As you know, we here at Argument Clinic are sticklers for language, especially other peoples’ language. If you have been following along, you probably could write this episode yourself, which is sort of the point. [stderr]
Is this the right room for an argument?
The outlines of the situation are simple: comedian Samantha Bee, whose trademark is “in your face” political humor, used some apolitical invective on Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka. It was a bad move at multiple levels, so we are overflowing with disapproval and rage – disapproval because of Bee’s awkward deployment of invective, and rage because we are inadvertently “on the side of” the Trump-supporting media machine. We are outraged that we might be seen as sharing their faux outrage!
You may wish to review Argument Clinic Episode 1, “A Theory of Verbal Abuse” [stderr] which lays the framework for this analysis. But (if we may sound like Sam Harris for a moment) it ought to be obvious enough, and tedious besides: Bee missed an opportunity to really say something nasty about Ivanka. Rather than throwing a term that invites invidious comparison and causes splash-damage, Bee could have maintained target focus and said something genuinely mean and funny about Ivanka. That is what we would have recommended, had we only been consulted; it’s a tragedy that we were not, but American politics is pretty tragic these days.
As you know, at Argument Clinic, we are fond of going “meta-” and this would have been an opportunity to do so – Bee could have reached for meta- and authenticity by saying something like, “you know, I consulted with a bunch of other comedians about what to call Ivanka, but we wound up embroiled in the nature/nurture debate about whether being a corrupt capitalist can be carried in your DNA.” The reason we call that meta-invective is because it simply opens the door for the audience to see this vast, sweltering landscape of nasty that could be applied to Ivanka, then it gently closes it and says “use your imagination.” Maybe we’re demanding too much of the Youtube audience: “use your imagination, those of you that have one. Or borrow a friend’s.”
Or, to keep things simpler, she could have pointed out some unpleasant truths about Ivanka. It’s not as if there’s not a deep mother-lode of those. Why resort to cheap throw-away invective when you can dig up shovels-full of genuine sticky filth to throw at a target?
Bee’s strategic blunder allowed her remarks to become contemporaneously linked to Rosanne Barr’s racist tweets. Of course that is indirection, but as a professional word-based political commentator, Bee could have seen and avoided that mine-field.
That brings us to the outrage-machine’s failure to effectively counter-attack Bee; fortunately for her, her enemies are stupid. Were they not, they would not focused so much on the naughtiness of the word, they would have attacked the foundation of Bee’s process and put her on trial for inauthenticity following our reasoning that “it’s not ‘invidious comparison’ if it’s true.”
Here’s what that would have sounded like:
Today, Samantha Bee read a nasty word off a teleprompter, referring to Ivanka Trump. The truth is that Samantha Bee, like most big-name television comedians, has a “writers room” [verge] of professional funny people who write the scripts for her show. You can picture the discussion in the “writer’s room” – “Hey, let’s go ‘edgy’ and have her really cuss out Ivanka.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s have her call Ivanka a ‘cunt’. It’s super ‘edgy’ and it’ll draw lots of media headlights.”
The fact is that Samantha Bee’s comment was not ‘edgy’ – it was a poorly executed propaganda move that backfired in her face. It’s especially egregious because she had plenty of time to think it over and ought to have realized that it was going to backfire, and that it went against her own feminist credibility. Her “writer’s room” let her down and she ought to fire them and write her own letter of resignation, if she is capable of writing that much original material.
Reveal that Bee is a coldly calculating propagandist, who has a professional team that helps try to make her sound funny, and you’ve fired shots below the water-line. Fortunately for Samantha Bee, she has been praying Voltaire’s Prayer a lot, and it appears to be working.
At Argument Clinic we are actually cynical enough to suspect that Bee’s “writer room” were hoping to draw some hate-tweets from President Trump, by attacking his favorite child. It’s probably because very cynical people see everyone else as cynical, too.
Here would be an interesting point of attack: look at Donald’s body-language in this photo – there is much creepy here.
Disclaimer: at Argument Clinic we watch Colbert, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers. Usually, their writers rooms do a pretty good job; we’re just disapprovingly looking down from our balcony seats and muttering “tut, tut” – like this:
It’s possible that Bee et al. were hoping that she would/could claim that it was a matter of one woman calling out another, and that that lessened the . . . problematicness a bit, in a way that Roseanne’s racist wording could not be.
Yes, Samantha Bee’s writers let her down, with only a run of the mill vulgar synecdoche. Even something like Griselda von Fuckface, borrowing from Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, would have been funnier.
The response to Barr and Bee exemplify a difference between contemporary US liberals and conservatives. Typically conservatives care more about vulgarity (a breach of manners) than about unkindness. Roseanne’s tweet did not use vulgarity. (Not that conservatives do not excuse vulgarity by their own, but they do criticize it.) This may reflect a difference in child rearing practices between liberals and conservatives, related to ethical and moral values.
As for racism, contemporary conservatives turn a blind eye. Roseanne apologized for a “bad joke about {Valerie Jarrett’s} politics and her looks.” She responded to accusations of racism by saying, “Muslims r NOT a race.” Newsweek ( http://www.newsweek.com/bill-maher-roseanne-barr-fired-trump-ape-racist-948284 ) quoted Charlie Kirk as mentioning Maher’s repeated comparing Donald Trump to an ape and saying, “The difference? Bill Maher is a liberal, Roseanne is a free-thinking Trump supporter.” Kirk’s failure to mention the racism behind comparing an African-American to an ape versus comparing a European-American to an ape may be regarded as tactical. But Newsweek’s failure to do so is problematical. Despite its conservative leanings, Newsweek is not known as a radical right wing rag.
There is nothing about the Donald-Ivanka relationship that is not creepy. It’s fractal creepiness; not just creepy, but creepy at every scale of resolution.
Prediction: At some point after Donald is safely dead, Ivanka will reveal that she was sexually abused by him.
Owlmirror@#3:
I would not bet against you. I’ve had the same thought. Look where his hands are, and his body-language – pure possessive control-freak.
Is “backfired in her face” a mixed metaphor or what?
How the misogynist, racist, sexist Right apologizes.
1. Claim it was “a joke”.
2. Shift the blame – other people say worse.
3. Blame external factors – drugs, alcohol, stress.
4. Claim it wasn’t racist because “I thought VJ was white”!?
5. That isn’t “the real me”.
6. Lash out and attack.
7. Never, ever, take personal responsibility.
How the Left apologizes.
I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night. It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.
— Samantha Bee
Jordan Klepper wins tweet of the year with this one _
This can’t wait! #ChanningDungey canceled “Roseanne” for doing exactly what she promised to do: show us Trump’s America.
Roj Blake@#6:
Her apology was well done.
And, yes, the authoritarian followers tend to do pretty bad apologies. That ought to be a whole meta-topic.
chigau@#5:
Is “backfired in her face” a mixed metaphor or what?
Because of budget cuts we had to let our entire metaphor department go; all we’ve got is a big jumble of stuff that they left on their workbench.
Bill Spight@#2:
Typically conservatives care more about vulgarity (a breach of manners) than about unkindness
Let me just home in on one piece of your comment, above. I don’t believe that they care about vulgarity or manners at all. They elected a crass vulgarian, and didn’t bat an eye about it – they’re interested in power, and power only. When they claim to be shocked by vulgarity, it’s just tone-trolling, and bad tone-trolling, at that.
I suppose a presidential candidate who deliberately vomited raw meat on his opponents, like a vulture, would be more crass and vulgar than Donald Trump, but by 2020, he could pick up that trick. But any conservative who claims to be shocked by crudity ought to be pearl-clutching about Trumps’ calling his opponents names like a 9 year-old bully in a sandbox.
Flatly reject their claims to care about vulgarity. Racism is vulgar. Capitalism is vulgar. Inequality is vulgar. “Conservatives” love vulgarity – it’s what they stand for: wretched excess of the wealthy, and inequality. They found their soul-mate in Trump.
Owlmirror@#1:
It’s possible that Bee et al. were hoping that she would/could claim that it was a matter of one woman calling out another, and that that lessened the . . . problematicness a bit, in a way that Roseanne’s racist wording could not be.
It’s possible. I still think Bee left herself remarkably vulnerable to the (accurate) charge that it was very deliberate, for effect, and manipulative.
Barr’s wording is definitely a disaster; but ABC knew that’s what she was when they hired her. I think ABC did a good job of throwing Barr under the bus so that they didn’t look like a bunch of enablers who gave a known racist a show of her own and a chance to strut her stupid on the national stage.
Marcus Ranum@#9:
It is not that I believe what they say, but what others say about them. It took me a long time to accept these ideas about the differences between contemporary US conservatives and liberals, as I grew up in conservative country, and was aware of many exceptions. My wife believed that these conservatives are mean spirited, an idea that I resisted for a long time. It is not, in general, that they are immoral, but they tend to have a rules based morality, and one sign of that is a concern with courtesy and manners. OC, in insult is a breach of manners, but the use of foul language is an additional offense. Insulting an opponent may be part of the game, in that view, but please keep the language clean. This kind of morality leads to charges of supreficiality and hypocrisy, to which these conservatives are sensitive. Avoiding the use of racial slurs is taken as sufficient evidence of not being racist. Roseanne could fool herself that the ape comparison was only about looks, just as Bill Maher’s orangutan comparison with Trump is, and maybe she did fool herself, I don’t know. But a rules based morality does not go deep.
I don’t like rape jokes. This goes double for pedophilia jokes. No victim of child sexual abuse deserves to experience listening to some comedian rubbing salt in their wounds. And this goes even for victims who grow up to be nasty people. It would be legitimate for comedians to attack the victim for whatever bad things they have done themselves (like, for example, corruption in this case). But it is not appropriate to crack jokes about the sexual abuse they may have experienced as children.
Moreover, in this case we don’t even know whether Trump really did anything inappropriate to his daughter. If nothing like this happened, then that’s false accusations of a crime. If something did happen, it’s probably painful for the victim to be reminded of these experiences.
I’m not saying that the society should ignore child sexual abuse. I’m just saying that people should be mindful about it and choose their words carefully. And comedians simply tend to not be delicate. That’s part of their job, really. This is why, in my opinion, it’s better for comedians to abstain from talking about sexual abuse. And if some comedian really wants to discuss this, then they better be extra careful with their choice of words.
chigau@#5:
I don’t actually think it’s a mixed metaphor. A handgun held out in front of your face (as you would in order to aim properly) would presumably backfire into your face or thereabouts.
Sam Bee isn’t going to make any serious points about Trump, or anyone connected to the White House. The Trump era is just a career opportunity for TV comedians.
polishsalami@#14:
Sam Bee isn’t going to make any serious points about Trump, or anyone connected to the White House. The Trump era is just a career opportunity for TV comedians.
An opportunity to blow a hole in a career.
How do you reconcile this idea with the popularity of those “Fuck Your Feelings” T-shirts that so many of them were wearing?
Dunc@#16:
OC, “Fuck Your Feelings” does express a morality that is insensitive to people’s feelings. I remember being amazed several years ago to find conservative pundits demeaning empathy. Such insensitivity is consistent with a rules based morality. To be sure, “fuck” is against the rules, but not as much as it used to be. Language and culture change. Also, a person who wears such a T-shirt might still not say “Fuck your feelings,” to someone without provocation. The rules for T-shirts are different. For instance, someone might wear an “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt but would never call the person they are with stupid.
Re: 17
Is that really true about t-shirts? How does that even work? I would never carry a sign that says something that I wouldn’t say out loud — that doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. If what you say is true, then that’s an epistomological gulf between me and them that I wasn’t even aware of.
brucegee1962@#18:
then that’s an epistomological gulf between me and them that I wasn’t even aware of.
Deeeeeeeep rifts!