Here on Hatch's Isle

The rhetoric of Orrin Hatch, the Republican U.S. Senator from the great state of Mormon, is so utterly clueless that he could almost be a Democrat.

Here’s a picture of him on the Senate floor with a poster of Thurston Howell III, the “Gilligan’s Island” millionaire. Was Hatch thanking a fictional member of the Republican base? Warning that Mr. Howell will never get off the island until Congress increases private-jet subsidies?

No, Hatch was arguing that taxpayers making more than $200,000 a year should not be mistaken for fake TV millionaires.

Oh, when will they listen to Figaro? How many times have we warned against naming the thing you’re denying? “I am not a crook.” “Don’t think I’m helping this millionaire.” 

What’s more, the Thurston Howell visual undercuts the Republicans’ best anti-tax trope: “job creators.” It’s a first-class metonymy. 

Figure of Speech: metonymy (meh-TON-uh-mee), a belonging trope. From the Greek, meaning “name change.” 

The metonymy takes a characteristic of something and makes it represent the whole thing. Some rich folk really do create jobs. Some inherit their dough and become Bertie Wooster. By applying the “job creator” label to every rich person, Republicans make the rich seem critical to economic recovery. Oh, thank you, Mr. Job-Creating Thurston Howell III, for allowing me to serve you this coconut!

Free enterprise, and tropical labeling, at their best.

Folk Wisdom Teeth

Michele Bachmann brags about her Iowa roots in a burg where mass murderer John Wayne Gacy learned his hearty, small-town values. Christopher Hitchens in Slate pulls off a great near-pun in defining American policitians’ mania for folksy, small-town John Wayne-ness.

All politics
is yokel.

Figure of Speech:  paronomasia (pa ra no MAY sia), the near-pun.

Slate’s conservative cynic-in-chief, an extremely urban cynic, wonders why Americans still think it’s a good idea to elect people for the sake of a myth. His paronomasia (Greek for “play on like-sounding words”) plays on Tip O’Neil’s old wisdom about all politics being local.

Actually, there are good reasons for yokelized campaigning. Politicians campaign on values emphasized by nostalgia: Roman candidates did exactly the same thing a couple thousand years ago.

One hopes they had a better sense of geography than Michele Bachmann. 

The Sleepy Modifier That Could Save Us

As America’s “leaders” play chicken with the debt limit, we can learn some cool lessons about the strategic art of rhetorical listening. Take a gander at this quote by Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican. Then try to guess why every Democrat should enthusiastically endorse the conservative’s statement. 

We don’t need
new taxes right now.

Sen. Jon Kyl on “Fox News Sunday,” quoted in the Wall Street Journal

Sleeper modifier: a term coined by Figaro, denoting an innocuous-sounding adjective or adverb used as a subtle signal in negotiations. 

As President Obama takes charge of the debt-limit talks, Senator Kyl wants to signal to Democrats that some revenue enhancers might be acceptable. For instance, he might be able to live with eliminating some tax deductions for the corporate jets that are clogging the nation’s airways. 

But the Senator doesn’t want to raise howls from Tea Partiers who equate any kind of tax with theft. So what does he do? He slips the word “new” in front of “taxes”—implying that old, reliable taxes might not be so bad. 

The Democrats should jump on this statement, agreeing to give up on any new taxes. Just reimpose some old ones. If taxes were restored to the levels under President Reagan, for example, we could eliminate the deficit without any further budget cuts. 

No New Taxes! It should become the liberals’ sleeper mantra.

Heads We Win, Tails We Win More

Here’s a brilliant example of the false-choice fallacy, which claims two alternatives when more (or fewer) exist.

President Obama needs to decide between his goal of higher taxes, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit. 

Senator Mitch McConnell in the New York Times

The Republican leadership has walked away from talks to raise the debt limit, putting the nation at risk of defaulting on loans and throwing world markets into chaos. The reason: the Democrats want to phase out “temporary” income tax deductions while slashing the deficit by $2 trillion. 

Having successfully defined the elimination of deductions as tax increases, and having convinced the public that the economic doldrums were caused by the deficit, the Republicans are now claiming still more rhetorical terrain. But how do you turn Republicans’ refusal to budge on revenues into Democratic intransigence? With a false choice.

The false choice analogy is the secret behind “push polls,” those fake voter surveys that ask you whether you’d like candidate A or, alternatively, Armageddon. McConnell presents a choice of (a) Obama’s “goal” to raise taxes, and (b) bipartisanship.  Ordinarily, bipartisanship means compromise. In the hands of smart rhetoricians, bipartisanship now means doing everything the Republicans say.

The Democratic leadership, being the anti-rhetorical souls they are, will retreat. But they’ll make aggressive growling noises while they do it, and will feel much better afterward.

The Russian Doll Figure

We recently introduced Mr. Potatohead. Now meet his decorous cousin, Russian Doll.  Another way to catalog, this figure wraps your items up in an irresistible description. Winston Churchill, that world-class master of figuring, did this at the beginning of the Second World War, referring to Russia.  

It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery

inside an enigma. 

Notice how Churchill uses the Russian nesting doll as a metaphor to illustrate the whole nation. But it works even when you’re not playing metaphorically with dolls. Here’s Emily Yoffee in Slate.com:

Many countries collectively agree…that children are a tantrum wrapped in a diaper and not worth the trouble.

We call this the Russian Doll for obvious reasons. To deploy the figure, it helps to have an object with some sort of covering. A diaper serves as a natural covering for babies. But your wrapping doesn’t have to be cloth. You might have your victim cover himself. 

The principal is a rulebook wrapped in pomposity inside a whole lot of bad skin. 

If you happen to be an actual student, please don’t try that particular example; it’s for demonstration uses only. But you can see that any object or person with a distinctive outer layer can make for a great Russian Doll. Suppose you wanted to say something memorable about the fire hazard of a Christmas tree. You can convert it into a comparable object, cover it with something, wrap it with something else, and deliver a good scare. 

A Christmas tree is an incendiary bomb covered in needles and wrapped in electric bulbs.

You just can’t beat an incendiary bomb for newsworthiness, and a rhetorical incendiary bomb does the job without harming a soul. Figures don’t get better than that.

Witty Mr. Potatohead

One of Figaro’s favorite figures—one he describes in his upcoming book—is what he calls the Mr. Potatohead. This cataloging figure breaks down a person or object into constituent parts, and then pretends that those parts came from elsewhere.

The journalist William Allen White used this device beautifully in his obituary of publisher Frank Munsey.

The talent of a meat-packer, the morals of a moneychanger and the manners of an undertaker.

With just three phrases, White gives you a vivid image of the oily crook. You can use it as a form of self-deprecating humor. 

When I play tennis, I have the agility of a tank, the aim of a mole and the response time of FEMA.

The Mr. Potatohead comes in handy when you want call attention to a variety of characteristics by exaggerating them. Say you want to describe a party you went to last Saturday: a chaotic, drunken mess with bad music, badly dressed guests, and the kind of mayo-drenched snacks that give people food poisoning. Instead of droning on and on about how awful it was, try chunking up a nice Potatohead. 

 A lovely party! The food of a bachelor’s fridge, the music playlist of an aging hair-band roadie, and guests straight out of “Dumb and Dumber,” without the witty dialogue. 

Creating your own Mr. Potatohead isn’t hard. Just take a characteristic or part of the subject you want to describe, and come up with an analog for it. Then take the next characteristic or part, find an analog, and continue until your subject is thoroughly spudded. An analog is something that’s analogous—an analogy. We’ll get to the metaphorical kinds of analogies later. In the meantime, just look for similarities that create the effect you want. If you intend to make a subject look great, use flattering comparisons. Do the opposite if you want to abuse someone or something. 

The book had the prose style of the Congressional Record, the characterization of a computer manual, and the suspense of a phone book.