Emptying English

Public servants, it seems, have infrequent use for the English language.

Rep. Baron Hill’s town-hall meeting gaffe provides a salient example. In a widely viewed clip posted to YouTube, the 9th District’s own congressman rides roughshod over a polite student journalist’s inquiry about why she is being prohibited from filming at the meeting.

“This is my town-hall meeting, and I set the rules,” Hill replies to a wave of boos from the crowd.

Realizing his mistake, Hill made a sorry effort to sugarcoat his message without retreating from the substance of what he has said: “Let me repeat that one more time. This is my town-hall meeting for you.”

More disturbingly, Hill continued, “And you’re not gonna tell me how to run my congressional office.”

All appears to have been recorded and posted online by a third filmer who Hill’s staff did not see at the back of the room.

The 9th District’s Republican congressional hopefuls will choose giddily from these lines and broadcast their chosen segments liberally before the November election.

More importantly, Hill’s public relations nightmare is illustrative of a serious plague in politics. Hill’s slip is but a single example of the misappropriation of words in public debate.

To be sure, Hill does not stand alone in abusing the meaning of the town-hall meeting. It slyly conjures up thoughts of self-governance and the equal worth of the opinions of the assembled people. It suggests that everyone present has the right to an equal say in the decisions undertaken. 

Yet the recent use of the town-hall meeting has been a far cry from Athenian democracy in the Midwest. Accordingly, Hill asserts that the town-hall meeting belongs to him.

Representative democracy works through the election of an individual who votes as he or she sees fit at the risk of being voted out of office in subsequent elections.

For this reason, “town hall” obviously misnames the sort of meetings politicians have taken to hosting. “Publicity stunt” or “non-election-year stumping” would more accurately describe these assemblages.

Hill’s assertion that constituents will not tell him how to run his congressional office initially appears to be a brazen challenge to the representative nature of democracy. If we took him seriously, we might conclude that he believes himself able to impose limits on constituents’ free speech.

However, Hill’s performance at the meeting is so absolutely ridiculous on so many levels that there is no reason to believe this line has any real meaning either.

Indeed, politicians routinely use words in such a self-serving fashion that it becomes difficult to hold them accountable for anything beyond their own re-election.

Of course, Democrats like Hill do not stand alone in their assault on the English language. The Tea Party hurls a laughably broad list of words at Democratic politicians: socialism, communism and fascism.

These formulations are all too transparent: My town-hall meetings are synonymous with everything good, and the ambiguous “other,” be it socialism or student journalists, with everything bad, or worse, evil.

Nietzsche would be distressed.
 

E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu