Mistakes were made
Stewart was attempting to assign culpability for the overflow of the coffee maker -- I had been the one who filled it and yet I had not known that if you screw the lid of the thermos part on too tight, the coffee spills out and floods the countertop. So it was and wasn't my fault, if you know what I mean. "Mistakes were made!" I declared, and somehow got around to pointing out that it was Reagan that had made the phrase famous. Stewart wanted to know in what circumstance it had been said, and in searching the internet for it, I found this great excerpt from Dysfunctional Narratives, or "Mistakes were made" by Charles Baxter, on the rise of the passive voice and the decline of integrity in politics:
Lately I've been possessed of a singularly unhappy idea: The greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty years may have been the author of RN [Richard Nixon], not in the writing but in the public character. He is the inventor, for our purposes and for our time, of the concept of deniability. Deniability is the almost complete disavowal of intention in relation to bad consequences. A made-up word, it reeks of the landfill-scented landscape of lawyers and litigation and high school. Following Richard Nixon in influence on recent fiction would be two runners-up, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Their administrations put the passive voice, politically, on the rhetorical map. In their efforts to attain deniability on the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, their administrations managed to achieve considerable notoriety for self-righteousness, public befuddlement about facts, forgetfulness under oath, and constant disavowals of political error and criminality, culminating in the quasi-confessional passive-voice-mode sentence, "Mistakes were made." [
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LINK | 3:17 PM | TB
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