If you’ve ever attended an open meeting regarding any function of your local government, you’ll understand how crucial it is to American democracy that ordinary citizens not be expected to represent themselves with the vocabulary of lawyers or the poise of politicians. Still: Of the many Michiganders the Trump campaign trotted before state legislators early this month to air dubious allegations of electoral fraud, some worked hard to convey a sense of real gravity and sobriety. The actual content of their testimony may have been, by turns, witless, pointless and bizarre — for the most part, they failed to understand mundane features of election law and thus considered them suspicious — but there was, surprisingly often, a real attempt made to dress nonsense in a presentable suit.
The one among them who found real notoriety wasn’t the most polished, though, or even the most comical. Mellissa Carone, who had worked in I.T. support for Dominion Voting Systems — a company that provided election technology to most Michigan counties — waxed wild and impertinent as soon as lawmakers started asking her questions, flinging claims of every kind of fraud imaginable. Even when a Republican legislator tried, gently, to steer her toward some sort of evaluable assertion, she had none of it, shooting darts with her eyebrows and insinuating that he himself might be part of a cover-up.
It was her tone that sent videos of Carone’s testimony circulating online — a mode of speech familiar across the country but especially redolent for anyone who truly loves the upper Midwest. There’s a special note of aggressive contempt that can be layered into the diphthongs and glottal stops of what linguists call Inland North American English, and Carone used it lavishly. She embraced, under questioning, that rhetorical mode in which argument is conducted mostly via attitude: derisive stares, obstinate snorts, the sort of stuff that tells you a fight is going to be less about the facts than about who’s more prepared to tackle someone in the middle of a Meijer supercenter. Carone so resembled a particular “S.N.L.” character — Cecily Strong (who hails from the Chicago suburbs) as the snotty, incomprehensible Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party — that it was inevitable a version of her would turn up on that Saturday’s show. By the next day, reports were spreading about Carone’s criminal history. The best case she could have presented against Dominion at that point was that it had employed her in the first place.
Just one day earlier, across the country, a man in Georgia grabbed attention with a very different piece of video. Gabriel Sterling, a state elections official, appeared at a news conference to thunder that attacks on the election had “gone too far” — that the paranoiac lies being circulated were on the verge of getting someone hurt or killed, and that Republicans who refused to lower the temperature were corroding “the backbone of democracy.” For a certain stripe of liberal, this was pure wish fulfillment, the kind of thing they’d spent five years constantly craving despite every indication it would happen rarely and matter hardly at all: a Republican forced to openly stand on principle against the pressure of his peers.
Even beyond that, though, Sterling’s address was just plain watchable: urgent, sincere, impassioned — exactly the kind of thing we’ve been taught, by decades of earnest films and Aaron Sorkin teleplays, to see as a stirring outcropping of authentic humanity into the hot air and hedging of politics. But then the problem — the intractable, signature problem of our moment — is that for many people, the same was true of Carone.
It’s not as if we’ve had any shortage, lately, of people clamoring for the role of vivid truth-tellers against an incorrigible system. Our president, for one, learned long ago that people enjoyed watching him abandon the decorum usually brought to the office. Add to that his unique lack of attachment to consistent principles or positions or sets of facts, and often all that’s left when the White House speaks is raw interpersonal drama — taunting, baiting, shaming, flattering or humiliating whomever it is that’s being addressed. This is the approach to communication that made Carone more watchable than any of the more polished crackpots around her. It tends to stick in the mind. The Trump administration spent less time engaging the press than any since Reagan’s, but you may well carry forward more indelible memories of its surreal theater than you will from eight years’ worth of Obama briefings — whether you thought that spectacle came at the expense of the presidency, or the press corps, or just the nation.
This rhetorical mode is usually reserved for people who are not in charge of anything and who can put it to righteous purposes as easily as corrosive ones. An example that has stuck with me came in June, when the Los Angeles Police Commission scheduled an online forum to listen to public concerns. It’s a standard municipal ritual for officials to occasionally let themselves be dressed down by the public, but something about the digital setting of this session lent it a special vigor. Commissioners were treated to more than seven hours of righteous abuse, with callers lining up to deliver their own personal blends of fact-based faultfinding and creatively profane insults, through which the officials could only sit, impassive and professional. It has lodged in my mind as a symbol of the number of bright, well-informed, motivated young people who are losing the last shreds of formal respect they once expected to have for their leaders and elders, internalizing forever that the people who manage the world may well be hapless against it. “I am 16 years old, and I know more than all of you,” one caller said, and it wasn’t even meant as an insult — she seemed genuinely stricken by the possibility that this was all a police commission was.
The differences between that caller and Carone could fill libraries. So could the differences between Carone and Sterling. But to different groups of people, each will appear valiant in the same way. They will look like the spark of life in the face of dull, unresponsive institutions and officials who drone on in calm, measured voices even as they lose control of the things around them. These people, and so many others like them, will convey the kind of urgency that appeals when you sense that something is wrong but have no interest in the difficult work of actually learning what it is.
The other witnesses in Michigan tried to channel a grand falsehood into the language of officialdom. It’s Carone you’ll keep hearing about, though, because she took questions in the style of the present: not as a witness, but as a dramatist. Why would she confine herself to specific, comprehensible claims? It hardly mattered what she was saying or what facts she wanted to assert; that’s precisely the lure and the danger of it. At points, the people in the room behind her clapped or chuckled approvingly.
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December 17, 2020 at 05:00PM
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The Tactic of Our Time: Sound Urgent, Be Incomprehensible - The New York Times
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