The Simpsons and Alexander Pope
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Despite the fuss about “British humour,” that pasty island has never produced a show as consistently funny as The Simpsons, M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, Futurama, or Frasier – funny, and, at times, (to use a word Lisa Simpson might use) perspicacious.
Like every Australian born in the ‘90s, I grew up watching The Simpsons, and as I age, I’m starting to appreciate the jokes I missed when I was a child.
In Treehouse of Horror VII, the aliens Kang and Kodos steal the forms of presidential candidates Bob Dole and Bill Clinton and run for office. At their pre-election debate (notice the $5 entry fee – one of the things I missed on my first hundred viewings) Kang gives a speech full of the clichés of American politics:
“My fellow Americans, as a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball – but tonight I say we must move forward, not backward; upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”
Like many political speeches, this is meaningless. Yet, the crowd loves it.
(As an Australian, I’m unpersuaded by Kang’s speech, though an equivalent featuring cricket, Kokoda, and having a schooner might lead my throbbing heart to the ballot box.)
Kang’s talk exemplifies George Orwell’s concern in his imperishable essay Politics and the English Language: writers and speakers (especially politicians and journalists) tend to communicate in pre-formed phrases.
As Orwell puts it:
“As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”
Modern writing, he continues, “consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”
Today’s word for “humbug” is “bullshit,” though the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt distinguishes the two in his book on the subject. (I might return to this subject in a later post.)
I think everyone can recognise the political bullshit described by Orwell and The Simpsons. But is it really a modern problem?
Was there anyone complaining about it when the English two-party parliamentary system was starting to form?
There was: Alexander Pope.
His work abounds in everything associated with British humour: wit, punctilio, and schoolboy vulgarity. At times incredibly rude, his poems are a sort of lavatorial combat against the dunces and spin-doctors of his age. Pope always found the most cromulent word, and his miraculous technical skill can sometimes be overpowering, like being beaten up by the Louvre.
The textbooks tell you that the English eighteenth century was a time of politeness, decorum, and moderation. These were ideals that Pope appealed to but then abandoned. The emetic force of political flattery and corruption (under King George II, of the House of Hanover) produced the two dialogues which Pope titled Epilogue to the Satires. The tone is anything but polite. Here is the description of how prefab speeches pass from mouth to mouth in Parliament without prompting any thought in the speakers:
Let courtly wits to wits afford supply,
As hog to hog in huts of Westphaly;
If one, through Nature's bounty, or his lord's,
Has what the frugal, dirty soil affords,
From him the next receives it, thick or thin,
As pure a mess almost as it came in;
The blessed benefit, not there confined,
Drops to the third, who nuzzles close behind;
From tail to mouth, they feed and they carouse;
The last full fairly gives it to the House.
In other words, the courtly wits are like hogs lining up “from tail to mouth” to eat their own excrement and then give “it to the House.” Political speeches aren’t bullshit but hogshit.
Left a like for "cromulent".