*95*Cavett
April 11, 2008, 6:20 pm
Memo to Petraeus & Crocker: More Laughs, Please
Once
again it is time to bid aloha to that sober team of mirthless entertainers,
Petraeus & Crocker.
It’s
hard to imagine where you could find another pair of such sleep-inducing performers.
I
can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with
honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the
peak of his brilliance. He talked about meeting General Westmoreland in the Vietnam days. Mort,
in a virtuoso display of his uncanny detailed knowledge — and memory — of such
things, recited the lengthy list (”Distinguished Service Medal, Croix de Guerre
with Chevron, Bronze Star, Pacific Campaign” and on and on), naming each of the
half-acre of decorations, medals, ornaments, campaign ribbons and other
fripperies festooning the general’s sternum in gaudy display. Finishing the
detailed list, Mort observed, “Very impressive!” Adding, “If you’re twelve.”
(As
speakers, both Petraeus and Crocker are guilty of unbearable sesquipedalianism,
a word wickedly inflicted on me by my English-teaching mother. It’s one of
those words that is what it says. From the Latin, literally “using
foot-and-a-half-long words.” We all learned the word for words that sound like
what they say — like “click” or “pop” or “boom” or “hiss” — but I’m sure the
mercifully defunct Famous Writers School surely forbade using the “sesqui” word
and “onomatopoeia” in the same paragraph. (You can have fun with both of them
at your next cocktail party.)
But
back to our story. Never in this breathing world have I seen a person clog up
and erode his speaking — as distinct from his reading — with more “uhs,” “ers”
and “ums” than poor Crocker. Surely he has never seen himself talking: “Uh,
that is uh, a, uh, matter that we, er, um, uh are carefully, uh, considering.”
(Not a parody, an actual Crocker sentence. And not even the worst.)
These
harsh-on-the-ear insertions, delivered in his less than melodious,
hoarse-sounding tenor, are maddening. And their effect is to say that the
speaker is painfully unsure of what he wants, er, um, to say.
If
Crocker’s collection of these broken shards of verbal crockery were eliminated
from his testimony, everyone there would get home at least an hour earlier.
Petraeus
commits a different assault on the listener. And on the language. In addition
to his own pedantic delivery, there is his turgid vocabulary. It reminds you of
Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when
talking to “Eyewitness News.” Its rule: never use a short word where a longer
one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of “learnedness”
and “scholasticism” — possibly even that dread thing, “intellectualism” — to
their talk. Sorry, I mean their “articulation.”
No
crook ever gets out of the car. A “perpetrator exits the vehicle.” (Does any
cop say to his wife at dinner, “Honey, I stubbed my toe today as I exited our
vehicle”?) No “man” or “woman” is present in Copspeak. They are replaced by
that five-syllable, leaden ingot, the “individual.” The other day, there issued
from a fire chief’s mouth, “It contributed to the obfuscation of what
eventually eventuated.” This from a guy who looked like he talked, in real
life, like Rocky Balboa. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Who
imposes this phony, academic-sounding verbal junk on brave and hard-working men
and women who don’t need the added burden of trying to talk like effete
characters from Victorian novels?
And,
General, there is no excuse anywhere on earth for a stillborn monster like
“ethnosectarian conflict,” as Jon Stewart so hilariously pointed out.
What
would the general be forced to say if it weren’t for the icky,
precious-sounding “challenge” that he leans so heavily on? That politically
correct term, which was created so that folks who are legally blind, deaf,
clumsy, crippled, impotent, tremor-ridden, stupid, addicted or villainously
ugly are really none of those unhappy things at all. They are merely
challenged. (Are these euphemisms supposed to make them feel better?) And no
one need be unlucky enough to be dead or hideously wounded anymore. Those
unfortunates are merely “casualties” — a sort of restful-sounding word.
(I
have a friend who would like the opportunity to say to our distinguished
warrior, “General Petraeus, my son was killed in one of your challenges.”)
Petraeus
uses “challenge” for a rich variety of things. It covers ominous developments,
threats, defeats on the battlefield and unfound solutions to ghastly
happenings. And of course there’s that biggest of challenges, that slapstick
band of silent-movie comics called, flatteringly, the Iraqi “fighting forces.”
(A perilous one letter away from “fighting farces.”) The ones who are supposed
to allow us to bring troops home but never do.
Petraeus’s
verbal road is full of all kinds of bumps and lurches and awkward oddities. How
about “ongoing processes of substantial increases in personnel”?
Try
talking English, General. You mean more
soldiers.
It’s
like listening to someone speaking a language you only partly know. And who’s
being paid by the syllable. You miss a lot. I guess a guy bearing up under such
a chestload of hardware — and pretty ribbons in a variety of decorator colors —
can’t be expected to speak like ordinary mortals, for example you and me. He
should try once saying — instead of “ongoing process of high level engagements”
— maybe something in colloquial English? Like: “fights” or “meetings” (or
whatever the hell it’s supposed to mean).
I
find it painful to watch this team of two straight men, straining on the potty
of language. Only to deliver such . . . what? Such knobbed and lumpy artifacts
of superfluous verbiage? (Sorry, now I’m doing it…)
But I
must hand it to his generalship. He did say something quite clearly and admirably and I am grateful for
his frankness. He told us that our gains are largely imaginary: that our
alleged “progress” is “fragile and reversible.” (Quite an accomplishment in our
sixth year of war.) This provides, of course, a bit of pre-emptive covering of
the general’s hindquarters next time that, true to Murphy’s Law, things turn
sour again.
Back
to poor Crocker. His brows are knitted. And he has a perpetually alarmed
expression, as if, perhaps, he feels something crawling up his leg.
Could
it be he is being overtaken by the thought that an honorable career has been
besmirched by his obediently doing the dirty work of the tinpot Genghis Khan of
Crawford, Texas?
The one whose foolish military misadventure seems to increasingly resemble that
of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn?
Not
an apt comparison, I admit.
Custer
sent only 258 soldiers to their deaths.
