's situation at Sidwell Friends is quite acceptable.

But it's an attempt to imply the same things your spouse would; it's an attempt to draw you into a warm 'n' fuzzy communitarianism, a blurring of responsibility, and (almost always, as in Mitchell's example), a subtle way of letting you know that you're expected to shell out some more cash to save/fix/preserve/bail out/protect/defend what's "ours".

The politicians chose a federal bailout over a bankruptcy procedure. In a bankruptcy, there would have been provisions to renegotiate contracts that could have been used to avoid this moment. But we didn't do that. We went the bailout route. And now we're reaping the reward. And the politicians are the ones who voted for all this. The outrage that we're seeing is the result of those politicians realizing that they were at fault and they're desperately trying to cast the blame elsewhere.

But it's a point worth making again -- they rushed this stinker through, and now it's biting them on the ass. Good.

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address in Washington when he realised it all sounded a bit too familiar.

It was. He was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.

Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: "That's your speech."

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

[Update: Turns out this was too stupid to be true. Sorry.]