Nobel Peace Sparks War

Statistics show that there is a marked uptick in the amount of genuinely hateful yammering one finds in public and political discourse. "Interactive" media are all well and good, but there does seem to be a recurring motif of pointlessly fulminating ping-pong, no matter what the subject at hand. Someone writes an article. Some readers like it, some readers don't. At first they fling praise or invective at the author, but soon they're calling one another political poopy-heads and snarling about who's stupider than whom. Then it goes from being accusative in the singular (you're an idiot) to the stereotyped plural (your kind are all idiots).

Rush Limbaugh has applied this schoolyard Punch and Judy narrative to every topic he touches. But it has also been spread by "reality" TV and extends from Jon and Kate to Congressman Joe Wilson. Donald Rumsfeld was masterful at it, and George W. Bush used it to suck the air out of every diplomatic space he entered. As a national discourse, it's silly and uninformative. When elevated to the level of international relations, it has been disastrous, as clichés like "You're either with us or against us" have shown.

I say all this because I think that the art of diplomacy is something that has become largely invisible to us in the United States. We value directness, even where it insults someone; we want instant responses, even where answers don't come easily. Diplomacy, a carefully choreographed ballet with words, is quite foreign to our perceptions of the world. We tend not to think about strategies of approach and deflection, negotiation and accommodation, patience and translation, and care in choice of words combined with pointedly applied pressure.

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