There’s a deliciously disingenuous post on Language Log today about Obama’s past sins that is illustrative both of the kinds of acrobatics his supporters go through to defend him on his past associations as well as the gratuitous leftism of much of academia.
The argument goes like this:
Everyone (well, almost everyone) knows that context is important when we try to understand meaning. … And when you look at language in the context of time (when something was said in the past), it’s relatively easy to find fault with silly people like us who change our minds about some wacky position we once held. Years, months, weeks, or even minutes ago most of us said, sometimes even believed, something that we wouldn’t want to support any longer. But there are bullies out there who ignore such time contexts so if you said it once, you’re stuck with it forever.
You see where this is going, right? People are allowed to change their minds on things. Well, right, fair enough. But it doesn’t take us long to get from there to here:
I’m coming clean at this late date because political events have made these wrenched-from-context-gotchas the game du jour. For example, we all know that Senator Barack Obama’s membership in the Chicago church where Reverend Jeremiah Wright once preached marks him negatively in the minds of a huge number of U.S. voters. No matter that he hasn’t regularly attended that church for decades. He used to attend, so he’s guilty, even if he didn’t hear the allegedly offending sermons, and even though he has since renounced Reverend Wright’s offensive positions. Forget the context of time. It happened. So off with his head.
What Shuy (the author) is “coming clean” about, by the way, is his three-year membership in a sexist gentleman’s club way back in the 1960s. I think we can all agree that he’s allowed to have changed his mind with the changing times in the last 40 years, especially if it’s true, as he says, that the primary reason for resigning his membership in the club was its exclusion of women.
What, one wonders, does this have to do with Obama? That’s the illustration of the second point: a leftist academic will find a way to smuggle shallow and off-topic political commentary into just about any discussion. It’s annoying, to put it mildly, and made all the more so in this case since Shuy cowardly closed comments on the post in question. Language Log generally allows them - but not when they’re pontificating about Obama.
It takes only a cursory familiarity with the facts to know that Obama doesn’t qualify for the “changed his mind” exemption in the way Shuy does. First and foremost, that’s because to qualfiy you have to actually have changed your mind, and Obama’s little conversion rings more than just a bit insincere. Association with Wright isn’t something that Obama did in the 1960s and then decided against on his own before he was in the public spotlight. Quite the contrary - he titled the book that doubles as his campaign manifesto after a line in a Wright sermon as recently as 2 years ago. He remains a member of Wright’s church to this day and has no intentions of disassociating himself from it. Furthermore, he has made inconsistent statements on the controversy that make it clear he’s not being entirely truthful about his motivations, initially claiming in news interviews that he had never heard Wright making such controversial statements but later admitting in campaign speeches he had. Perhaps richest of all is Obama’s on-again-off-again invitation to Wright to bless his campaign launch and act as his campaign’s spiritual advisor. Obama called Wright the night before the official campaign launch event to disinvite him, and that apparently on the basis of a Rolling Stone article about him that devotes a lot of column space to Wright. And what did Obama say to Wright to disinvite him? The following:
“You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”
If there’s any reading of that that doesn’t amount to “my association with you could be poltically embarrassing,” I’d really like to hear it. Certainly there’s no way to look at that and conclude that Obama was blissfully unaware all this time that his pastor had been saying all these controversial things, as he initially claimed in television interviews. And neither is there any way to look at that and conclude that Obama was starting to develop real personal misgivings about Wright’s positions. Nope, this was all politics all the time.
As for Obama’s eventual “renunciation” of Wright that Shuy is at pains to make sure we’re all aware of, does anyone really need to remind Shuy that it came a month after a popular speech in which Obama defended his association with Wright, and only came because Wright not only deliberately made more such comments in press interviews, but also implied that Obama had been lying about his opinions on Wright all along?
So yeah, people can talk about changing their minds, but they only get a cookie for it if they’re not lying for political expedience. If Roger Shuy was a member of a sexist organization in the 1960s which he dropped out of to protest its sexist policies, that’s fine - laudable, even. I think we can all agree that he’s allowed to “change his mind” about his membership under these circumstances (although, one hastens to add, the way he spins it in his Language Log column, he didn’t actually change his mind since he supposedly tried to use his membership to change organizational policies from withing, etc. etc., but never mind). Just as I think we can all agree that we wouldn’t buy it if he’d never actually left the organization, claimed on one occasion that he was unaware it was sexist and then on another that he knew but it didn’t matter because it had other redeeming qualities, and then only disowned its leader a month after he defended him, and that only because the leader impled in public that Shuy was insincere in his opposition to the group’s sexism. Obviously, in such a case, we wouldn’t believe for a minute that Shuy had actually changed his mind about anything.
Just as no one who’s been paying attention honestly believes that Obama has changed his mind about Wright.
Shuy’s column is disingenuous, his mention of Barack Obama gratuitous, and really, the whole thing, as a political and personal apologia, is inappropriate for a blog like Language Log that is supposed to be about Linguistics.