Dancing the Cotton-Mouthed Joe

by emptypockets

The Cotton-Eyed Joe, for you lifelong Northerners, is a boisterous line dance in which participants shout out at intervals, "Bullshit! Bullshit!" The Republican presidential debate last week was a different sort of line dance, in which the participants shouted out at intervals "Obfuscation! Obfuscation!" but the effect was similar.

The shouts came most clearly from Representative Tom Tancredo, who challenged the straight talk of some of his colleagues by saying:

"No more platitudes, no more obfuscating with using words like, 'Well, I am not for amnesty, but I am for letting [immigrants] stay'"

(Quotes in this post are taken from the MSNBC transcript unless otherwise noted)

Tancredo is right on two counts. First, this kind of political formula is widely used (has it always been so popular?). Second, it is not quite bullshit, at least not in my understanding of the Frankfurt definition. So what exactly is it?

I am not sure I have this right, and I welcome corrections, but I think this political formula is a form of paradox, in the sense of "a self-contradictory statement that at first seems true." I haven't been able to find a good example of exactly this type in Wikipedia's list of paradoxes, so I will (for now) call it the Model T paradox, after the statement about that car and loosely attributed to Henry Ford: "You can paint it any color so long as it's black."

The essence of a Model T paradox (as I'm defining it) is that it is composed of two elements: a "giver" element that makes a sweeping, often generous statement, and a "taketh away" element that negates the first.

The Ford example is clear: "You can paint it any color" grants broad privilege, while "so long as it's black" negates it. Tancredo's example is an interesting inversion, in which the first element is highly restrictive ("I am not for amnesty") while the second negates that ("but I am for letting them stay.")

Of course, accusing someone of asserting a "Model T paradox" in political debate has got no pizzazz, so for rhetorical effect I'm going to refer to this phenomenon less academically as a candidate being "cotton-mouthed," meant to evoke the image of speaking through a mouthful of wadding, as well as the sinister behavior of the snake of that name, and (to the imaginative) the "Bullshit!"-filled line dance I described above.

Ironically, Tancredo himself was a Cotton-Mouthed Tom (see how that works?) elsewhere in that same debate:

Moderator: "Will you work to protect women's rights, as in fair wages and reproductive choice?"

Tancredo: "I will work to protect women's rights. The reproductive choice part of that, if I heard you correctly, is a reference to abortion. The right to kill another person is not a right that I would agree with and support."

There's that "Model T" again: "Women will have their rights, so long as it's not reproductive rights."

This kind of formula has been very widely used by politicians in both parties to straddle the line on stem cells. In the debate the biggest cotton-mouth on stem cells was Governor Mitt Romney, who is against stem cell research but doesn't want to say so:

Moderator: "Mrs. Reagan wants to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Will that progress under your administration, Governor?"

Romney: "It certainly will. ...But I will not -- I will not create new embryos through cloning or through embryo farming, because that will be creating life for the purpose of destroying it."

Once again we ride the "Model T." In a nutshell: "You can do embryonic stem cell research, so long as you don't use embryonic stem cells."

The cotton-mouthed "platitudes [and] obfuscating" that make a Model T paradox are distinct from other kinds of bullshit and deception. They are closest in purpose to statements like "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it," but the latter is a flip-flop, implying a change in position over time (at a different point in the debate Romney also copped to a flip-flop on stem cells). In contrast to a flip-flop, a Model T paradox gives the appearance of holding contradictory views at the same time.

This deception is also distinct from flat-out fabrication. Governor Tommy Thompson's stem cell answer, for example, was, "There's research currently going on right now at the Weisman Center in Madison, Wisconsin, that's going to allow for adult stem cells to become pluripotent, which will have the same characteristics of embryonic stem cells..." That is simply wishful thinking, an entirely different type of deceit. (For more on Republicans trying to create reality through rhetoric, recall the White House senior advisor who said "We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." And don't miss Language Log today on Stanley Fish on Karl Rove: "Language (or discourse), rather than either reflecting or distorting reality, produces it, at least in the arena of public debate.")

Considering we have been living under an administration that has made a science of deception, our understanding of the taxonomy of their deceptions has been slow to arrive. Fortunately (I guess), the Republican contenders promise to provide an abundance of examples.

I'd be particularly interested in hearing of other occurrences of what I'm calling the Model T paradox; in learning the construct's correct name if it has one; and in other formulas you've noticed being used repeatedly for "platitudes [and] obfuscating," as Cotton-mouthed Tom so aptly put it.

Comments

[marksb]

In Tech marketing we called it "bullshit". It's a lie, but it's a carefully couched lie that can't be proven (or called) easily. Like if I am selling a remote-access router that tends to catch fire in the switch room rack, I can lay claim to 5-9's reliability because it worked that way in the QC lab before it shipped. Never mind the widely customer-reported fires in the field, they are not proven in the lab, so it's not an easily-proven lie. My defense is intended to mislead the customer: it's bullshit. I once had to go out to our sales channel and defend an Ethernet board that, um, didn't work sometimes. Well, a lot. I had four or five statements in my mind to use that pitched the reliability tests in our lab (which we cut to a quarter the scheduled QC to make up time to our product launch, but nevermind, who's counting...), blamed the customer's PC's, blamed the TCP software, and quoted a couple of magazine tests that rated the board highly (in lab conditions and optimum test environment). It was all bullshit and I caught holy hell from resellers for lying to them. You have no idea what a New York reseller can do to you when you are caught lying to them. (Real examples)

I see this bullshit as a lie if the bullshitter knows what is said is not true, or not congruent. By that I mean that if someone says two incongruent things to mislead the listener, in order to confuse or change the received message, it's a lie; the speaker knows what is said is not true or is intended to mislead.

My bottom line, it's about integrity: if you are speaking with integrity, your are speaking the truth. If you are speaking without integrity, you are lying. You KNOW what the truth is, and if you speak otherwise, you are speaking an untruth: a lie.

My wife is a communications studies professor so I'm going to run this by her when she comes home from teaching tonight. Should be interesting.

[marksb]

Umm...one more thing. I worked for a major telecom equipment company that did business around the world. The company had a policy that they did not pay bribes to close or further business. No Bribes.

But you can't do business in many countries without paying off a lot of people. The minister of communications. The guy that runs the test lab. The guy evaluating the bids. If you don't pay these people off, someone else who did wins the bid.

As you might imagine, this screwed up the yearly revenue numbers...so the company made up an accounting cost center called a "special projects fund". The fund was used to hire a local "sales consultant" who billed for his time. That time was a number that was entered into the corporate books as sales costs in the local country. Of course the 'consultant' did the payoffs, and the bribes were no longer bribes, they were consulting fees.

This was a lie and everyone in the executive floor and in sales management knew it was a lie, but it was wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and contracts were closed, revenue was booked, and the stock price climbed.

I am using up bandwidth to tell this story because I think a lot of wink-wink, nudge-nudge is going on around defense contracts these days. So much is blacker money and so much activity has been hidden by classification of projects. Just a thought.

[emptypockets]

marksb, interesting take. Frankfurt's definition of bullshit, at least as I understand it, hinges on the speaker's disregard for truth or falsehood (he aims the charge particularly at talking heads on cable news, who care less about accuracy than about saying whatever it takes to keep an audience: truth, lies, who cares.) My own sense of bullshit, as I wrote previously, is "the meaningless dressed in the clothes of the meaningful." In your case, you were hyping statistics that you knew weren't relevant -- classic bullshit.

In the broadest sense, bullshit is any kind of deception -- as you say, "speaking without integrity." Certainly the examples here are meant to deceive (or at least obfuscate -- is the difference important?) and so you might say they're all bullshit. But, at the very least, we can work on a taxonomy of the different kinds of bullshit. And I think this is a start.

[marksb]

Marcy, right now there is so much lying, bullshit, and obfuscation going on in the media, politics, and in business that I think this is vital work. Maybe the most vital.

It is said that the first step to corrective action to bad behavior is to expose the bad behavior so we all can view it in absolute honesty. Then we can begin to correct the behavior toward something more ethical and morally true---living with integrity, in this case.

This is truly a long-term project, but perhaps it's the core of our renewal? I mean, what is our country to become now that we've faced our current situation? Perhaps living in integrity, or living for the truth, is an/the appropriate return to the core of our founding values as a country and a society.

Heh. How do you like that as a desciption of Democratic values: The Truth.

[John Casper]

mark, fyi emptywheel does not equal emptypockets.

[marksb]

Ha. Read the material (three times!), skim the author. Shucks. Well, there ya' go, nice post emptypockets.
(Oh for an edit function!)

[John Casper]

Nice post emptypockets thanks.

[pseudonymous in nc]

Tancredo's just one of that curious group of third-generation immigrants who turn out to be ladder-pulling xenophobes with a not-so-secret love of white-supremacist groups.

What's fascinating about his brand of bullshit is that it sits just over the border from White Supremacist Land. And there's no bell-curve of acceptability in right-wing American politics: one can be an inch to the left of Stormfront and considered 'mainstream'.

[Redshift]

Hmm, I'd call it a fallacy rather than a paradox, but I don't know an existing formal name for this one.

One nit to pick -- Romney's answer does appear to allow for doing research on fertility-clinic embryos, so it may not quite fit the pattern. (If you take him at his word and don't assume that he'd get smacked down by the Christian Right before anything could actually happen.)

[-ck-]

An OT FYI --

according to Michelle Shocked, "Cotton Eyed Joe" is a back alley abortionist.

Read the lyrics closely, and it comes out:

"I'd a been married a long time ago,
If it hadn't been for Cotton Eyed Joe"

As for the Bullshit shout out, read between the lines:

"What you say?

Bull-Shit!!!

What you say?

Bull-Shit!!!"

The "what she said" is -- I'm pregnant.

[emptypockets]

Redshift, on fallacy vs paradox, thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure which is correct here. My impression is that fallacy has a vaguer meaning, including any kind of false reasoning. So I would put Thompson's "wishful thinking" statement under the fallacy category. I don't think the Model T example is false reasoning so much as a purposefully self-contradictory or self-inconsistent statement. So I think I prefer "paradox."

As to Romney's stem cell position, on the contrary he said in the debate he would not allow the use of embryos from fertility clinics:

Moderator: And you won't take any from these fertility clinics to use either?

Romney: I'm happy to allow that to -- or I shouldn't say happy. It's fine for that to be allowed, to be legal. I won't use our government funds for that.

This is somewhat fallacious, as the legality is not at issue (indeed, it's now constitutionally protected in Missouri) but rather whether NIH can fund this research. Romney's position is, as far as I can tell, equivalent to the current policy.

-ck-, I hadn't heard that one but I did look into it a bit and there seem to be quite a few theories about its origins. In fact, it's interesting just how much of a folk song it is -- no one seems to be sure quite how it came about. One theory I did see (I've lost the web page now) related to gonorrhea or other STDs, where (not to get too graphic) I suppose men suffering from a discharge or "drip" might possibly refer to their sexual organ as a "cotton-eyed joe." This may make sense with the "Would've been married long time ago, hadn't been for that cotton-eyed joe." The general impression I got was that the "Bullshit" call-and-response part was introduced more recently, and I saw some references to variations on this (like shouting "Crawfish", which may be either independently arisen or a self-censorship away from the "Bullshit" version).

Completely OT, this reminds me of an interpretation I once read about "The Riddle Song" (I gave my love a chicken, that had no bone; I gave my love a cherry, that had no stone; I gave my love a story, that had no end; I gave my love a baby, with no cryin') that interpreted it completely in terms of sexual puns: the "chicken without a bone" supposedly referenced a cock, the "cherry without a stone" was a hymen, the "baby with no cryin" was the pregnancy. Apparently this has been disproved, based on the song predating some of that slang, but it makes you listen to it very differently anyway!

[Primordial Ooze]

I thought cottonmouth was the dry mouth you get from smoking a particular illicit plant. Note that I am not admitting to or advocating use of this substance.