A Grammar of Empathy and Political Strategy

By Jared Roscoe

The master sees greatness and health in being part of the mass; nothing will do as well as common ground.

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

It's entirely possible that on February 28, 1997, while Bill Clinton was making presidential history on Monica Lewinsky's Gap dress--giving birth to a new Era of Good Feeling--I was sitting in eighth-grade English class. Perhaps it's appropriate, then, that on that same day Clinton gave Lewinsky something else: a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Whitman is admired for bringing the vernacular to poetry; he was the everyman. And Clinton aligned himself with the everyman when he declared with tearful blue eyes to the American public, "I feel your pain." During the scandal and despite impeachment, Clinton's approval ratings increased.

If permissiveness was in the air during the booming '90s, it certainly wasn't apparent in Mrs. Krall's English class. She fought the prevalent laissez-faire attitude with 1950s grammatical insanity. We never formally studied Whitman's Song of Myself; it was clear that Mrs. Krall preferred stuffy academic British verse. No one knew how old she was, but back-room estimates placed her birth as synchronous with John Donne's. She even had a wooden leg, the inevitable subject of many dares. As we dove deeper into the minutiae of the hyphen--the punctuation that brings words together--I daydreamed of hooking up with Mary Lascano, who always sat near the window in the spotlight of late-midday sun. Mrs. Krall could care less about my new interest in Whitman's more racy passages--she enjoyed startling me from my reverie with a question about Orwell's politics. We suffered Mrs. Krall's harsh lessons, and she insisted we'd thank her, some day.

-I-

It is, of course, no secret that American students are insufficiently trained in grammar. I'm on the MTV-and-Ebonics side of the generational divide, the children of the hippie generation, who had demonstrated how standard language practices serve the interests of the empowered. Nevertheless, new becomes old, so when the protesters of the '60s were confronted with lyrics such as Snoop Dogg's in Drop It Like It's Hot--"I got hatas on my j-iz-ock, plus the frickin c-iz-ops / All uh whom want to hit me with sh-iz-ots til I dr-iz-op / Thank God for hip-hop, or I be in the b-iz-ox, / Jail or casket, either way you r-iz-ot"--well, let's just say things changed.

But unlike most complaining parents and critics, Mrs. Krall was on the front lines of the battle for grammatical decency. She actually tried to teach Standard American English to kids who were listening to rap lyrics with words she couldn't begin to decipher. Unfortunately for her quixotic cause, private-school eighth graders are no more interested in diagramming sentences than watching CSPAN. We knew that our friends in public school didn't have to wear collared shirts--let alone stand at the blackboard and draw forks to represent parallel structure. Besides, Mary Lascano and exuberant passages of Leaves of Grass were much more engaging topics for my budding literary and sexual passions than the intricacies of hyphen usage. Or so I thought.

-II-

It's been almost sixty years since George Orwell wrote "Politics and the English Language" and argued that in order to defend English "[w]hat is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around." Orwell idealized the purity of thought, whose meaning could be captured by a precise selection of words. Bill Clinton, however, showed us that a word can have many meanings: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." His particular, calculated phrasing fits multiple definitions, creating a legal backdoor he could move in and out of. Politics in a representative democracy involves compromise, and compromise means styling words in order to satisfy a plurality of people. No one believes that sexual relations solely means having intercourse, that oral sex doesn't count--it certainly doesn't fly in the Court of Wives. In Willy's World, he wasn't lying, but he wasn't telling the truth. Of course, he wasn't not lying either.

No matter where Willy lies, Orwell's essay came in a more naïve epoch than our postmodern age. These days, poor diction is not a mark of laziness so much as the sign of a political agenda. When George Bush says "Freedom is on the march," or "We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress," he knows that the more vacuous the phrase he creates, the less disagreement he engenders. And the more votes he wins. I don't know whether politicians are being serious or ironic when they speak in these empty sound bites. Maybe it's both. Orwell argues for choosing the meaning first, then the words that best capture the capital-"I" idea. But the ingenuity of contemporary politics--and its handmaiden, public--opinion polling-is that if politicians choose their words carefully enough, the meaning don't matter. And politicians, especially Republicans, have gotten better at it since Bill's time.

While William was getting nailed politically for saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," Republicans were elevating their game. Bill, a Yale-trained lawyer, was relying on legalese, shifting the definition of words ex post facto. Republicans, instead, took polls and found which words resonated with the public--Freedom! Tax relief! Democracy!--and repeated them in front of an American flag. It's a perversion of Orwell's political-linguistic philosophy: choose the words first, the meaning later. These days, it's tough to know what anything means. Best just to say popular phrases, not spew forth Kerry-esque diatribes on nuance. Kerry, why did you vote "yes" on the Iraq war? Why did you vote "no" on funding for the troops? Freedom! Democracy!

Little wonder that rhetorical strategy has been the hot topic among Democrats, who believe they have discovered how to out-craft the crafty Republicans. George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, achieved messiah status with Democratic strategists with his 2004 political handbook Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. This easy-to-read, cultish manual made framing a household word inside the body politic's Beltway Given the amount of rhetorical equivocation in politics, it's not surprising that a linguistics professor became the go-to guy for political strategy. Lakoff argues that the problem with the Democrats since the late 1990s hasn't been their ideas and values--no, these are part of the everlasting mother archetype, programmed into us at birth!--it's how they've been put into language. In other words, the American people would believe Democrats if only the asses thought more about their messaging. Rove and company fashion phrases such as death tax and partial-birth abortion, and unwitting Democrats repeat these phrases-now part of the political dialogue-even though they are trying to argue against these phrases subtle ideological leanings. Using death tax instead of neutral inheritance tax in a debate on said tax's repeal can alter people's opinions. After all, who thinks that death should be taxed? It's just another sign that the gosh-darn government is overstepping its limits and messing with ordinary folks' lives. But an inheritance tax or an estate tax, well, of course the well-heeled offspring of wealthy families shouldn't get any more advantages than they already have. Democrats have finally realized that when they say things like "I support the death tax," they are shooting themselves in the foot. Now every Democratic press release contains new direction and change.

Standard Written English is where the battle is being fought; spoken-English inventions such as bling-bling and smoke 'em out are vulgar until some High Priest of Grammar deems it otherwise. Whitman's creative use of vernacular in poetry took years to fully gain acceptance. Today, however, linguistic inventions are absorbed by pop culture hella quick. Recently, moms in the audience of Ellen Degeneres' eponymous show waved their hands in the air "as if they did not care" to Snoop's live performance of Drop It Like It's Hot. (Backstage, Snoop learned to knit with Ellen.) His --izzle language, which was transgressive when I began this article, is now annoyingly mainstream. If someone's old man said dude while I was growing up, it would've lead to merciless teasing. Now, the women on The View sit around in their upper-middle-class clothes and say Fo' rizzle to each other. If all this bizarre stuff is happening, it's got to be easy for a phrase as sneaky as partial-birth abortion to be repeated by Democrats and impartial journalists. The term snuck into Standard Written English without anyone noticing. Except Lakoff, that is.

Not everyone agrees that framing is a big deal. Lakoff--much like the Republicans he's trying to out-wit--has been accused of spouting vacuities. Lefties at The Atlantic Monthly have decided that to follow Lakoff's framing strategy is pure folly, declaring it a sign that the asses' biggest problems are laziness and an inability to generate proposals of their own. Joshua Green writes in T.A. Monthly, "Lakoff offers no new policy ideas. Instead he suggests that the Democrats reposition the ones they already have, and spruce up some unpopular terminology while they're at it."

But it's not that renaming Slick Willy's original profession public-protection attorney won't work. There's something genuinely creepy about renaming everything, giving previously unfloatable ideas sterilized monikers. The scary, Orwellian program in the US called Total Information Awareness (the program that had a big, presumably all-seeing eye on a pyramid as its logo) has been renamed Trade Transparency Unit. What bothers me, however, is that Green doesn't argue that Lakoff's do-what-the-bad-guys-do strategy might be suspect. Green implicitly argues that truth is just what emanates from power, and therefore, the Democrats should get back into power by any means necessary. Subordinating values to marketing strategies--instead of the other way around--ends up burying Orwell's democratic faith in rationalism and the English language under layers of slick advertising.

It may be old hat to argue that capitalism has brought the commodification of personal life, but it seems we now have the commodification of civil life. The president talks on camera and it sounds like an impassioned speech, but we know it's been carefully scripted and vetted of anything that might disturb the public. He's not known for his intelligence, nor for displays of emotion. It's pure marketing, and to the surprise of the rest of the world, it's worked for most of two terms in office. The president is selling us something: government.

Sure, the American government has all of the features of a democracy, but it has the calculated detachment of a prostitute: I feel as if I'm participating, but it seems like the government doesn't respond, despite it's insistence that it's there for me, that everything will be OK.

-III-

It's a desperate political situation. If only I'd paid better attention in Mrs. Krall's English class. When not lusting after Mary Lascano, I would read from Leaves of Grass, which I put inside the book we were supposed to be reading: George Orwell's 1984. Orwell worried about this scary politico-linguistic outcome, though he thought it would come about through a totalitarian regime, not a democracy. The same day Slick Bill willied Monica Lewinsky; the same day I feared the performance of public grammatical disasters at the blackboard; that same day I was reading Leaves of Grass when I should've been reading the dystopian 1984.

Mrs. Krall would be happy to know I eventually did get around to reading it. Now I could tell her that in 1984 the government is, as Orwell writes, "[N]ot interested in the good of others," but rather "interested solely in power." The totalitarian controls include a new language that suits the rulers' political goals. The language is called Newspeak and it's terribly similar to framing. The aim of Newspeak (an amalgamation of new and speak, though probably also news and speak) is to remove the possibility of all thought inimical to the ruling political body, named Ingsoc. Orwell writes, "[Newspeak's] vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning a [Ingsoc] Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods." Mrs. Krall would be very proud indeed.

Newspeak has a troubling vocabulary, which in part "consist[s] of words which [have] been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only [have] in every case a political implication, but [are] intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them." One example in today's news world is the use of euphemisms, though the word euphemism itself is now probably just a euphemism for framing. George Carlin once pointed out the evolution of the euphemism-cum-frame post-traumatic stress disorder, which refers to the terrible mental anguish suffered by many soldiers because of combat. We first had shell shock to describe the immediacy of depression, irritability, and anxiety associated with combat. Over time, though, it became more benign. There was combat fatigue and operational exhaustion. The latter sounds more like something that happens to everyone after working long hours. Now we have post-traumatic stress disorder, a word that's distant from the horrifying reality of what it's trying to describe. Of course, there is a political purpose to this: the framing mutes the brutality of war and its effects on those directly involved; war isn't as bad as doves want you to believe. The goal of Newspeak is to modify any word relating to objectivity and rationalism--and their descendents, liberty and freedom--so as to make them entertainable "only … in a vague wordless form." Newspeak thereby reduces unorthodox thoughts into "self-evident absurdity," such as "Big Brother is ungood." Today we have the Democrat who unwittingly repeats, "I support the death tax." In short, in Orwell's Newspeak and Lakoff's framing, truth is what power says it is.

Orwell seems entirely prescient, and the consequences for American democracy are astounding. If you substitute framing for Newspeak, Lakoff (or perhaps more accurately, Rove's political progeny) becomes a creepy mastermind of today's 1984-esque dystopia. The principles are never the problem; it's the packaging. The solution is to alter the language we use to describe our values and deny the possibility of alternative ways of framing the debate. Democrats, who can be as self-righteous as Republicans, know that they (and only they) have the key to any problem. Many Democrats and Republicans only have messages, not policies. Many Democrats and Republicans are playing the same game, seeking to maintain power as an end in itself. No one is left to care for the well-being of the country and its citizens, the everymen.

Politics is an industry, and Lakoff is pushing another product. But I believe this is deeper than neat packaging. This is about our very ideals of American government. In Abraham Lincoln's famous formulation in the Gettysburg Address, America's government is "of the people, by the people, for the people." Part of Bill Clinton's appeal was that he had empathy to go along with his slick rhetoric--he felt our pain, and, by and large, we believed him. His marketing strategy, almost paradoxically, was guided by an honest feeling of service to the people, of fellowship with the common person.

It seems odd that empathy can be one's marketing strategy. Marketing is about earning profit (or votes) by convincing people that they need what you have. Empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and imagining how they see the world. It's much clearer that one's marketing strategy can be empathy: you can try to convince someone that you actually care about them. The successful wedding of strategy and empathy is possible. The place to look for it is Mrs. Krall's eighth-grade English class, where hope sprung eternal.
My gazes at Mary Lascano turned into stares and then outright gawking, always with the hope she might turn to meet my eyes. And there was hope that if you didn't look at the clock, fifty minutes of grammar would turn to something more manageable. We hoped we would avoid our classmate's fate of being branded "subhuman" for punctuational insufficiency.

Mrs. Krall's students plotted to plant flowers outside her home, and the irony seemed self-evident. Like, who would put flowers around a dungeon? Sometimes, however, hope comes from the unlikeliest of places.

-IV-

Since Mrs. Krall's terrifying invitations to the drawing board, I hadn't thought much about syntax. I didn't have another grammarian for an English teacher until my senior year of college. Crowned by his doo-rag, my university professor taught us that in order to understand what's being communicated through various formal modalities of written English, one must first know the rules that are being bent.We spent no fewer than five classes discussing the ins and outs of hyphen usage, but still no one knew when it was properly placed. His favorite example was high-school teacher, which he argued, sans hyphens, would mean a school teacher who gets stoned. Syntax embedded itself in my brain like a neurological parasite: I couldn't read a book, magazine article, or grocery-store sign without having my concentration interrupted by a question on hyphen usage. Anything I wrote during this period was immersed in technical proficiency. I couldn't focus on the themes of the piece, only on the correctness of its grammatical structure. I was truly in a quagmire.
The hyphen use that interested me most was the formation of a compound descriptor. Consider: Big-time player. Without the hyphen, the meaning could be something like "fat person who screws with the flow of time." The rule is if the first word of the compound is an adverb ending in --ly, you don't use the hyphen--as in previously used phrase. Accordingly, we have a well-dressed man. It gets trickier. If the compound descriptor follows a linking verb and after the noun its modifying, then it doesn't get the hyphen: He is well dressed. But still: He is a well-dressed man. This little rule can show you who the big dogs are in the editing world. Hyphen mistakes are arguably the most frequent editorial boner. Wilson Follett, author of Modern American Usage, writes of the hyphen, "Nothing gives away the incompetent amateur more quickly than the typescript that neglects this mark of punctuation or that employs it where it is not wanted." Armed with this hyphen rule, I'm willing to bet you can get a cheap feeling of superiority while reading your local rag. But discussing your find won't win you many friends, trust me.

My hyphen obsession came to a head when I realized my professor might have been wrong about the high school teacher. This was not a black-and-white issue like apostrophe usage. The top dogs of syntax (at institutions such as the University of Chicago) can't agree on the proper occasion for a hyphen, admitting that at some point it's a matter of style. In fact, many syntax guides argue that common phrases used as adjectives--like high school--don't need to be hyphenated when they come before the noun they modify. That is, unless clarity of meaning demands it. My professor's high-school teacher now seems to be an over-compensation, as if we assume the poor school teacher is stoned without it. Hyphen use, in this case, becomes a meta-level mind trip of intentional fallacy. Did my professor have some hazy experiences with groovy high school teachers? Or does he understand this deeper hyphen-modifier rule, thereby making a (extremely high-brow) joke out of the whole situation by insisting no one can assume a teacher's sobriety?

There are broader political implications of this deceptively innocent rule. Would high school-teacher unions come down on the side of needing the hyphen? (Probably not, though I'm not aware of any communiques to that effect.) Furthermore, maybe major newspapers should start using death-tax policy, as hyphenated, so as to not project too-deep acceptance of a term invented by Republican framing experts. Farcical examples aside, there's still a political point to be made. All syntax has meaning; all syntax, therefore, is political.

-V-

Even if you are well versed in the general controversy over the word African-American, you still might not know the hyphen in African-American is also contested. Many groups have objected to the use of the hyphen, causing the 15th Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS)--the cautious grammarian's handbook--to declare, "Whether terms such as African American… should be spelled open or hyphenated has been the subject of considerable controversy, the hyphen being regarded by some as suggestive of bias." Some argue that the hyphen implies (the negative notion that) that one's ancestral origin and new American identity are incompatible and therefore cannot be resolved without the bridging hyphen. Others believe that the hyphen makes African-Americans (and the word African-Americans itself) appear to be a sub-category of Americans. To others still, the hyphen implies dual-nationality. Accordingly, The Japanese American Citizens' League concurs with CMS, preferring Japanese American to be hyphen-less, so that Japanese becomes an adjective describing the noun American, thereby emphasizing the American-ness of the person.

Yet The New York Times disagrees, preferring the hyphenated form--even when the term occurs as a stand-alone noun, e.g., The cars of African-Americans. Whereas some read the hyphen as a signal of incompatibility between the two words, defenders of the hyphenated form say that the hyphen represents the fact that Americans are capable of having multiple and alternative identities simultaneously. The compound noun Italian-American, for example, signifies an Italian who has moved to the United States and become a nationalized citizen. The hyphen is the bridge between the Italian and the American parts of the identity. For a nation known as a melting pot, however incomplete the metaphor may be, this function of the hyphen is indispensable.

This bridging function of the hyphen does, however, have a hotly contested history as well. In 1915 Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech to the Knights of Columbus, declaring, "[A] hyphenated American is not an American at all. … The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else." This tarnished, if slightly forgotten, use of hyphenated American gives ammo to critics of the hyphen, who must include the vocal minority anti-immigration crowd. However, after a few generations the preceding noun-plus-hyphen drops off, and what is left is entirely American.

An important exception to the gradual exit of the hyphenated first half is the case of African-American; blacks are not simply called Americans in the same way descendants of Italian immigrants are. One need not look further than the news for examples: "African-American male sought in connection with murder." How ridiculous would it be to see in the Times the headline "American male sought in connection with murder"? Yet in the States we still say African-Americans (instead of just Americans, as we call other third- or fourth-generation citizens), regardless of how long their ancestors have lived in this country; the term is widely used as an indicator of color, not just nationality. But there are many white African-Americans, descendents of European conquerors and settlers. It's been argued that African-American is simply a euphemism for black, and that it's only because of touchy-feely liberals that the word black makes us uncomfortable.

The term African-American was popularized by Jesse Jackson in the '80s, and he hoped it would be a label for blacks that would carry positive connotations, one in which American blacks were linked to a shared history, that extends to the continent of Africa and the slave trade. There are many reasons why African-American is a contested term, but the debate over hyphenation is consequential. For some, the hyphen exists still as a reminder of the powerful force of racism and the tension between the African and American aspects of black identity. I, a white American, prefer to see the hyphen in African-American as a fusion of identities--not one of co-existence, but of mutual, if uneasy, influence. It is one term: African-American, yet simultaneously it's two others: African, American.

-VI-

If the hyphen were a voting citizen, what would its politics be? Consider, more broadly: Hyphen comes from the Greek hyph'hen meaning "under one," "into one," and "together." The hyphen, therefore, might be the sexiest and most American punctuation. After all, the United States is "One nation, under God, indivisible." The hyphen is a connecting force, bringing together two parts that were previously unassociated, doing to words what the United States promises to do with its immigrants. Both the hyphen and the core philosophy of the United States represent the fundamentals of the modern Democratic Party, a party of tolerance, acceptance, and empathy. This is the party that pushed the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, hallmarks of American government and its ability to work for the common person.

Maybe it's a sign of the times that no one knows how to use a hyphen properly. The grammatical near-crisis of the hyphen comes when America is a nation divided. We have lost sight of the togetherness demanded by hyphens.

Hyphens offer some important lessons for the modern politician and citizen alike. Most important is the hyphen's emotional equivalent, empathy, which is highlighted throughout Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the poetic politics therein. Whitman, like Clinton, understood the political importance of empathy, of common feeling, of indescribable universal sentiment. In contrast, Orwell yearned for rationality and objectivity; in 1984 we learn that even love can save no one. Were Orwell a friend of the hyphen, however, he might have seen in empathy an alternative route, one that would escape the eventual trappings of Machiavellian framing.

The root of Orwell's suspicion comes from the trickiest concept in 1984: doublethink, which seems to be the self-deception necessary to deceive oneself into thinking objectivity does not exist. Orwell writes a beautiful description of "the labyrinthine world of doublethink," worth quoting at length:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself--that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

Doublethink is such a shifty process that F. Scott Fitzgerald said almost the same thing some years earlier, except with positive connotations: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Doublethink could either be the mark of a genius or the ultimate crime against rationality.

Orwell's biggest problem with doublethink is that it erases the rational objective world and replaces it with one in which two plus two can equal five. In this vacuum of authority, a political party--in 1984 it's Ingsoc--seizes power and controls the truth. In today's political situation, we see much of the same: the president and his communications team control the message. The ability to stay on message and repeat framed concepts creates an environment where the truth is what the Republicans say it is, and the Democrats' attempts to refute the president's constructions end up propagating them. As the Democrats try their best to learn from the Republicans and create their own frames, it further muddies the water. Orwell saw all of this coming: "Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.… Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain."

But there's the possibility that doublethink has a counterforce, even if Orwell didn't quite see it. Opposed to Orwell's scary conception is what I like to call reflexive empathy, which is the awareness of empathy without it becoming calculating or manipulative. Although related to doublethink, reflexive empathy is better captured by the Fitzgerald quote and the work of Whitman. Clinton, ever the shrewd politician, undoubtedly knew the political benefits of having an empathetic presence. Yet what made Bill so damn astute was that Americans largely construed him as being genuine. This is reflexive empathy, a possibility which Orwell seems to discount. Clinton, oxymoronically, was acting naturally. Maybe he chose compassion and then developed a political rhetoric to utilize his empathy. Or maybe it occurred in the opposite order. Either way, he managed to be politically sagacious and still emotionally spontaneous. Clinton might have rationally chosen to act according to his emotions, a submission to empathetic guidance. Americans admired his rhetoric and believed those sad blue eyes. As difficult as reflexive empathy might be to understand, perhaps the best marker of it might be trust that is rooted in shared sentiment. What passes as trust in 1984 comes from fear of punishment, punishment, and utter subjugation.

The hyphen demands that we choose to be empathetic, not just pragmatic power-grabbers. It may be the case that framing is an inescapable part of Washington politics. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, we are stuck with it as a dirty necessity, the moral and literal equivalent of Newspeak. The Democrats should remember that they have control over the genie, and that the goal to regain the White House and reach 60 seats in the Senate can be accomplished in a morally sound manner with reflexive empathy as the guiding principle. Democrats should re-examine the political theory of the hyphen, the syntactical equivalent of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. As it stands, Republicans gain points when they claim Democrats are engaging in divisive class warfare or partisan politics, regardless of whether there's truth in either party's claims. Leaves of Grass, Clinton's playbook in love and politics, states an alternative modus operandi: "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, / A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, / Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest."

-VII-

There's another deep meaning to the hyphen: sexuality. The politics in Leaves of Grass are intimately tied to sex. More than political pamphlet, Whitman's treatise is a sexual romp through the woodlands and pastures of America. Whitman describes a pleasant way to pass time in a passage that Clinton has surely read: "I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer / morning, / How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd / over upon me, / And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your / tongue to my bare-stript heart, / And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held / my feet."

Reportedly, when Hillary--the staid politician-cum-wife--discovered that Bill had given Monica Leaves of Grass, she burst into tears. The woman who appeared so strong in TV interviews was pierced by the revelation. A blow job is physical betrayal, but Leaves of Grass carried symbolic weight: Bill had given Hillary the same book when they began their courtship many years before. The former first couple, both engaged in politics, were linked by lyrics--the combination of love and politics. Sex and love are the private analogies of the hyphen, but solidarity is its civil and political manifestation. It's all too easy to say that Clinton wasn't being picky when he chose Lewinsky as his intern, but maybe he was informed by the all-inclusive attitude of Whitman's poem "A Woman Waits For Me": "I will go to stay with her who waits for me, and with those women that / are warm-blooded and sufficient for me / I see that they understand me and do not deny me." There may be a small chance I was being politically active when I was ignoring Mrs. Krall's droning in favor of staring across the room at Mary Lascano, our sexuality beginning to develop. We were about to receive our grammatical and political awakenings.

To return to the Greek etymology of the hyphen, under one, into one; the sexuality is self-evident. It's hot. The hyphen appears phallic, a sideways Washington Monument, but it is not aggressive or dominating; it seeks to join together as in the etymology of copulate. Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas are full of sexual imagery, often with political intent and effect. Democracy, for Whitman, is a coming together with fellow humans. He does not see individualism as the core of democratic philosophy, as it "isolates." Instead, it is "adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making races comrades, and fraternizing all." Though Democratic Vistas is more prosaic and restrained than the euphoric, coital Leaves of Grass, Whitman nevertheless declares therein, "Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man--which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly develop'd, cultivated and recognized in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States, will then be fully express'd." Whitman argues that men need to have more passionate relationships with each other, and that without these sexually ambiguous though clearly empathetic relations, democracy cannot succeed. "Democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself." Democracy is not just a relationship between the people and the government; it is a relationship among people.

When Clinton looked into the eyes of the American public and said, "I feel your pain," he, perhaps unknowingly, echoed Whitman's verse: "Agonies are one of my changes of garments, / I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become / the wounded person." It is solidarity that both Clinton and Whitman strive for. Orwell wrote that not even romantic love could stand against brute political oppression--but this is an unfair opposition. Solidarity--not romantic love--is the civic opposite of Machiavellian politics and its contemporary manifestations, poll-politics and framing. We need to take seriously the idea that American politics can be about something other than the retention of power. Instead of following (imaginary) elephants, Democrats need to lead democracy back to its beginnings as a relationship between the people and the government. Strategy does not have to mean manipulation; reflexive empathy can provide the Democrats transcendent moral and strategical perspective they need to become a relevant political force again. Democracy is one of humanity's most lofty creations. Democracy is a spiritual ideal that can bring people together into brilliant harmony made all the richer by diversity. And what better way to bring this country together than through the lessons of the hyphen. The American hyphen, after all, is a uniter, not a divider.

to epilogue