Back in Twelfth Grade, my writing teacher had us perform a LitCrit exercise where we minutely analyze a poem. The subject poem, now sadly lost to me, described a First Contact scenario between humans and extraterrestrials. In that fleeting moment of contact, the superior aliens have one chance to decide whether to be benevolent or aggressive. Whatever choice they make cannot be undone; it’ll define their identity forever.
Called upon to perform an extemporaneous close reading, I noted language comparing First Contact with European imperialism. White “discoverers” could’ve been cooperative, friendly, and egalitarian with the peoples they contacted; they just weren’t. Except that isn’t quite what I said. Trying to think and speak simultaneously, my words got garbled, as they do, and I said “First Contact between aliens and humans resembles first contact between Indigenous groups and humans.”
I caught my mislocution (spoken before an integrated class of White, Black, and various Asian American students) and apologized immediately. Most students nodded sagely, letting me continue. But one mixed-race Asian American youth wouldn’t forgive, and kept muttering “Great, so now we’re not human” from the back. After the third or fourth time, I angrily barked: “I said I was sorry, dammit!” The class gasped audibly at my anger.
This week, a 19-second clip from C-SPAN circulated on social media. Journalist Pablo Manríquez asks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) if he’s concerned about voting rights and voter suppression in various states, including his. McConnell replies: “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” The clip then cuts out mid-word.
I don’t often feel sympathy for Moscow Mitch McConnell. His underhanded tactics held one Supreme Court seat open nearly a year under President Obama, only to help rush-confirm Donald Trump’s final nominee days before the election. He regularly submarines popular legislation which would help his constituents, just because Democrats sponsored it. He’s stonewalled investigations into the January 6th insurrection, the closest America’s come to a coup d’etat.
Yet this week, watching McConnell struggle to give a consistent answer while still formulating it, I felt great sympathy. I felt transported back to Twelfth Grade, being held to impossibly high standards of accurately parsing somebody else’s statement, and giving my response, on the fly, while also not making mistakes that classmates would find objectionable. Then McConnell, like me, stumbled in his high-wire act, and that’s all anybody remembered.
Those who dislike Republican policies and practices love finding camera-friendly symbols. Remember President Trump’s famous struggles to drink water? Or teenager Sailor Sabol’s inability to hit the high notes while singing The Star-Spangled Banner, one of the most difficult songs to sing? Liberals and leftists love magnifying ordinary, banal cock-ups into metaphors for their opponents’ political failings, maybe because it’s easier than formulating counter-arguments.
Just one time, I genuinely feel for McConnell. He committed a routine error anybody might commit, one I actually have committed. But it’s not the same. Every classmate but one immediately forgave my mistake, perhaps because I caught it unprompted and apologized. McConnell’s opponents, by contrast, edited the clip to remove any context. Did he apologize? Did he even realize what he’d said? I dunno, and you probably don’t either.
Worse, there’s no viable response. Such mistakes can’t go unaddressed in politics, or they’ll metastasize. But what response is available? I had my classmates’ sympathy, and they probably regarded the one guy as a malcontent, until I yelled. That turned me into the bully, and I felt the room’s loyalty abandon me. If your grade-school experience resembled mine, you learned that answering bullies in kind cost you any accrued compassion.
Moments like this, I’m embarrassed to occupy the same approximate ideological terrain with the online left. As with President Trump’s water-glass struggles, we’ve chosen to magnify a trite human error into a crisis, because addressing the underlying problem requires hard work. It’s true, as McConnell says, that African Americans vote in high percentages. It’s the rest of the statement that matters: “No thanks to your party, Mitch!”
Worse, by focusing on an insignificant Freudian slip, the online left has made themselves easier to dismiss later. Next time they muster a substantive accusation, based on facts and evidence, Republicans will hand-wave them away, saying: “These are the juvenile bullies that can’t forgive a routine verbal fluff.” And journalists, famous for their softballs and both-sides-ism, will go along with that. This makes us easier to ignore in the future.
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