4.28 Monday (Diminution of Agia Elisaveta)

"The Elizabeth Warrens"

This past week, on one of my endless daily drives through the Rattlesnake Belt, having reached that point of blank distraction at which even the basest form of cultural diversion would suffice, I turned on the car radio. The instant jackpot was a political talk show, the topic was banking regulation, the sympathies of guest and host alike were faith-based conservative free marketeering. 

The guest was a spent intellectual force from American Heritage Action who began reasonably enough by pointing out a shared perception that the "banking industry" has perpetrated high crimes and misdemeanors with no consequences to itself. But if anyone were hoping for a bit of home truth about rigorous new regulation or strict oversight of an institution gone haywire, the speaker quickly volunteered that he did not agree with "the Elizabeth Warrens." A palpable relief emanated over the broadband (which Miguel still thinks of as "the airwaves.")

Now I confess I was ignorant of any other Elizabeth Warren in political life or in the public notice, not to mention several of them. Who were these other Elizabeth Warrens, I wondered, that he had even heard of them, could know their views on regulation, could know of their universal agreement on the question? And why would these women, all sharing a name, necessarily agree in questions of banking policy? Isn't it at least conceivable that, of the set of all women named "Elizabeth Warren," at least one might have landed on the side of the free market angels?

Oh, Miguel (I chided myself), always too literal minded. I had at last spotted the rhetorical coup de grace, the trick of diminishing a policy or argument by reducing it to the name of its proponent (Marxism, Keynesianism), then reducing the proponent to a type; the implication is that there is not a single individual named EW, no such person exists in her own right, no one individual capable of advanced and clear thinking.

There are only "the Elizabeth Warrens," which is to imply a set of clones or nested Russian dolls or kittens, all singing the same monotonous mechanical tune without a single functioning consciousness. An ideology requiring no counterarguments.

In a more positive vein, one might speak of "the Ronald Reagans" as a single functioning consciousness.

 "The Ronald Reagans"