The Mote in Will's Eye

George Will in his latest column takes on Senator-Elect James Webb (D-VA) for what Will considers his boorish behavior in confronting President Bush on Iraq at the White House recently. Fine. I don't agree with him, but he's entitled to his opinion. Like Robert George (from whose Ragged Thots blog I got this little item), I tend to agree more with Peggy Noonan's assessment of the Bush-Webb confrontation (and don't think it doesn't pain me to say that I agree with Peggy Noonan about anything).

But that's not the part of Will's column that I want to discuss [full disclosure: although I've never met George Will in the flesh, one of my jobs at Newsweek years ago was answering his hate mail which, as you can imagine, kept me mighty busy].

Later on in the same column, Will pedantically discusses a recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Webb.

This is what Webb wrote:

"The most important — and unfortunately the least debated — issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country."

And this is what Will had to say about it:

"In his novels and his political commentary, Webb has been a writer of genuine distinction, using language with care and precision. But just days after winning an election, he was turning out slapdash prose that would be rejected by a reasonably demanding high school teacher.

Never mind Webb's careless and absurd assertion that the nation's incessantly discussed wealth gap is "the least debated" issue in American politics.

And never mind his use of the word "literally," although even with private schools and a large share of the nation's wealth, the "top tier" — whatever cohort he intends to denote by that phrase; he is suddenly too inflamed by social injustice to tarry over the task of defining his terms — does not "literally" live in another country.

And never mind the cavalier historical judgments — although is he sure that America is less egalitarian today than it was, say, 50 years ago, when only about 7 percent of American adults had college degrees? (Twenty-eight percent do today.) Or 80 years ago, when more than 80 percent of American adults did not have high school diplomas (85 percent have them today), and only about 46 percent owned their own homes, compared with 69 percent today?
But notice, in the same sentence that the word "literally" appears, the word "infinitely." Earth to Webb: Words have meanings that not even senators can alter. And he has been elected to be a senator, not Humpty Dumpty in "Through the Looking Glass." ("When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.") America's national economic statistics are excellent; Webb could actually tell us how much richer the "top tier" has become, relative to other cohorts, over a particular span. But that would require him to actually say who he is talking about, and that takes time and effort, and senators — Webb is a natural — often are too busy for accuracy."

Now, is it my imagination, or is George Will making a pedantic horse's ass of himself picking apart Webb's prose while doing his best to ignore or at the very least avoid discussing the pretty much unassailable point that Webb is making?

Let me answer Will's questions with questions:

Will says that 50 years ago, seven percent of Americans had college degrees and that 28 percent do so today. But this begs a lot of questions. For example: how many of those people with college degrees 50 years ago got those degrees through the GI Bill, and therefore did not have to start their careers with a staggering amount of debt incurred in order to get that degree, as young people have to do today?

Will leaves that out.

Again, more people today have high school diplomas -- and yet high school diplomas are not worth nearly as much on the job market what they were then. Back in the day a high school diploma could get you a manufacturing job the likes of which no longer exist in this country, because the CEOs who make hundreds of times what an average worker makes (another point that Will does not address) have shipped all those jobs overseas to people who can be paid pennies for what an American would expect to be paid a living wage for.

Did I just end a sentence with a preposition? Sorry, George. My bad.

George Will's pedantic posturing notwithstanding, the fact is clear: we are living in a far less equitable society than was the case several decades ago. The top one-tenth of one percent have benefitted greatly under this administration, while the working man has gotten screwed -- Ford's recent announced layoffs of 38,000 workers (that's not a typo, folks) is just another indication of just how badly skewed our nation has become economically. The rich have become obscenely rich, and the middle class and the poor are, respectively, struggling either to get by or to survive at all.

And if Will can't see that, perhaps it's because he's part of the problem.

Tom Moran