Senatrix-Wannabe Kennedy, Y’know
By Martin Harris

There’s been scant evidence of the gentry-left rising to the defense of one of their own, that scion of the Kennedy-Camelot branch of American political-intellectual royalty, Caroline, after her remarkable performance in a recent CBS interview. They could have argued, for example, that she didn’t say  "…and stuff" even once. She did say  "…y’know" about every two seconds for a total of about a hundred or so, according to commentators who actually kept a running count. It was cringe-productive to watch and hear. It was also a demonstration of native-language incompetency, which wouldn’t have been tolerated by the Main Stream Media for a New York minute had it come from the mouth of an identifiable non-leftist. Consider, for example, the journalistic vitriol poured by the intellectually-superior (just ask them) MSM over that "dumb-soldier" President Dwight Eisenhower for his use of the then-new verb "finalize" at a time when such neologisms hadn’t yet secured academic recognition. When one of their own does far worse, embarrassingly so, the MSM chooses to ignore it. Or, in an isolated case, praise it.

The latter course was taken by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who in all seriousness argues that such linguistic incompetence shows that her heroine "is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to market…" and that she is, in real life, "…smart, cultivated, serious, and unpretentious". Wasn’t it Ms. Dowd or one of her gentry-left peers who labeled Ronald Reagan "an amiable dunce"? I suspect that what’s going on here is as much based on class as on ideology, that Fourth Estaters like Dowd are advocates of a managed (by them, of course, because they’re smarter than us mean-spirited dummies) socio-economic structure. The Dowds of journalism are also upwardly mobile enough to aspire to invitation into the salons, dining rooms and committee conference rooms of those above them in both wealth and station. You don’t get those invitations if you foolishly write that a Jackson Pollack painting could have been done (in fact, has been done) by a chimp with a paintbrush; that architect Frank Gehry’s amazingly distorted and irregular building designs look like exemplars of the "crushed-tin-can school of architecture" (my label) or that Maya Angelou’s "poetry" falls far short of  Shakespeare’s in term of  structure, discipline, breadth of language, or portrayal of the human condition. Conversely, if you profess your admiration for the Gehry’s and Kennedy’s, and agree enthusiastically with those by whom you wish to be accepted as one-of-their-own that such grotesque construction displays as the new IAC building in NYC’s Chelsea district "have an enigmatic beauty"  (Archi-Tech magazine) or such remarkable verbal displays as non-diagrammable sentences filled with multiple you-knows are commendable because "it isn’t how you say it" that matters (Dowd). She closes her column with an attendance list of the Beautiful People with whom she wishes to be identified attending the Senatorial swearing-in, complete with apparel description. 

The same group of  aspiring upwardly-mobile Fourth Estaters seems to include the editor-publisher of Middlebury’s "other newspaper", who used a full third of his editorial column recently to denigrate (are we allowed to use that word any more?) Sarah Palin for a couple of "likes" in one of her interviews, but has been remarkably silent on the avalanche of Kennedy you-knows. Had the Kennedy standard-bearer-in-training been either more Right or less Rich, she would have been a suitably down-scale target for his brand of editorial ridicule, and of course for the Palin-style barbs of the MSM as well.

When my generation was growing up, we were ridiculed at home and school for using "you know" in conversation.  "No dear, I don’t know" or "No, young man, we don’t know" trenchantly delivered were the devastating humbling devices which cured us at the dinner table or in the classroom through humiliation, an instructional device which, like the now-vanished parochial-school hardwood ruler, is presently considered child abuse.

All of the above explains why, in Joseph Sobran’s words, "in one century we have gone from teaching Greek and Latin in high school to teaching Remedial English in college". Ms. Kennedy apparently had such an active social calendar in her undergraduate years that, y’know, she simply couldn’t, y’know, even find time, y’know,  to attend those classes. 
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights