We Are All Floridians Now

The election of 2018 was ably summarized by Brenda Snipes, supervisor of elections for Broward County, Florida, in a comment about 2,000 ballots that her organization appeared to be missing. She said there was one thing she was sure of: “The ballots are in this building.”

There would be nowhere else for them to be. The ballots are in the building. The ballots are in the building.

The ballots, if found, would presumably have been cast for candidates of Snipes’ party, but she was forced to resign her position before she could find them. In the same way, Democratic and Republican partisans spent the election season trying to find the votes they needed and were sure existed, somewhere on the premises; but they never found where. The more or less final results of the election indicated that the voters were pretty much where they were when the whole thing started — evenly divided. The same groups turned out in more or less the same numbers, and when forced to decide between D and R, they decided in a way that taught no one much of anything. There was no blue wave. There was no red wave. Nobody rocked the vote. And because the results were approximately even, both parties will spend the next two years making asses of themselves trying to find their votes.

But more was lost than ballots in the election of 2018. Grammar often got so lost that nobody even went looking for it. Here’s a report from Fox News (November 18) about the Senate election in Snipes’ own virtuous and efficient state:

[Rick] Scott's victory . . . marks the first time in more than a century that Florida has two Republican senators representing them in Washington.

No matter how many ballots Floridians cast — bogus or not — “Florida” is not a “them.”

The best orator among Florida politicians was supposed to be Andrew Gillum, the losing candidate for governor. Gillum is said by conservative friends of mine to be “a good speaker, even if you hate his politics.” As a libertarian, I’m inclined to hate everyone’s politics; as someone who can read and write, I’m inclined to be skeptical about all supposed Great Communicators and Inspiring Speakers of the post-literate age. I liked Ronald Reagan pretty well, but I wasn’t captivated by his speeches. I didn’t like Barack Obama or William Jefferson Clinton, but that wasn’t my reason for disliking their constant attempts at self-expression. The reason was that they were blustery, repetitive, and a hundred times too long for their concept count. I found Gillum’s speeches as embarrassing as any other faux-folksy orations.

His election, like Scott’s, fell into the toils of a Florida recount, and Gillum long pursued a victory of hanging chads. Meanwhile, he talked a lot. He said, among other things,

I wanted so bad, and still want so bad, for us to be able to make a combined impact on this state, and I’m trusting that we’re going to have that opportunity. Once we get beyond this election, whatever the outcome may be, we will have to commit ourselves to an improved and a better democracy.

How bad[ly] do you want to be able to make an impact, Mr. Gillum? I want it so bad. Are you currently committed to a better democracy? Maybe not now, but in the future I will have to commit myself. But what do you mean by a better democracy? I mean an improved democracy. I will have to commit myself to an improved and a better democracy.

Gillum wasn’t the only candidate in that race who was committed to the meaningless doubling of words. Ronald Dion (“Ron”) DeSantis, who emerged as victor, was also so committed. He also kept issuing statements, which were duly reported by the Miami Herald:

“I remain humbled by your support and the great honor the people of Florida have shown me as I prepare to serve as your next governor,” his statement read, striking a more conciliatory tone than the confrontational approach he used in the campaign. [The Herald is convinced that approaches strike tones. Picture that, if you can.]

He said the campaign must now end so it can “give way to governing and bringing people together to secure Florida’s future. With the campaign now over, that’s where all of my focus will be.”

Humbled by support and humbled by honor, DeSantis now turns to governing and bringing people together . . . can’t he just say something once? People who can’t do that are likely to get confused. What does it mean to say that a campaign must give way to bringing people together? Incidentally, what does it mean to secure the future? Isn’t it going to happen anyhow? Leave the damned thing alone.

I know what DeSantis was trying to say. Why didn’t he say it? “The campaign’s over; let’s try to work with our opponents”? Now, was that so hard?

But how in God’s universe did the other guy — Mr. Gillum — get himself so mixed up as to say that “it [meaning either his campaign or the recount he wanted] is not over until every legally casted vote is counted”?

Sorry. The past participle of cast is cast. And don’t accuse me of pedantry. The man is a politician. The most important thing in his life is the casting of votes. He must have read hundreds of articles, papers, advice sheets, whatever, about the subject. And he doesn’t know what the past participle of cast may be?

Don’t say he merely prefers an accepted variant of the word. Casted hasn’t been used in serious English since the 16th century, and if there’s one thing Florida politicians are not, it’s collectors of antiquarian books. (You can say the same about Mike Pence, who in 2016 babbled about having “casted” his vote, until he was reproved by Merriam Webster and a little swarm of literate people.) Both Gillum and his opponent are able representatives of the modern form of illiteracy, which is the ability to read and speak without noticing what you read and speak. When in doubt — whatever! Just make it up!

That approach can be used with concepts, too. Adults form concepts mainly by reading, reflection, and communication with knowledgeable people. The concepts result from their attempts to find intellectual answers to questions posed by their experience. This is particularly evident in the formation of economic concepts. Today we see one person paying three dollars for a cup of coffee and another declining to pay anything more than two. On another day we see the second person happily paying four dollars for the same commodity. We wonder how to account for this, and if we are willing to read, we may learn from our reading the principle of marginal utility. Similarly, we may wonder why jobs appear to be scarce in one year but abundant in another. If we read, or talk with other people, or pursue our own reflections, we may discover such concepts as the investment cycle, the effects of taxes and regulation, the influence of technological innovation upon productivity, and the like, and we can use these concepts to explain our experience.

By contrast, a person who, as Sophocles says, “wishes to talk but never to hear or listen” seeks answers not from reading, reflection, and communication but from an impulse to say something, whether the saying represents a concept or not. Want an example? Here’s a good one. It comes from the inimitable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, newly elected congresswoman of New York, who was asked by a PBS interviewer for her response to the nation’s low unemployment rate. As a dedicated opponent of the current economic regime, she seemed embarrassed by this question. But her embarrassment did not last long. She soon had something to say, which was: “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.”

When I saw a clip of that interview, I grabbed a piece of paper to record her words, certain that I would use them here. My plan was to show how even dumb people can generate ideas, lots of ideas — dumb ideas, but plenty of them anyway. I would list eight or ten fallacies that are packed into Ocasio-Cortez’s eight words. Then I realized: there aren’t any ideas in what she said, or around what she said, or implied by what she said; it’s just words, nothing but words. Her remark was as empty of concepts as those mysterious messages in Cocteau’s Orphée: “The bird sings with its fingers, three times.” She is conceptually illiterate, that’s all.

I gave up my plan, but I was not disappointed. I knew that in this column, O-C’s future is secure. Most politicians talk nonsense all day long, but few are objects of a publicity cult. They are clowns without an audience, and their words are written on the waves. But Ocasio-Cortez is the Donald Trump of the Left. Nothing can stand between her and a camera, and there are always people showing her the way to one. She is God’s gift to Republicans and to people like me. I expect from her a continuous supply of hilarious remarks.

I have not been so lucky with Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, whose legislative career was ended by the voters on November 6. I fear that McCaskill will no longer be turning out fodder for Word Watch. But her farewell performance was a knockout in the nonsense department. It had the weight, the gravity, of exemplary things. Ocasio is a nut who sees no reason to disguise the fact, but McCaskill is a representative figure: like other mainstream politicians, she spent her career disguising an obsession with power as a manifestation of civic duty. When she lost, she posted a farewell address in which she made the following outrageous claim.

This campaign was never about me — it was always about the people of Missouri.

Her full statement contains 354 words, 33 of which are first-person pronouns. Most of it is autobiographical: “I love Missouri. I was born and raised here. Waited tables to put myself through college and law school at Mizzou. I have raised my family here. I’ve never left. [Note: except for 12 years vacationing in Washington DC.] . . . We’ve been through a lot together, Missouri and me.”

How icky can you get? The really awful thing is that this could have been “Montana and me” or “New Jersey and me” or “Hoboken and me”: any pol could have written this — and most of them have. The business about waiting tables — they all say something like that. They all maintain that their campaigns are not attempts to thrust their snouts into the gravy bowl; oh no, everything they do is a “fight for what’s right,” for “our values,” as McCaskill put it — the “values” of “this state” (or whatever). We have Missouri values, California values, Cleveland values, any kind of values you like, and every value offers a privilege to serve:

You allowed me to serve the public since I was 28 years old. [There’s an old leftist satirical song that says, “Our leaders are the finest men, / And we elect ’em again and again.”] For decades I have been blessed to get up every single day to make things better and improve people’s lives. [Recall Gillum’s idea about both improving and making better.] That has been my greatest privilege.

Every libertarian must be in agony, having to read yet another assertion that the people are desperately waiting for their lives to be improved by such philanthropists as Claire McCaskill. The real agony, however, begins when one gets to McCaskill’s promise. She puts it in boldface: “I will never stop fighting.”

Even when they lose, they all say that. They all promise to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing their whole lives. No matter what you think, they know what’s right for you. You will never get rid of them. They simply won’t go away.