Wokescolds

When the left becomes grimly censorious,
it incubates its own opposition.

— Michelle Goldberg

During an interview with a professor of English yesterday, I asked whether the late novelist John Updike belongs in the modern canon.

Wryly he answered, "It depends on whose canon."

The cause of his caution was obvious: not knowing who I was, the professor wanted to be spared another bashing by a possible wokescold.

Wokescolds—those busybodies who bash you for any show of disinterest in their causes—are the bane of the Democrats.

They're why the party will lose the midterm elections.

Wokescolds are dangerous because they're smug and obnoxious.

While they relentlessly shame us for our indifference to special-interest issues like "transgender equality," "microaggression," and "cultural appropriation," they remain blind to the fact that most of us care more about guns, gas, and the stock market.

They're dangerous because they make ready targets for right-wing hipsters, who can mobilize uninformed voters with post-apocalyptic visions of a Stalin-style government—even though 8 of 10 Millennial voters don't know who Stalin was.

So here's my two cents.

Wokescolds should take a vacation. 

A long one.

I recommend Mexico. 

With its tropical beaches, boutique hotels, and feisty cuisine, Mexico offers the ideal spot for a getaway.

Just ask Ted Cruz.

And while on vacation, I recommend that the wokescolds bring a little light reading.

Aristotle's Rhetoric would do nicely.

That's where they'll find these morsels of wisdom:

A statement is persuasive either because it is directly self-evident or appears to be proved from other statements that are so. In either case, it is persuasive because there is somebody whom it persuades. 

But no art theorizes about an individual. Rhetoric is concerned not with what seems probable to a given individual, but with what seems probable to a whole class of people. 

Rhetoric, too, draws upon the routine subjects of debate. The duty of rhetoric is to deal with key issues in the hearing of persons who cannot take in a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Got that, wokescolds?

And if Aristotle doesn't convince you to drop the smug and obnoxious rhetoric, maybe you should stay in Mexico—permanently.

After all, you'll love it down there. 

I hear the Mexicans are debating transgender bathrooms.

Pulpits and Poohbahs

While today we would say something's "great" ("GameStop is great!") Ragtime-era folks would say it's "bully" ("GameStop is bully!").

So in 1904, when Rev. Lyman Abbott was invited by then-President Teddy Roosevelt to preview an important speech, Roosevelt confided, "I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit!"

In a chronicle of the meeting, Abbott recalled Roosevelt's words and described his bully pulpit as a license to build Americans' support for reform, while tearing down opposition to it.

Abbott's pubic mention of Roosevelt's words made the term famous overnight.

But today "bully" is a pejorative; and behind today's bully pulpit stands an actual bully—a corrupt conman who's using his platform to promote treason and panic timid supplicants.

However, access to the bully pulpit doesn't in itself turn a bully into a poobah.

The bully must do that to himself.

Poohbah—meaning a "pompous big shot"—was coined in 1895 by Gilbert and Sullivan when they composed The Mikado. 

The two songsters liked the flatulent sound of the word, later claiming it derived from every tin-pot dictator's way of dismissing a new idea by saying "Pooh!" or "Bah!"

Poohbah leapt overnight from the stage into British parlance, but didn't catch on in the US for another 31 years, when A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh first appeared.