All posts tagged: deep concern

The Republican coping goes into overdrive

The Republican coping goes into overdrive

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Americans claim to dread a Trump-Biden rematch, but some Republicans seem more stunned than anyone else that Trump is back on the ballot. Now they are desperately trying to rationalize supporting their nominee. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: “A Psychological Necessity” Saturday Night Live during the 1980s was at the height of its satirical powers, skewering both Republicans and Democrats with surgical efficiency. (In one of the greatest of all such skits, Phil Hartman played Ronald Reagan as a multilingual genius running the Iran-Contra plot faster than his hapless staff could follow.) The current political situation, however, reminds me of a 1988 debate parody with Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz. After Carvey’s George H. W. Bush plows through a string of non sequiturs and repeats “stay the course” and “a thousand points of light” a …

Beware Euphemism in a Time of War

Beware Euphemism in a Time of War

Published by skeptic

An open letter signed by famous writers decrying Israel’s response to the Hamas attack shows a startling moral obtuseness. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Ahmed Zakot / SOPA Images / Getty October 18, 2023, 11:48 AM ET George Orwell is forever the patron saint of language and the ways it can become degraded in times of war—when a split occurs between what is being inflicted on human beings, on human bodies, and the words of ideologues who want to keep us from seeing “what is in front of one’s nose,” as Orwell famously put it. His iconic essay on the topic, “Politics and the English Language,” argued that euphemism and jargon and the passive voice can be deployed to hide inconvenient truths. Consider, he wrote, “the comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism.” The professor would not just come out plainly and say, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Instead, he would go for something like this: “While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain …