From “Is” to “Us” the Words that Define Impeachments
In 1998, the Bill Clinton impeachment story got its defining moment. The absurdity of the situation was underlined when Bill responded to a question with the now infamous phrase: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Bill was clearly caught in a lie about something embarrassing and needed to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
His technique of conjuring a confusing hurricane of technicalities and legal wordplay to try to sneak out of the back door while everyone scratched their heads trying to make any sense of what he actually said was comical. It was offensive to our common sensibilities. A colloquial label for this technique is “playing dumb.” Every cheating husband who was in the midst of coming up with elaborate stories to convince their wives how the lipstick on their collars really got there even rolled their eyes at Bill.
The “is” line became fodder for late night jokes and disingenuous bellyaching or downplaying of the seriousness of perjury from both sides. And to be fair, it was kind of a funny moment. You can see the horror on Bill’s face when he realizes the linguistic trap he has set for himself halfway through that sentence knowing that he was going to have to end it with the word “is”.
But the “is” statement lives on as a testament to the hypocrisy of the political elite. The tap dancing around the existential and legal notion of a word like “is” would make even a seasoned linguistic philosopher pull his hair out. It was so out of touch with the way regular people interact that every cheating husband out there must have muttered “Oh, come on man...” The frustrating part for those folks was the technique seemed to work for “Slick Willie” and he wiggled away and still proudly lurks around the symbolic swamp with the political class while the cheaters with non-Clinton last names probably had to sleep on the couch for years if they were lucky.
The “is” line was an early salvo in the raging culture wars. But now there is a much more serious two letter word on the dissection table defying definition in this impeachment cycle: “us”.
We have had our attention focused on a question in the Ukraine call transcript that Donald Trump keeps insisting that we all read: “Can you do us a favor though?” The word us is getting a lot of scrutiny.
Trump himself has recently rolled out this defense: “With the word ‘us’ I am referring to the United States, our Country.”
During her testimony in front of Congress, Professor Pamela Karlan, pointed to this little pronoun and surmised: “When the President said 'do us a favor,' he was using the royal we there. It wasn't a favor for the United States.”
This “royal we” usage is the kind of “us” that mob bosses in Hollywood fantasies use in the middle of facetious questions while stroking a pair of brass knuckles. “Let’s make a deal that makes us happy here, what do you think?”
Trump dusted off the old “playing dumb” playbook here. He wants us all to believe that he wasn’t thinking about his personal position during that question. Given a lifelong trademark of self obsession, egomania, pettiness and greed he is asking us to believe that he was struck with a moment of admirable patriotic impulse to fight foreign corruption and that the son of a leading political rival just happened to be on the board of the particular company he was interested in. Total coincidence. Do you hear the collective echo of “Oh, come on man…”?
This feels all too familiar. But this is not the only time I’ve seen the word “us” come up lately. This is the real tug-of-war for any nation, family, or collective of people. “What defines ‘us’?” From the early framers, through well known civil war speeches, to this little essay, this question of “us” has been the genuine battlefield.
Before the Ukraine scheme became the focus of impeachment, the loudest outrage and protest about Trump centered around his hasty withdrawal from Turkey and Syria which lead to the Kurds being exposed to killers waiting in the shadows and opened the door for Russia to gloat while parading around abandoned US military bases.
In a rollicking press conference where reporters peppered Trump with aghast questions about how he could possibly abandon the Kurds to slaughter. Trump’s response was a fairly simple: “That has nothing to do with us.” There is that little pronoun again. This line got a lot of play and ridicule from liberal media outlets. But honestly, it’s a tough question. What does the border of Syria and Turkey have to do with “us”?
I’ll offer one definition of “us” which points to a resounding “it has very little to do with us” and another which points to “it has quite a bit to do with us.” One definition is about a place and the other is about an idea.
“The Place definition”: America is a place on Earth and we are the people who live on it. We are a collection of about 300 million people populating a landmass that connects two oceans and is bordered on the South mostly by a warm river and in the North by tundra. The people who live on it are bound together by overlapping histories of ancestors who wished to live in a society committed to a representative republic agreement where we wrestle over which laws we ought to be governed by but we generally lean towards free choices and against tyrannical systems. If your ancestors fought to get here legally and you were born here you are one of ‘us’.
This definition is basically a blood and soil, every man for himself view of ‘us’. It’s the land. And it’s the people on it who love it. And with this definition in one’s mind it is quite hard to answer what the Syrian/Turkish border has to do with ‘us’ with anything substantial. You can draw a straight line from the definition that relates to our self-defense that would sound something like “fighting them there, so we don’t fight them here.” But that argument wears out its welcome at some point of low probability events and grows especially thin when every day that passes is a day further away from the horrors of 9/11.
“The Idea definition”: America is an idea and an experiment about self governance. The main stage of that experience has been on a landmass in the Western Hemisphere which we have to protect and take care of or else the global enterprise collapses. It is a universal concept which generally elevates individual freedom above all else and aggressively defends it from the treachery of kings and dictatorships wherever it finds them. We are the vanguards of that experiment. We are simultaneously its subjects and scientists. We are a trusted ally and champion for anyone who believes that this experiment can work and we are a friend to the underdogs who want to live freely. If that’s you, give us a ring and we’ll reasonably try to help out.
This definition is more of an ephemeral concept which binds “us” as people who share ideas much more than blood lines or local addresses. By this definition the situation on the Syrian-Turkish border and the perilous state of the Kurds has a lot to do with “us”. This doesn’t dictate a strict policy persay. There will always be room to discuss what reasonable help to ideological allies looks like. You can argue about military over extension, impossible alliances, and make cases for non-interventionism within this definition.
There is a third potential definition of “us” which would be called “The Trump definition”. This one is pretty easy. “Us” means Trump and his supporters. Everyone else is against “us”. Viola.
Here’s another recent example to ponder these definitions. This video of the protesters in Hong Kong went a little viral.
These are freedom desiring humans who are locked in a violent standoff with a dictatorial adversary singing the national anthem of the United States of America and waiving the stars and stripes. Are they… “us”? The Place Definition seems to roundly reject any notion that they are unless they can make their way to legal citizenship over on this side of the ocean. The Idea Definition points to a clear ‘yes’. This does not mean we must send in the troops and give them townhouses in the Denver suburbs, but I think it means something. And the Trump Definition? Well, I guess you’d have to ask them.
I, like nearly everyone, can forecast how the Trump impeachment story will unfold in terms of votes and party lines. But what is harder to predict is what moment may come to define this entire thing.
We never did get around to figuring out what “is” meant in 1999 but we did get a reminder that “playing dumb” works in legal settings. And again, it was kind of funny.
At the risk of being “that guy” that explains a joke, a lot of humor works on the premise that we have similar quiet voices in our heads when we experience the same thing. Bill’s “is” statement was relatable because obviously we knew that Bill knew what the questioner was really asking. But we also knew the “playing dumb” move, because we’ve all probably used it. “Oh, sorry officer. I didn’t see any of the twenty signs that posted the speed limit back there.” That quiet voice in all of our heads whispers “Well, the officer can’t prove that you aren’t just a total dope. Go for it!”
Should we pretend that we don’t know what Trump really meant when he said “Do us a favor, though”?
There is some more “playing dumb” humor here because we all know what Donald Trump meant. But I fear the punchline to the joke is much less funny this time because when Donald Trump uses the same “us” in the statement “It has nothing to do with us” about the Syrian border, or countless other incidents outside of our geography, an urgent question screams out: what does ‘us’ mean to him and to… well… us?