Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up in a panic. My t-shirt is drenched in sweat, my hands trembling. And somewhere I hear a voice whispering:
George Will is using the word "hectoring" again!
...I generally stay away from Will. Unfortunately, I frequently come upon him by accident. And almost every time that happens, I find the same thing: the word "hectoring" staring me in the face.
That’s what happened this week. I was running a Lexis-Nexis search to see how many different journalists just this week had used the words "George McGovern" and "Howard Dean" in the same article. Your basic survey of the horse racing trend. The answer, as of this writing, was 119.
Number three on the list was by George Will. Entitled "Dukakis Plus 4.4. Percent?" it was a classic of the Will genre. Reading Will makes one admire the run-of-the-mill horse racer campaign journalist for the unpretentious, just-following-orders way he goes about robbing the meaning from our political process.
Because it’s one thing to reduce a meaningful election into an idiotic horse race, but another thing entirely to do so on the backs of Proust, Chaucer, Goethe, Grantland Rice, Casey Stengel, Erica Jong and thousands of other disparate and defenseless persons whose speechifying styles you have herded into the death camp of your career, to be ground into bone meal and lampshades. I apologize for this metaphor, but the ambition of Hitler is really the only way to address the scale of Will’s pomposity...
