"If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, just look at those He gives it to." -- Maurice Barring.
This one is short. I tripped over an important revelation this morning. I was thinking about the similarities between the
campaign of Romneylan and Bush Pere (or
George I). Both had trouble speaking
English as she is spoke. For Bush, it had a name. People called it "the Wimp factor." (Never did become a reality show on television, but I can imagine that Ashton Kutcher simply overlooked the possibilities.) For Romnoid, there is no name that the journalists have for it -- for the inability to know what a chocolate doughnut is, for ridiculing plastic rain coats, for "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, my friend," for "I enjoy firing people," for being sorry about dog torture "after all the attention it's gotten."
What it is is that Romney is not the first hyperwealthy Republican candidate for president since George I, but he is the first pedigreed one. He and Senior Bush speak the same language, a language designed to set a difference between its speakers and the rest. They speak Plutocratian.
Plutocratian is not merely class. American English has been heading toward class dialect for a while, although there are various countermeasures, so the move is dithyrambic, as it were (Greek dance joke there: two steps forward, one back). Anyway, this ain't that. Plutocratian is not a class dialect, because it is spoken by the people above American class structures.
[The United States's class is naturally economically fluid. The price of entry is price. Make enough, and you're up. Lose enough, and you're down. The exceptions are the hedge fund capitalists and the "middle class." (I don't want to write a serious diary, here, so I'll just give one serious sentence, ok?) "Middle class" in the U.S. is a set of beliefs and actions rather than income or job, which is why it's elastic and enormous. The super-duper upper, on the other hand, requires a belief, attitude, and education that all form one into an assumption that there is a natural rule by the proper people, that the proper people are simply the proper people, and that no one else may gain entry.]
Romney and his like crew become the plutocrats not because their parents were, but because they have been wealthy and have been shaped to believe that their ruler is natural. They are aristocrats, but money made the bloodline good.
I think we need to learn the language that Romney speaks. If you are on the upper east side of Manhattan, you might meet one of the Romney class (very nice people, really), or if you are in Aspen, so we need to discover where the languages have diverged and help both them and us by coming up with a Plutocratian glossary.
1. "My friend": A person who cannot be fired but who has no ability to affect the speaker. Ex. "Corporations are people too, my friend."
2. "Gun owner," "just a splash," etc.: A series of unimportant details which are spoken of metaphorically to display one's wit, since the reality of the words, the denotative meaning, is logically impossible. [Did George Bush wish for a refill of his coffee? It is illogical that a ruling class individual would be interrupted by a wait staff member, so the interruption is an occasion for showing wit. Does Mitt Romney own and fire guns? What an absurd proposition! He probably owns a gun or two, since he owns various things, so the question gives him a chance to say he is a "small varmint" hunter and employ idiom.]
3. “I’m not familiar with precisely what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was,” Romney said today. “I’ll go back and take a look at what was said there.” [May 17, 2012] or "Some of you may have gotten my ass e-mail" [H.W. Bush and the darned teleprompter]: These contradictions and embarrassments translate as, "Details!" Since the speaker is superior to the audience, the fact that the words may be inaccurate should be laid to the fault of the words, not the person. The speaker knows that he is the rightful leader, so blame English.
4. ". . . ": A refusal to hold a press conference or to allow questions, or the laborious equivalent, "I'm not going to talk about that," means that the person and questions are simply not important. They do not pertain to capital, do not pertain to capital transfer, do not facilitate the goal of setting America "right" by placing a "natural" ruler in the executive, and therefore should be eliminated.
5. "Efficiency"/"Prudent": Prudence, for the world war two generation, and efficiency for the Business School generations, means "eliminating competition."
6. "Effective": Henry Ford said that the goal of an industrialist was to "Produce goods of the highest quality possible, at the lowest cost possible, while paying the highest wages possible.." That is two clauses too long for "effective."
Let us come up with more and aid our friends in the capital and equity and asset backed securities of long generations speak less "bespoke."