The stylistic differences between the left and right aren't just a question of the words they use, but the tunes they sing them to. Listen to a recent piece by the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan on the resurgence of patriotism, or as she calls it, "the simple idea of the goodness of loving America." The nation that won the war had nothing to do with big-city elites, she says; it was "a bigger America and a realer one -- a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality."
And and and and and and and. . . -- that repetition of conjunctions is what rhetoricians call polysyndeton. It does a lot of work for Noonan here. Each of those and's implies an "and not" -- an opposition to the urban cosmopolitans who don't have religious feeling, don't study the Bible, don't love their moms, and don't have garage bands, most likely because they don't have garages. They're the people that Noonan describes as the "intellectuals, academics. . . , and leftist mandarins," not to mention the "local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants." (And they would be...?)
Then too, the and's flatten the differences among all those unlike things -- replace the conjunctions with commas, and all of a sudden the thought emerges in all its vacuous incoherence: "a place full of religious feeling, cultural energy, Bible study, garage bands, sports-love, mom-love, sophistication, and normality."
You hear that rhythm a lot in Noonan's prose. "It was daring and brilliant and brave." "You want to really feel it and experience it and smell it and touch it and thank God for it."
But then a lot of columnists use this device, particularly the ones on the right. Take Michelle Malkin's letter to American soldiers: "You hail from Middletown and Middleboro and Greenville and Redding and Thousand Oaks and Maple Tree." (And South Central and the Bronx, she might have added, or is this another garage-band thing?)
William Bennett writes that "Real fatherhood means love and commitment and sacrifice and a willingness to share responsibility and not walking away from one's children." Paul Greenberg talks about "country breakfasts and jukeboxes and cowboy hats and denim and mamas and papas." And so on for David Horowitz, Jack Kemp, and numerous others -- it's as if most of the American right was off at a retreat on the day when the rest of freshman English class was covering the serial comma.
True, you won't hear this rhythm from conservatives like William F. Buckley, George Will, Jeanne Kirkpatrick or William Safire, none of them writers who are given to flights of gush. And there are liberal writers with a weakness for the device, like the tirelessly expansive Molly Ivins. But even so, you're about five times as likely to encounter this pattern on conservative sites like the National Review and townhall.com as on liberal sites like The Nation or the American Prospect.
Of course it isn't as if polysyndeton has an inherently political meaning, or any inherent meaning at all. The device has been used by everyone from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll to Bob Dylan to very different purposes. But the pattern has a particular cadence in American writing, where it signals plenitude and immediacy, as if you're laying down your thoughts one scoop after another. It bubbles up whenever people are waxing sentimental about dogs, baseball or the English language -- particularly about the English language, I've noticed. And it's a staple of eulogies and of course book blurbs, where it's often compounded by alliteration -- "wise and weird and witty and warm."
Ultimately, this is just another one of the things we can blame Walt Whitman for, along with all the writers who mimicked his voluble spontaneity. But it's not likely that Peggy Noonan picked this up directly from Whitman, much less from Allen Ginsberg or Gary Snyder. If you listen to her sentences, you hear another, even more familiar voice:
Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?
No, but you . . . you . . . you're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others.
It's all there in Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," not to mention "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "The Grapes of Wrath" and dozens of other plays and movies from the thirties and forties. It's the pattern that playwrights and screenwriters used when they wanted to evoke the artless wisdom of the common man.
That's what Noonan and the others are aiming for with this pattern -- the rhythm of the simple feelings that are obvious to everyone but the clever people who make life too complicated. But the device is apt to sound a bit more calculated and self-conscious when you run into it in the Wall Street Journal, particularly in an age as knowing as ours is. Back in Capra's time, people didn't make it a point of pride to be in touch with their feelings, or dwell on the simplicity of their ideas. Reading Noonan's column, I kept thinking of the recent remake of Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," with Adam Sandler in the Gary Cooper role.
At the end of her piece, Noonan says, "Is this corny? Too bad." Well, no. Capra was corny, and so were Robert Riskin and Nunnally Johnson and Jo Swerling and Sidney Buchman and Clifford Odets and Robert Sherwood, even if they were clever and lived in big cities and didn't go to Bible-study classes and talked too loudly in restaurants. But what Noonan does isn't corny, it's kitsch.
______________________________________
1. "Those young black kids… are putting their lives on the line to protect white and black and yellow and red America"
--"The daily abortion stories and abortion polls and abortion editorials and abortion pictures and stories showing how the movement to "protect these rights" is faring -- all this has drummed into their heads the idea that human life is not special, is not sanctified, is not a life formed by God but a fertilized ovum that makes demands and can be removed."
-- "Because they know what they're doing won't work, or is wrongheaded, or confused, or cowardly, or cynical, or just another way to dither, or will more likely yield bad outcomes -than good."
-- "But a lot of people are lonely, encased in their thoughts about their own lives and experiences and memories and challenges."
--"When it happened, it's hard to describe how exciting and moving and idealism-inspiring it was."
--" If you think of where we are now, in 2002, with so much more equality and working together and living next door to each other and sending our kids to the same schools and Boy Scout meetings..."
--"They were Italians and Irish and Poles and Puerto Ricans, and they lined up for absolution..."
- "We continued our lives and enjoy them, and if you go to any restaurant in the five boroughs there will be laughing and flirting and people joking and being intelligent and enjoying the food." (Quietly, you would hope.) return
2. Cf also "And all for a little of what I think that particular blessing of civilization or literature or history or philosophy has advised us about these things." return
3. Also from Greenberg: "George Bailey a tragic figure? Why, he's the richest man in town, as his brother says at the end of the film. He makes Mr. Potter, that old miser, look like a pauper -- because George Bailey has loved and sacrificed and built and given and stood alone a time or two, and, well, he has lived."
--"They cast a silence greater than all the speeches and band music and flyovers and 21-gun salutes."
-- "They're about friendship and courage and grace and, I realize at times like this, the triumphant, ever soaring human spirit." return
4. Cf David Horowitz: "Americans wake up! Your enemies hate you for who you are. They hate you because you are democratic, and tolerant and unbelieving. They hate you because you are Christians... And they hate you because are Hindus and Buddhists and secularists and Jews."
Michael Kelly: "Jail, it occurred to them, was just the ticket for certain people--corporate polluters and drunk drivers and deadbeat dads and gun owners and people who hate other people."
David Brooks: "America does seem at once crass and materialistic and strong and indomitable."
Andrew Sullivan: "And if we need to humanize this, perhaps we should leave our own memories of that day behind and think of those wives and husbands and children and parents who cannot live a single day without remembering."
Jack Kemp: "Bob Dole has... unfurled our banner of growth and opportunity and hope and cultural renewal." return
5 Cf "Being a congenital optimist, I naturally believe all this will change, that we will have another surge of progressivism and reform and hell-raising and fun and justice."
--"Before we lurch off again, let us at least stop and think, and ask questions and demand answers and consider alternatives"
--"Doesn't anyone notice that we're getting fleeced by banks and pharmaceutical companies and utilities and energy companies and our HMOs and big, international companies in general?" return
6. File under "even Homer nods": " The Germans and Palestinians and Kurds and Ukrainians have homelands; we just have a nation and a flag." return
7. The pattern can be searched on by using Google's wild card feature. Thus a search on "and * and * and" will return strings of the form "and shoes and ships and"; a search on "and * and ** and" will turn up strings of the form "and ships and sealing wax and"; and so on. (This feature isn't documented on the Google site, but you can find an explanation here.)
Note though that these searches will also return many strings that are not strictly polysyndeton, sometimes because one of the conjunctions scopes another (as in "I'll have coffee and ham and eggs"), sometimes because of repetition (as in "on and on and on and on"), and sometimes, particularly as the number of wild card operators increases, because of the presence of other intervening punctuation (as in "I nodded and smiled. Bill and Mary did too"). The estimate of a five-fold difference between conservatives and liberals is based on about 100 occurrences of (true) polysyndeton in numerous political commentaries, but there are too many confounds to consider it exact. return
8. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news . . . (Lear, V, iii)
The time has come,' the Walrus said,
'To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax -
Of cabbages - and kings...' ("The Walrus and the Carpenter")
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it... ("It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall") return
9. Cf Dwight Macdonald in "The Decline and Fall of English": "English is not just a convenient means of communicating.… It is compounded of tradition and beauty and style and experience and not simply of what happens when two individuals meet in a barroom or classroom." return
10. Cf the way the figure kept coming up in the appreciations for Fred Rogers after he died about a month ago: "decent and kind and gentle and human," "appropriate, and real, and substantive, and moving," "loneliness and fears and joy and sadness." return
11. At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession,
A swarming and busy race settling and organizing everywhere,
Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the
whole world,
To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific,
Populous cities, the latest inventions, the steamers on the rivers,
the railroads, with many a thrifty farm, with machinery,
And wool and wheat and the grape, and diggings of yellow gold.
("Song of the Redwood-Tree")
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the
mare's foal and the cow's calf,
And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the
pond-side... ("There Was A Child Went Forth") return
12. angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz... ("Howl")
Different shoes and shirts,
In little heaps — sit naked, silent, gaze
On chests and breasts and knees and knobby feet
in the tide smell, on the bleached deck plants,
Like seals hauled out for sunning. ("The Sweat") return
13. Jefferson Smith: Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. . . . There's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties. ...And it's not too late, because this country is bigger than the Taylors, or you, or me, or anything else. return
