he tabloid papers are constantly telling us all the things we're doing wrong:
you're eating sushi all wrong, they say. You're showering wrong. You're
cooking bolognese wrong. You're drinking tequila all wrong. You're
drinking coffee wrong. You're dating all wrong. You're eating wrong.
You're washing your armpits wrong. But they missed the most important
thing: you're insulting people . . . all wrong.
Unlike in the good old days, politicians can't thin the herd by murdering each other, at least not openly, but they're still allowed to insult each other. Unfortunately, yesterday's Republican debates showed that they're terrible at it.
The purpose of insulting your opponent is not just to get your name in the press. It is to convince people that you're a better, smarter candidate who can out-think others and respond rapidly, creatively, and intelligently to a tense situation. Also that you have a bigger vocabulary than a six-year-old. These are qualities we look for in a president.
The debate is over, and the winner is that short guy on the left
The New York Post praised Nikki Haley for her body language, but they didn't mention she just disqualified herself from the presidency by insulting Vivek Ramaswamy. Saying “Every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say” is not only clunky and juvenile, it is not a good insult, even if—or especially if—it's true. What a listener hears from this is not that Ramaswamy is saying dumb things. It is that Nikki Haley thinks she's too dumb to be president. She has impostor syndrome.
Chris Christie also failed. When he calls Trump Donald Duck, what listeners actually hear is that this is the most intelligent thing Christie can think of to say about someone he obviously hates. It's as if he thinks he's in a Disney cartoon.
Donald Trump's fans praise his ability to fight back, but Trump's legendary inability to insult anyone in anything remotely resembling a clever way probably cost him the election.
If anything, the Democrats are even worse. The Democrats' problem is that they are not allowed to use half the words in the dictionary. The only things they're still allowed to say are ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ and ‘transphobic.’ After months of heavy black smoke pouring out of their industrial think tanks, they finally produced on a fourth one: ‘Threat to democracy.’ It bombed: the only response it got was laughter.
So, what would be a good insult? Mark Hemingway's comment about pop music over at The Federalist was not a bad one:
Someone who truly, deeply cares about the state of popular music has to stand athwart Taylor Swift, yelling “what is this @#?!”
Unlike today, where insults consist mostly of people calling each other Disney characters or making defamatory claims about events that never actually occurred, people in earlier times were masters of the insult. Søren Kierkegaard famously called his opponent Hans Lassen Martensen a “glob of snot.” After Michael Servetus, the doctor who discovered pulmonary circulation, compared Trinitarians to atheists during his 1553 trial, John Calvin responded that he wished “little chickens would dig out his eyes a hundred thousand times.” Before being burned at the stake, Servetus replied by calling Calvin an “evil sorcerer.” We have much to learn from our ancestors.
A good insult is like a good joke. It forces the listener to think and to re-parse what was said in order to perceive the situation in a new way. Calling somebody “stupid” or some variation of that doesn't qualify. As an editor at Uncyclopedia, a website that tried to use humor to satirize a famously inaccurate online encyclopedia, once wrote: if you want to convince the reader that person xyz is stupid, the one thing you must never say is “person xyz is stupid.” If you do, the editor wrote, your article has failed.
Maybe it's why humans invented the concept of Satan: to give a voice of intelligence to negativity. Without the ability to grapple with negative emotions and express them constructively, we become like the characters on Star Trek Next Generation who would rather put the ship on Self-Destruct than say something not nice. Now both parties are on Self-Destruct and voters are holding their breath waiting to see which will blow up first.
“You're Donald Duck!” How pathetic. An insult is never about the person you're insulting. It's about yourself. If it's true that we're becoming more atomized and more self-centered, it makes sense that our insults turn into childish, mindless bashing. We derive our identity from other humans. As we lose contact with others, we lose contact with ourselves, and with it our ability to blast our scum-sucking enemies into rhetorical oblivion.
sep 28 2023, 8:01 am
