"... and that he was not talking about political violence generally. But if discussing a type of automotive technology in bloody terms seems odd to some, it fits in the increasingly brutal language Mr. Trump has been applying to electric vehicles, one of his favorite foils. He has long claimed electric cars will 'kill' America’s auto industry. He has called them an 'assassination' of jobs. He has declared that the Biden administration 'ordered a hit job on Michigan manufacturing' by encouraging the sales of electric cars.... Jennifer Mercieca, author of 'Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,' noted that... 'his speech was so disjointed it makes it difficult to know if he was threatening the U.A.W. workers, the U.S. auto manufacturers, or the nation as a whole.... In a sense, it doesn’t matter because Trump was threatening all at once.... Trump paints a dire picture of the nation, threatening economic ruin if he isn’t put in charge.... Using threats of force to gain power over a nation is authoritarian... not democratic.'"
I should note that Trump's antagonists paint a dire picture of the nation ruined if Trump is put in charge. There's a lot of metaphorically violent rhetoric going around, but it's only denounced when it comes from the Trump side.
Much has been made of Trump's use of "bloodbath," but if Biden had used that word in his State of the Union, it would have been praised as feisty and fiery.
"But this raises the question of why, exactly, we should care that Biden is using these wonder drugs to elevate his public performance. After all, in sports, we limit steroid use and other performance-enhancing drugs because those drugs have awful side effects, and give those willing to accept them an unfair advantage. What are the side effects of Biden’s alleged drug use?... Or is the idea that Biden is somehow rigging the election by using some kind of drugs that turn him into an energetic public speaker?"
I didn't watch it live for the same reason I didn't watch "Dragnet" when it was on at 9 p.m. on Thursdays in 1954. It was past my bedtime. I was 3.
I'm 73 — 8 years younger than Biden — and I'm in the Central Time Zone. He gave that speech at age 81 at 10 p.m. at night and went on until midnight, and I see he was feisty....
I wasn't feisty. I was lying down in my sleep position — a complicated arrangement involving 4 down pillows — and planning to more or less listen, listen until I entered the world of dreams — a place not necessarily more pleasant that the House chamber (last night I woke up screaming at nonexistent crocodiles) — but a place where I sojourn for 7 hours rebuilding the strength of a body that naturally rises at 4 a.m., maybe 3.
As I say, I am 73. I am not feisty at 9 at night and certainly not at midnight. If something were important enough though — stand here in front of millions and read this teleprompter in a dramatic, masterful style — I'd do it properly. I wouldn't yell irascibly. You wouldn't have to shoot me with drugs. In fact, that would be dangerously risky. I might behave erratically. I might yell irascibly. Yell irascibly for 2 hours? What would people think? Is the press on my side? Give me the drugs then! The press is on my side! They'll say I was "feisty."
Calling an old person "feisty" is like calling an African American person "articulate"....
We know what you mean. You're revealing that you have a stereotype and you're giving this person credit for setting himself apart from it.
But I was embracing the old-person stereotype, embracing my pillows, drifting off to sleep, and not really appreciating the irascible tone of voice. But I got to sleep. I've slept through the night. I did not wake up screaming. I'm well rested and perfectly lucid — I think! — composing these remarks before setting out to commune with the sunrise.
I knew I would have the video of the full speech. What's so special about watching it live? Looking up what was on TV on Thursday at 9 in 1954 — so I could write "Dragnet" in the first sentence of this post — I happened upon this:
Despite hit filmed programs such as I Love Lucy, both William S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC were said to be determined to keep most programming on their networks live. Filmed programs were said to be inferior to the spontaneous nature of live television.
Take away the magic of live television, and what is the State of the Union address? We are perfectly free to watch the entire thing on YouTube the next day. Or never. Or in sliced out snippets — a highlight reel or a collection of verbal slips or biggest applause lines. Or we can just read about it. Did anything happen? Did some grieving mother hear her daughter's name said aloud? Was the name precisely correctly pronounced? Did the President hold up a button? Did he recharge his campaign?
Was he feisty?
***
"Feisty," the OED tells us, is based on the familiar word "fist." It's a punch-in-the-nose concept. Fisty. Definition: "Aggressive, excitable, touchy." We're told it's American slang, originally dialect, and the OED has the quotes to prove it:
1913 Feisty means when a feller's allers wigglin' about, wantin' ever'body to see him, like a kid when the preacher comes.
H. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders 94
1926
That-there feisty bay mare jumped straight upwards and broke the tongue outen the plow.
E. M. Roberts, Time of Man 152
1965
Luther gets a little feisty after a few drinks, and he began to argue with him.
‘D. Shannon’, Death-bringers (1966) xiii. 162
1968
He couldn't shake her loose—she hung on to his arm, feisty as a terrier.
J. Potts, Trash Stealer xiii. 148
***
Post-sunrise opinion: The morning after, it is possible to see that the SOTU was a campaign speech. Every morning, there was a campaign speech yesterday.
In the comments: I'm getting a lot of pushback on the etymology of "feisty." It's not the fist that is the hand in an aggressive clench? It's a dog, you say? Well, let's go back to the OED. I see I made an assumption. What I was seeing at the OED entry "feisty" was:
I had not clicked on the boldface "fist." But if I had, I would not have gone to the entry for the kind of "fist" that is the clenched hand. I'd have gone to a separate entry, with 3 things together: a fart, a puffball fungus, and a dog:
1. A breaking wind, a foul smell, stink. Obsolete....
2. The fungus usually known as puff-ball.... Obsolete....
3. U.S. dialect. A small dog....
The etymology pointed us to #3, so — no matter how much we might enjoy thinking "feisty" means farty — we must accept that the comparison is to a small dog. Yappy, hopping around, over-excited. Still farty though. You see the connection. It's always the dog.
Back in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson stunned the nation — and many of his own advisers — by adding a secret 90-second bombshell finale to an Oval Office address on Vietnam that he was pulling out of the presidential campaign. With war raging, he said, he should not “devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.”
No one should expect President Biden to emulate Johnson during his State of the Union on Thursday night, no matter how much some Democrats and commentators have floated the idea....
The SOTU is still over an hour away, but please put your SOTU comments on this post.
"I am pleased to inform you that tomorrow night we will be doing a LIVE, Play by Play, of Crooked Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address. I will correct, in rapid response, any and all inaccurate Statements, especially pertaining to the Border and his Weaponization of the DOJ, FBI, A.G.s, and District Attorneys, to go after his Political Opponent, ME (something never done before in this Country!). We did this once before to tremendous success - Beating All Records. It is important for the Country to get the TRUTH!"
In another part of the show — this was last Friday — he said if it's between Biden and Trump, he'll say what he's said before: He'd vote for Biden if Biden is just a head in a jar of blue liquid.
"... not just to be the de facto center of attention, but to invoke something pure, even holy. There’s a reason guests aren’t supposed to wear white to a wedding; there’s also a reason Jesus is so often pictured in white. When Marjorie Taylor Greene wore a white coat with a fur collar while heckling the president during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, many on social media saw Cruella de Vil.... Greene’s outfit Tuesday — a white, knee-length dress paired with an ecru Overland alpaca wool coat with an alpaca fur trim on the hood and collar — was surprising for a handful of reasons. Not only is a white ensemble an unusual choice for the wintry, business-formal State of the Union (and a coat an unusual choice for an indoor event), but the silhouette itself, luxe, frothy and hyperfeminine, was somewhat outside the norm for Greene, who tends to opt for clean lines and often wears black or red."
I didn't watch. I don't spend my time like that. Why watch when you can read? What do you think could happen? If the Speaker of the House tears up the speech, there will be a video clip. Did somebody shout out "Liar!" again? I'd rather hear about it after the fact than sit there watching and waiting for something to go wrong. I don't want anything to go wrong, and I don't believe anything useful will be said. If it is, I'll read about it the next day. That's much faster.
Stray quotes from the transcript:
We’re seeing these fields of dreams transform the heartland....Urban. Suburban. Rural. Tribal.
And we’re just getting started....
American-made lumber, glass, drywall, fiber optic cables.... Let’s face reality.... Let’s give public school teachers a raise.... I’ve never had to have the talk with my children – Beau, Hunter, and Ashley – that so many Black and Brown families have had with their children.... I’ve made clear with President Xi that we seek competition, not conflict.... [L]ast year Jill and I re-ignited the Cancer Moonshot that President Obama asked me to lead.... My fellow Americans, we meet tonight at an inflection point.... We must be the nation we have always been at our best.... We are a good people, the only nation in the world built on an idea.
That all of us, every one of us, is created equal in the image of God... As I stand here tonight, I have never been more optimistic about the future of America. We just have to remember who we are....
We just have to remember who we are... cue the dementia jokes.
I do have time to write out that I remember when David Foster Wallace observed the foolishness of press releases that announce that a press release announces something.* That is, it's silly to have an announcement phrased as if it's pointing to something else, when it is the very thing it is announcing.
Here, we've got "The White House Announces Guest List...." when it really means "Here Is The White House Guest List."
__________________
* In "Big Red Son," Wallace quoted a press release from Adult Video News that said "The nominations for the 15th Annual AVN Awards were announced today," then dropped a footnote: "The passive mood here’s a bit disingenuous — the release itself is announcing them." A bit disingenuous... ha ha.
"'Biden's campaign platform included ending the federal death penalty and solitary confinement, decriminalizing marijuana, and using clemency to free federal inmates serving sentences for some nonviolent and drug crimes. More than a year into the new administration, few of those promises have been fulfilled, frustrating criminal justice reform advocates.... Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were both reluctantly dragged by their party to the left on criminal justice issues, and rising murder rates have made many Democrats hesitant to stray too close to any 'defund the police' rhetoric. (One of Biden's bipartisan applause lines of the night was calling for putting more police on the streets: 'The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to FUND the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.')"
"The group, which is calling itself the 'people’s convoy,' is one of several starting from different parts of the country and due to start arriving in the US capital at various points through to late next week – all inspired by the demonstrations that recently paralyzed Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, for weeks....
Some of the trucker groups are scheduled to arrive in time for Joe Biden’s State of the Union address next Tuesday, 1 March....
The Pentagon said on Tuesday it had approved 400 national guard troops from the District of Columbia, who would not carry weapons, to help at traffic posts from this Saturday through 7 March. About 50 large tactical vehicles were also approved to be placed at traffic posts. In addition, up to 300 national guard troops from outside of Washington were approved to come to the city to assist at traffic posts if needed.
Brian Brase, a truck driver who is one of the organizers, said that, regardless of where the trucks stop, 'we’re not going anywhere' until the group’s demands are met.... We plan to stay a while and hope they don’t escalate it the way Trudeau did with his disgusting government overreach'... Organisers bill the convoy as non-partisan, trucker-led, and supported by a wide range of ethnic minorities and religious faiths.
However, as in Canada, significant elements of the protest appeared to attract a rightwing crowd...."
... but absolutely every response to it that I'm seeing on Twitter is attacking him for editing video to change the sequence — like it's dishonest, showing a real event in a way that it did not happen.
This is exactly like the montage Trump tweeted after the State of the Union, with Nancy Pelosi ripping up his speech at multiple points during the speech (and not after it was over, as happened in real life).
You can make people look awfully bad with this technique, but it's a standard comic method, and it would be terrible to lose it. But this is the Era of That's Not Funny and people have shown themselves to be woefully lacking in the ability to detect fake news.
Bloomberg's montage shows him asking whetherseemingly trying to determine whether he is the only one on the stage with executive experience and portrays all of the others incapable of answering. I think the biggest problem there is that some of the other candidates do have executive experience. Buttigieg was a mayor, Biden was vice president, and Klobuchar was a county attorney. But Bloomberg is technically right, because the question he asks is "I think I'm the only one here, I think, that's ever started a business — is that fair?"
"... raises everyone up: 'From the pilgrims to our Founders, from the soldiers at Valley Forge to the marchers at Selma, and from President Lincoln to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have always rejected limits on our children’s future.' Trump wants to remind black Americans that this inheritance of striving and overcoming belongs to them, too.... It was clear from the choice of guests [at the State of the Union] that President Trump is going all out for the black vote, with personal stories of courage, success, and hopes answered. The first five featured guests were African American. The Democrats scowled through it all.... President Trump co-opted and promoted initiatives Democrats once claimed, making them his own: incarceration reform, family leave for men and women, infrastructure, high-speed internet for all communities, stamping out human trafficking...."
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