This Is Not The Time To Spit On The Table

Donald Trump takes fire from Representative Rashda Tlaib (photos by Detroit Metro Times)

As reported yesterday (this is Huffington’s post):

“Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) went from her swearing-in as one of the first Muslim women in Congress to cursing out President Donald Trump within a matter of hours on Thursday.

Tlaib told the crowd at an event hosted by progressive group MoveOn:

“And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I say, ‘Baby, they don’t.’ Because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker”.”

To which, as NBC reported, newly-re-elected Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, remarked, 

"Generationally, that would not be language I would use, but nonetheless, I don’t think we should make a big deal of it."

Pelosi also said that what Tlaib said was "nothing worse than the president has said," and that the episode "consolidates his base, but I don’t think they need much consolidation." 

She added that while she was "not in the censorship business ... 

I don't like that language, I wouldn't use that language, but I wouldn't establish language standards for my colleagues."

I’m no position to be a scold (an old-fashioned word, I know) or a comportment Nazi—there are many times in my life when I’ve uttered that phrase, mostly in my head, but in rare moments of anger or in extremis pain I’ve said it out right out loud. And it is no secret that my feelings about Mr. Trump are scalding hot and overflow with a very profane four-letter alphabet soup. And yet…and yet.

It doesn’t feel like a “generational thing” to me. Though I am younger, by nine years, than Pelosi, her generation and mine are close enough in traditional American social culture to have been raised to be wary of unleashed invective and profanity. But, it must be said, Speaker Pelosi and I and our overlapping generations of mostly white and relatively privileged Americans too often tried to maintain our parents’ language rules (“standards” to use Ms. Pelosi’s word) that were unrealistic, filled with cultural hubris, foolishly pompous, and were patently insensitive to those who didn’t sound like, look like, or live like, us.

What I do know is that my parents and my grandparents were cautious if not downright withholding in their use of profanity’s most biting bullets. My father was very blunt in his advice to me on the subject: “Just don’t. Not only does it makes you sound ugly, it makes you look ugly.” In all the years I knew him, I can’t recall any time when any of George Carlin’s classic seven dirty word slipped his lips. Not once. In more than five decades.

It isn’t a prudish thing—at least not for me. Lord knows I’ve enjoyed the hot language of many a standup comic, men and women, whose entire routines are founded on the cornerstones of Bruce, Carlin, Pryor, and Williams. From Sarah Silverman to Wanda Sykes, to Janeane Garafalo, to Iliza Shlesinger (Elder Millennial), I laugh with total gender indifference. Which is to say, I am fine with raw words in the right places, which is to say further, “right places” as defined by my sensitivities.

It isn’t a religious thing—Pelosi is a Catholic, I’m a Protestant, Tlaib is a Muslim—at the shared heart of our Christian and Muslim faiths is a desire to be kind and civil both in tongue and deed. That is not to say we always achieve the kindly desires to which we aspire. Great pain, anger, frustration, outrage, personal affront, defense of family or cause, a need to scream our truth frequently often collide in our lives to overrule our better-natured angels and when we believe we are targets, we reach to our pistol of rhetoric, and fire those words, point-blank if need be, to send a message of hurt right back to the source.

Been there. Done it. Usually, but not always, regretted it.

No, it’s not a generational thing, or prudish thing, or a religious thing. It’s a commonsense thing. It’s a be-bigger-than-that thing. It’s a don’t-play-their-game thing. It’s an unintended consequences thing. 

When Representative Tlaib went off on Trump, she gave him everything he could have possibly wanted in that moment. She gave him an angry basket of Palestinian-American-child-of-immigrants, woman, single mom, Muslim, Democrat, and activist. That is the basket from which Trump and his base get all their red meat. And, in one fiery moment, Tlaib put that basket on the opposition’s front porch. Big mistake, in my opinion.

In a sense, it was also a spit-on-the-table thing, at least for me. There was a 1947 movie, The Hucksters, starring Clark Gable and Sydney Greenstreet, in which Greenstreet, in the role of overbearing, slimy, corporate tycoon Evan Llewellyn Evans, spits a great wad of sputum onto a polished boardroom table. Looking at Gable’s shocked character, a World War II veteran named Victor Albee Norman, Evans says, “You’ve just seen me do a disgusting thing. You will always remember what I just did.” 

Sydney Greenstreet, in The Hucksters, spitting on boardroom table

Two points: First, I saw that movie more than 50 years ago, and I still remember the name of the movie and the quote; and, second, saying “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker,” is nothing less than spitting a wad of sputum on the newly-polished table of the House of Representatives.

Yes, it sent the message Rep. Tlaib wanted to send; yes, it was memorable for its directness; and yes, it will make no difference to the national conversation about Trump’s immorality, amorality, crudeness, vacuousness, and usurpation of the office of the presidency. No invective, no head-on, full-winded epithet-filled attack works to deter Trump. He feeds on it. He breathes it. He offers it to his base on a daily basis.

Like Nancy Pelosi, I am no guardian of standards of language for Members of the House or Senate, but unlike Speaker Pelosi, I don’t mind offering Rep. Tlaib a word of advice as a former Hill press secretary: “Hold your fire; use your passion creatively; don’t become a videoclip; don’t become the tool others will use for and against you; and, most of all, as quaint as it may sound, you are in the People’s House now, so please don’t spit on our table to make a point.”

The Siege Against Truth and Reason Is Real: Lincoln's Words Can Inspire Our Resolve To Right Our Ship

I was heartened to read the Washington Post’s lead editorial this morning (January 1, 2019) which asked us to consider the “perfect new years resolution for 2019,” based on Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

The editorial encourages the public to: 

“Take a trip down to the Lincoln Memorial, if you’re in the Washington area. At last report it was still open to the public, though with limited government support, thanks to the shutdown. There, inscribed on a wall, is the perfect New Year’s resolution for Americans and people from other countries who still admire this nation despite all its conflicts and contradictions. The words come at the end of the speech Abraham Lincoln delivered during his second inauguration.

The sentence is so familiar to us — “With malice toward none,” it begins — as to have become almost meaningless to some. But reading the whole address in the presence of the statue of Lincoln, especially at night or on a gray day, with visitors from home and abroad quietly, respectfully taking it all in, gives it a sort of mystic power.”

If you are not a regular reader of “But What If I’m Write?” (in which case I hope you stick around), I’m a former Congressional and Cabinet-level speechwriter, with a little over 30 years as a writer speechwriter, and press secretary for political leaders of both parties. 

Over the course of the thousands of speeches I’ve written, it would be fair to say I’ve drawn substantially on the texts of five key speeches by just three national leaders: Abraham Lincoln (the First and Second Inaugural Addresses), Theodore Roosevelt (The Man in the Arena/Citizenship in a Republic), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (Four Freedoms). I’ve also been inspired by Letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a letter I think is one of the most important writings of any American at any time in our history.

What draws me to write about the Post’s editorial is the power of the right words to help us through the worst of times—whether the Civil War of 1861-1865, the ruthless corporate hoarding of wealth at the turn of the 20th century, the Great Depression and World War II, Vietnam, or the uncivil war between the nation’s political left and right that has been on the rise since the Obama campaign and presidency and, most recently the campaign and inauguration of our current president.

There was a time when Americans took comfort in the words of respected leaders and men and women of faith and letters. There was a time when thinking before speaking (or writing or tweeting), was a thing taught in school, enforced at home, and practiced by Americans of all social and economic stripes. There was a time when Americans could parse the meaning of a speech without having to go through ethical or moral contortions—you knew what was being said, you got the message, you understood the importance of the guidance.

Today, not so much. Today, too many Americans rely on the external and twisted filters of cable news or social media relationships to inform their opinions, taking little, if any, time to compare and contrast what was said vs. what others would have them believe was said. The result is a degree of national polarization I’ve not seen since the Civil Rights era, and even then, while America was burning itself down on crosses of racial hatred or lifting itself up on powerful words of racial partnership, there was not such a deep-seated sense of citizen-to-citizen distrust, disparagement, and shaming that exists in today’s national discourse (such as it is) and political theater.

It seems no individual or group is spared the humiliation of being called out by an almost illiterate president who receives his truth from a tiny cadre of counter-productive soothsayers who whisper into their leader’s ear from sunup until, well, the next sunup.

For more than 550 years (1409-1963), every papal coronation ceremony—the Catholic church’s investiture of God’s prince on earth—included this publicly-spoken reminder to the all-too-human Pope, “Sic transit gloria mundi” (“So passes worldly glory”), which has often been shortened to “All fame is fleeting.” It was a sobering prompt to the incoming pontiff to not let the earthly trappings of celebrity—no matter how faithfully or righteously ordained—distract from the hard truth that we will not take any of it with us when our time on this mortal coil expires. 

Every president in my lifetime—from Truman to Obama (though a case can be made to exclude Nixon)—despite their many moral and ethical frailties and failings (or, perhaps, because of them), understood and embraced the reality of the limits of their office and the fleeting nature of their power. Until now.

And now, to abduct a line from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” There is no doubt in my mind that we are a nation under siege from within our own borders, countless sieges being waged against truth and reason wherever those two noble philosophies reside. I also believe that the engines of these internal sieges are fueled and weaponized by forces outside our borders, forces as easy to identify as Russia and China and Iran, and forces still unknown to us, but nonetheless real and dangerous.

The fight against such siege warfare would normally fall on the shoulders of the nation’s chief executive, but because he has abrogated that responsibility, and, in fact, has become a vocal enabler of the siege against truth and reason, it falls hard on the shoulders of Americans who still believe in the founding principles, who still understand the nobility of our purpose despite the failures of our methods, who are still willing to stand against the winds and tides of cowardly inhumanity and social disrespect.

Most of all, the fight to right our ship against the cannon blasts of a morally corrupt and intellectually vacuous prince of his own gilt-masted frigate, depends on Americans who still understand what Lincoln was saying, praying for, beseeching a torn nation to take as its own new mission:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

It will, indeed be a happy new year if we can start down that path together.