Maybe I've been wrong to defend the American school system, because I'm very much disturbed by many Americans' inability to read for comprehension on a rather basic level.
Today Neera Tanden, Biden's nominee for the White House Office of Management and Budget, had her confirmations before the Senate Budget Committee. It seems that John Neely Kennedy, a Republican Senator from Louisiana, called Tanden out for her well-known history of intemperate tweets while she was head of the Center for American Progress. "I mean, you called Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant slut," Kennedy said.
"That is not true," Tanden protested, which in context indicated that she had called Sanders an ignorant slut. I don't much blame her for being confused, because she hadn't expected that zinger, and spoken words go by so quickly that they're easy to get wrong. The Hill post linked above concluded:
As the hearing came to a close, Kennedy issued a humorous point of clarification to Sanders.
"I want the record to reflect that I did not call Sen. Sanders an ignorant slut," he said.
"I don't know how I should take that, Sen. Kennedy," Sanders responded.
(There's more context in this story. Read it, if only for the pleasure of seeing Lindsey Graham assuring her that he didn't condemn her for taking big donations from corporate donors, because everybody does it.)
Tanden deleted a lot of older tweets, apparently, when she learned she had a shot at a position in the Biden administration; evidently no one ever warned her that bad behavior on social media would follow her forever and affect her career. I never followed her, but many of her productions found their way into my feed via people I did follow. Her Twitter history doesn't matter much. What matters is that she's a nasty, corrupt person with a bad record running an organization, and I don't think she should get the OMB post, but that's not what concerns me right now. What concerns me is the reactions Kennedy's remarks got in certain regions of Twitter.
Numerous people accused him of calling Tanden an ignorant slut. That's a really impressive misreading. Unlike Tanden, they presumably were seeing Kennedy's words written out rather than having them whizzing past their ears; they were reading Twitter the way Donald Trump reportedly "watched" TV, with half his attention until a stray phrase made his ears perk up and he'd be keying a scrambled version onto Twitter. So there was a lot of yowling about old white male patriarchs disrespecting Women Warriors of Color. To be fair, these people might just have been trolls, hoping to stir up shit and not really meaning a word they wrote; but I think that like Trump, it was a combination: they half-believed it, but they also knew it would make people go berserk.
I'm still shaking my head over this one:
...so, to be clear, Senator Kennedy says that's something she *didn't* say? why, exactly, is that specific phrasing relevant then? Why introduce profanity into the record that isn't even part of the issue in question?
This guy has got to be an AI, unable to parse anything but the most direct statements, because Kennedy's rhetorical figure is a very simple one, like "everything but the kitchen sink." But quite a few people couldn't grasp it.
"Ignorant slut" is of course an allusion to a notorious Saturday Night Live sketch from the 1970s: the "Weekend Update" fake news segment included a Point/Counterpoint "debate" between Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd, in which Curtin concluded her argument by insulting Aykroyd ("But you wouldn't know about that, Dan, because there's no old saying about what's behind a miserable failure") and Ackroyd responded with the iconic epithet: "Jane, you ignorant slut."
Younger people can't be blamed for not recognizing the reference, though the skit remains famous to this day -- it has 3.6 million views on YouTube -- and I'm a bit surprised that I recognize it, but as it happens I saw it when it originally aired. Even those who do know it probably remember it mainly for the abusive language, and Aykroyd's character's misogynist slur, and not for its mockery of broadcast "debates." That, after all, is how most people think debates are supposed to go. Also, though Aykroyd and Curtin used their own names, they were playing characters, reading a script. (As I've said before, many people seem to believe that actors just go before the cameras and wing it.)
Some people did follow what was happening in the exchange between Kennedy and Tanden, but more didn't, and that's not counting the people who expressed their shock at it without going into detail. Once again I found that though I thought I was hard to shock, I was stunned at literate people's inability to read a sentence. Even if you don't know the TV source of "ignorant slut," it doesn't take a genius to see that Kennedy wasn't calling Tanden names, or calling Sanders names either -- which is more than can be said for Tanden.
