Will Bunch: William Safire, "nattering nabobs" and the power of words
[Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News]
William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times op-ed columnist, died today at age 79. He did more than any other American over the last generation to get people talking about words and phrases and the way that we use them. That makes it hard to find the perfect words to say about his passing. His life and his voluminous writings taught us that words have not only poetry -- and sometimes roots as intricate as a giant Sequoia tree could be jealous -- but also power, power that could be either righteous or destructive or both.
Safire is still remembered some 40 years later for the words that he put in the mouth of a previously inarticulate and later disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, and for one phrase in particular:
"Nattering nabobs of negativism."
It's such a memorable and jarring expression that we can almost forget why it was so important -- as the opening salvo of a political war that continues to this day. In an era -- this would be the late 1960s and early 1970s -- when the reality-based world was looking rather bleak, with new revelations about government spying and the White House waging secret military campaigns in Southeast Asia, it would be the Nixon White House that invented the strategy of not changing the message but instead declaring war on the messenger, the American news media:...
... The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called "the silent majority" a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events -- journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority...
Read entire article at Philly.com
William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times op-ed columnist, died today at age 79. He did more than any other American over the last generation to get people talking about words and phrases and the way that we use them. That makes it hard to find the perfect words to say about his passing. His life and his voluminous writings taught us that words have not only poetry -- and sometimes roots as intricate as a giant Sequoia tree could be jealous -- but also power, power that could be either righteous or destructive or both.
Safire is still remembered some 40 years later for the words that he put in the mouth of a previously inarticulate and later disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, and for one phrase in particular:
"Nattering nabobs of negativism."
It's such a memorable and jarring expression that we can almost forget why it was so important -- as the opening salvo of a political war that continues to this day. In an era -- this would be the late 1960s and early 1970s -- when the reality-based world was looking rather bleak, with new revelations about government spying and the White House waging secret military campaigns in Southeast Asia, it would be the Nixon White House that invented the strategy of not changing the message but instead declaring war on the messenger, the American news media:...
... The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called "the silent majority" a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events -- journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority...