Sartorial Snark

Good heavens, we can't have a president who dresses like a foreigner, can we? Because if you dress like one, that means you are one. Just look!




George W. Bush really is Vietnamese!




And Silent Cal Coolidge was a Injun!




And Warren G. Harding was ... let's not go there.

Snark vs. Smart 2

[posted by Callimachus]

Here's another object lesson in the stupidity of snark. It doesn't help that the poor fool picked as his target our friend Michael J. Totten, one of the tightest and most straight-up writers working his way through the Middle East.

Michael J. always describes what is in front of him. He tells you what he sees, and I, and many others, have learned you can trust that for exactly what it is: What one man sees as he goes to these places. If your narrative of what's going on there doesn't have room for what he reports, you better re-check the narrative.

Michael J. is in the category with Michael Yon and a few others who are free from the big-media editing machine and the Narratives-Ready-to-Eat that professional journalists carry with them everywhere. [Remember, I've worked among them for 20-some years.]

These two don't try to paint big pictures, though they will tell you what they think the big pictures are, and what makes them come to their conclusions. It's based on what they see when they go there.

Mr. Snark doesn't go anywhere. He reads stuff online and if it suggests Iraq isn't quite the simplistic fiasco he insists it is, he savages the author. Never mind that one of them is in Iraq regularly and the other isn't.

As if to show how far out of touch with reality he is, our snarker sits at his keyboard and calls a writer who has gone into the war zone to find out what's happening there a ... you guessed it: chickenhawk.

If the gasbag right truly believed in this occupation they call a war, not only would they enlist, but they'd reach out to the left to build support here at home. Instead they resort to petty insults and cheap shots, trying to rub our noses in their superiority.

Now, the bit about war supporters needing to engage skeptics in respectful and persuasive discussion might almost be a point worth making. Except that "petty insults and cheap shots, trying to rub our noses in their superiority" is exactly what Mr. Snark is doing and not at all what Michael J. is doing. And Mr. Snark clearly has no openness to being persuaded of anything on this matter -- he's already decided his den is a better place to understand Baghdad than, well, Baghdad.

The trigger for all this is a throwaway line in Totten's piece, in which Totten notes that some very Red State characters who work as contractors in the Middle East come away with a worldliness and sophistication that can run rings around the faux cosmopolitanism of many a sophisticate who considers skiing vacations in the French Alps to be globetrotting.

Willie and Larry work construction for private companies in harsh places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They are both well-rounded individuals with Red State tastes and political views and a worldliness and cosmopolitanism that surpasses that of most people who live in the Blue States.

Note, please, that he is talking about regional identities, not merely political sensibilities. Though he identifies them by their common handles nowadays, which are based on political splits, he's talking about cultures here, not votes.

The line is pegged to two specific characters with whom Totten crosses paths. They aren't made out to be great men or heroes. That's not his style at all. But they are recognizable types. I know some contractors, too, who rarely left the Deep South before they got swept up in this post-911 adventure, and it's been fascinating to watch them grow, yet not change. The skill set they evolve riding motorcycles up Lookout Mountain or hunting water moccasins or dealing with small town planning commissions and traffic cops finds remarkable opportunities to connect with the strange-but-familiar realities in Iraq.

But Totten isn't telling you "this is how everyone is here." He's telling you, as always, "this is what I saw." And, for those of us not in the place, what he sees is an essential part of understanding what is there. When he writes, "Lots of them [soldiers] are from Georgia and Texas," he means those he encountered. It probably has something to do with the units he moves among. He's not making a statistical statement about the U.S. military.

Snarky just doesn't get it.

If you want to know the big statistics, which are another essential part, you have to go get them. And Mr. Snark, accustomed perhaps to being spoon-fed truths by Huffington Post et al, proves singularly inept at this.

Totten writes, "Individual cities-within-a-city are home to millions of people all by themselves. The sheer enormity of the place puts the almost daily car bomb attacks into perspective. The odds that you personally will be anywhere near the next car bomb or IED are microscopic."

Snarky scorns this by citing a news article that includes the line, "The latest fatalities took the military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,625, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures." He then calculates a percentage based on that number and concludes it's 1 percent. Measurable. Totten is wrong.

Except Totten never made such a statement about the U.S. military. He's talking about the city of Baghdad, with its millions of residents, not the 150,000 or so Americans in uniform in the country. Even if he were, the 3,625 figure is total casualties from all causes. If you break it down, IEDs (1,503) and car bombs (102) account for less than half of military fatalities.

How many ways can Snarky get it wrong in just a few graphs? Now there's a statistic I'm not ready to tackle.

Snark vs. Smart

[posted by Callimachus]

Here's a quick lesson in stupid from our friends on the left.

Start with this little campaign trail out-take:

A question for President Bush on immigration rose up like a ghost from the grave this afternoon in Ohio.

Only the questioner was a 13-year old blonde-headed girl, Jessica Hackerd, from Brecksville, Ohio, who immediately broke into tears after making her inquiry.

"Mr. President, I know immigration has been a big problem in the U.S. And what is your next step with the immigration bill?" Jessica asked Mr. Bush, during a question and answer period after a speech Mr. Bush gave to a Cleveland business group.

Mr. Bush's sarcastic reply -- a wry "yeah, thanks" -- drew laughter from the crowd of 400. But the attention caused young Jessica, who characterized herself in an interview afterward as very shy, to immediately tear up.

Bush quickly tried to set things right, and made a sustained effort, but the damage had been done.

Cut to Michelle Malkin, the kind of political voice that in Stendhal's France would have been called an "ultra." She has a huge Internet following, and has bitterly opposed Bush on the immigration bill.

Remember that the girl, Jessica, asked a general question, without any sort of slant for or against the late bill. The article, read end to end, doesn't give any indication that she has a political agenda -- she is, after all, 13.

She asked the question about immigration, she said, because her father, Richard, has engaged her in conversations about the topic, and that was what popped into her head.

Malkin evidently has read the article. She makes it not an immigration issue, but another revelation about Bush's personality, about the arrogance of making a little self-serving joke and forgetting he's got a young person in front of him quivering in the spotlight:

Do you think there’s anyone in the White House who might possibly realize that it’s precisely this flippant attitude that has turned off so many grass-roots conservatives and eroded the president’s political capital when he needs it the most?

So now you've got the president in a very vulnerable position, Simon-Cowell-in-chief, having put a civic-minded seventh-grader in tears, and having been dressed down for it by one of the most powerful voices that usually bolsters him.

He's caught in a run-down. And what does your snark-loving left-wing blogger do? All he has to do is make the throw to home and complete the play to nail the president he is supposedly trying to defeat.

He takes a big swing and hits -- the young girl and the anti-Bush commentator. Honest to crap. Even a Phillie wouldn't bungle it that badly.

The post is titled "Cry little racists. Cry your white-hot tears of hate." Malkin is someone "who knows something about being gawky, awkward, and emotionally stunted" and Jessica and her honest question is assigned to the class of "13-year-old drama queens who have just been told they can't go to the mall...."

Way to go, dumbass. But, ho boy, what excellent snark!

But If You Must Snark ...

[Posted by reader_iam]

Here's a glossary to help you do it liberally. Any nominations for 1) most useful words, 2) funniest words, 3) most unfair words, 4) most fair words or 5) your choice?

(If anyone knows of a comparable tool from other perspectives, let me know; having come across this glossary, I did poke around for something similar, but without success.)

Re-Snark

[posted by Callimachus]

The Paragraph Farmer undertakes a defense of snark against my earlier assault on it as a rhetorical style. I was hoping someone would undertake a defense, and I'm gratified the gauntlet was picked up.

Part of the problem will be deciding what snark is, beyond "I know it when I see it" -- and Patrick and I seem to generally agree on it when we see it. Cribbing from my own comments thread, here's my -- not definition, but description:

As a form of humor, snark is part invective, part sarcasm, but the weakest parts of both. Its intent is to inflict pain and humiliation on the object and along the way garner admiration for the inflicter. It does not try to change my opinions, only to mock me for having them.

"Snark" as a noun is an early 20th century derivation from "snarky," which is a figurative use of the verb "snark," whose literal sense is "to snort." It's imitative of the sound of snorting, and in some Scandinavian languages it has this literal sense still. The figurative suggestion is of "snorting with derision." And if you bear that image in mind, you'll be better able to recognize pure snark and discern it from other sorts of lacerating humor, such as satire.

Snark is essentially words expended in the interest of making the speaker and his allies feel satisfied, and the sbark object uncomfortable, for things being the way they are. It has no interest in persuasion -- it presumes the lines already are firmly drawn and the fight is to the death. But neither does it strike any blows in the fight. It makes no convincing refutation of the opposition, and it attempts no serious counter-argument. It is taunts sneered by those too lazy or cowardly to get into the fight, or too bloated with their own righteousness to seek to persuade their opponents or even to treat them as sane people.

On to Patrick:

He correctly identifies snark as a tone, more than a pure humor. This is in some degree a correction of my post, and I think it's a valid one. It's a seasoning -- as he agrees -- not a main ingredient. The trouble is, an awful lot of what passes on the blogs, and especially on the leftish ones I read, is all snark, no content. That is what I am addressing.

He brings up Dorothy Parker (and he might as well have thrown in the rest of the Algonquin group). Certainly her best-known work is a series of snarky quips. Trouble is, they make pretty thin gruel for a literary reputation. Her short stories are not very powerful reading now, and even her literary reputation as the queen of that scene has been well eclipsed by Dawn Powell and others. She's more interesting now for her life than her work. Really, who remembers or reads any of the round table nowadays? Snark's buzz does not stick.

Patrick anticipates my reclassifying snark-of-which-I-approve as "honest invective" or "keen satire." I will disappoint him. Invective or satire can be flavored with snark. But snark alone is neither of those.

Satire has an ultimate aim of amending the morals and manners of some group or society: Swift's satire had a purpose -- he wanted to change specific policies and to persuade people to do so. If he had only snarked about them, he would have had no such purpose, other than to make himself feel good for what he felt.

In fact, changing the policies would have pulled the rug out from under the self-satisfaction of the snarker, whose self-worth is rooted in opposition. This is the really insidious thing about snark, and why I hate it so much, and why I see it as such a corrosive drug on the modern-day left in America.

Invective, too, though it is amenable to snark, ultimately aims at a general audience -- the public -- rather than the private circle of the writer's political allies, or the target of the writing. It seeks to discredit the misconduct in question so that the public will find it odious and rise against it. Yet pure snark takes no care to be less odious to the public than the misconduct it calls out. It takes no note of the public at all, except as another out-group not privileged to stand with the snarkers in their impotent snorting.

Both satire and invective are crippled by an excess of snark.

He mentions some bloggers I do not read or know, and then he mentions Ann Coulter, whom I certainly do know, and identifies her as "having built a career on snark," which certainly is correct. And she's a perfect example of the self-destructive force of an overdose of snark.

Her arguments, when she actually stops the insult machine long enough to make them, are lame and imperfect. They are as shoddy as Michael Moore's. And when she attempts them, she does damage to her own cause, first by making them so publicly and so poorly, and second by associating them with herself, and the public persona she inhabits which is so odious to people in the middle ground who might be persuaded by the argument if it were made well and made by someone not so proud of being a bomb-tosser. She gets her facts wrong, uses facts she thinks exist but do not, and doesn't bother to correct herself. In all this she discredits her cause. Her arguments (compared to, say George Will, when he happens to take on the same topic) are as rotten as a junkie's teeth. It's the sort of intellectual flabbiness that comes from too easy reliance on snark. Her defense-of-McCarthy argument is a classic example.

[As for Moore, he is a propagandist in his work, and a supple and effective one. When he speaks or writes, he rarely rises above snark, which is a saving grace for the nation, because it exposes his essential nature and undoes somewhat the effect of his filmmaking.]

Patrick believes there is "good, even necessary, snark" and that it "makes the case" for something. Makes it to whom? And to what purpose? Show me one person who ever has been converted out of error or convinced of truth by snark alone.

He objects to my enlistment of Mark Twain and Galileo among those who "came not by snark." By now he should be aware that I am talking about the contemporary American political scene, especially as it is represented by the blog world, especially on the left. And I am concerned especially with the art of persuasion which is the fuel of a democratic political system such as ours. It wasn't my idea or my ideal, but it is the one Americans have chosen to have. It can be done well or poorly.

He points out cases where Twain seemed to be using snark. He suggests Galileo was using snark in a case where Galileo actually was using a straw man to perform satire. But if Twain had done nothing but snark, he'd have no more reputation than Dorothy Parker. And if Galileo had done snark instead of declaring, "it moves," we might still believe in Ptolemy's universe.

My model, held up for the left to -- I hope -- recognize, is Twain railing against the Philippine War or vivisection, and Galileo maintaining the science of his observation against the dogma of the Church. I chose those quite deliberatelty as mirroring many of the modern left's positions, as it sees itself, in America. Twain's force is in the sarcasm, the irony, the invective, the cynicism of his writing. His writing here is graphic, and uses snark as seasoning. As a result, the text crackles with electricity and it thunders with indignation. When Twain writes To the Person Sitting in Darkness, is he merely congratulating himself on being better than his opponents? Is he merely preaching to the choir? Or is he setting out to change minds, and, in the process, change the world?

Snark does none of that. Nor does it care to. It either doesn't care, or it feels too impotent to do anything else.

Snark That Works For Me

[Posted by reader_iam]

You know, by his use of "snarkmeisters that we are," skippy himself implies that his post about the recent ironies of being Al Gore is snark." But honestly, I think the first part of skippy's post is fair comment and as for the second example--well, it's such an odd coincidence, who could resist? It's more "truth that's stranger than fiction" than snark, if you ask me.

Excess of Snark

[posted by Callimachus]

I tried to read a page of Atrios today. It was impossible. The writing is so coded, so terse, so self-referential, so masturbatory with in-jokes and snide asides to the regulars, so tilted toward the ironic instead of the literal, that "Atrios" seems to me to now qualify as its own language. It is hived off and sealed from the mainstream, and deliberately so: More support for the suggestion (which actually was made proudly on an Atrios-like blog) that the oppositional leftish anti-administration/anti-war blog crew really fancies itself the cool, artsy kids occupying their one table off in a corner of the high school cafeteria. There they all sat, convinced they were alone because they were exclusive, not because everyone else found them, in one way or another, insufferable.

That is where reliance on snark will get you.

With Snark

[posted by Callimachus]

Snark is the wit's pleasure in his own stink.

Snark mistakes grafitti for architecture.

With snark hath no man a point of good persuasion. Solzhenitzyn came not by snark. Nor Mark Twain; Galileo came not by snark.

Snark lacks courage. It is the self-satisfied snort of slaves and eunuchs. It is a smug cakewalk entertainment for chattels that makes the performer feel special and changes nothing.

No tyrant fears snark.

Snark is rhetorical junk food. All salt, no meat. Stuff your face with it all day and you gain no nourishment.

Snark is to inquiry and discourse what Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity. It is a swamp of poisons into which nothing thoughtful goes and from which nothing emerges untainted.

Snark is not opposition. It is not honest invective or keen satire or moral outrage. It dulls the blades of all those.

Snark is the smacked ass smirking at the hand that slapped it.

Savvy modern tyrants, if they could, would prescribe the voice and tone of dissent. And they would choose snark for that voice as the least effective one imaginable.

Snark is the chirp of minds that choose to be small yet can't cease to feel important. It is the trade of shiny feeble tugs that can ply no rough waves or tow no thought longer than a slur.

Snark gives the lazy thinker an excuse to write anyhow, sans imagination, sans purpose. It finds no truth; it exposes no error. It is wit borrowed on interest and spent wastefully. It debases the coinage of commentary.