Mitch Albom: Public discourse by lawmakers is now a notch above food fight
www.freep.com
Attention: non-metroDetroit™-specific content. I'll still respect you in the morning.
Something's been bugging me for a while now regarding the quality of discourse in this country, especially from the people in positions who have been educated in this nation's higher institutions of learning, people who have studied how to string words together in a cohesive manner to present ideas both simple and complex, people who are at least familiar with the concept of rational debate, people who may even be considered role models but minimally are usually held to a higher standard.
Y'know…people who should know better.
Apparently I'm not alone in this as The Freep's Mitch Albom gives his take on the nosedive of intellectual exchange in politics and elsewhere…
During an evening hearing last week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican, got into a testy exchange with U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat.
GREENE: “I don't think you know what you are here for. ... I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you're reading."
CROCKETT: "I'm just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?" […] All that was missing was the food fight.
It’s all terrible. It’s all dishonorable. And it’s our Congress. Our lawmakers. The people who determine the fate of the country. […] And we are making a mistake if we think, optimistically, that this will somehow get better.
[…]what has changed in recent years is that the low-brow stuff, instead of behind the curtain, is now proudly in front of it. Surely Donald Trump led the way in this revolution. From his early campaigning days in 2016 calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” and Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” to more recent insults of Adam Schiff (a “pencil neck” with a “fat, ugly face”) and President Joe Biden (“He can’t put two sentences together” and “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to s---"), Trump is a single-handed, monster-truck force for lowering public debate to schoolyard trash talk.
Everyone is sinking into the same mud. And we’re kidding ourselves if we think our side is righteous, or the other side started it, or coarse language is worse than clever insults. […] Needing a dictionary doesn’t wash away ugly.
The emphasized passages are where I and Albom diverge: "coarse" is worse than "clever" because at minimum "clever" shows you're not "working without tools." And these are the last people that should be working without tools.
Doncha think?
Alt link for your convenience via archive.is
Everything I say is a lie…
!detroit@midwest.social ☆ !michigan@midwest.social ☆ !music@midwest.social