I have a low taste in snark. Sentences and tweets are lovely, but sometimes you need more. There are times satire is appropriate, So, Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review elevates mere sniping to a form of vitriolic poetry.

When I was a child I was taught English by old-school teachers who did not consider our taste sufficient to find appropriate styles of English to read and use as models. Instead we were pointed to the great writers, and encouraged to precis and pastiche. So, in honour of the technique of those people who made me literate and far better read that I would otherwise be, I have this as a model for the next time you want to start a flame war.

Consider it as a form of source code.

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.

It’s worse than the Oscars.

…

The State of the Union has not always been a grotesque spectacle. George Washington delivered his briefing in person, but he was dealing with a self-respecting Congress that understood itself to be his equal in government. When he wanted the Senate’s advice and consent for an Indian treaty, he visited the chamber personally to seek it — and was so put off by the questioning and debate to which he was subjected that he vowed never to put himself through that again. It was an excellent idea. Thomas Jefferson, ever watchful against monarchical pretensions in the federal apparatus, discontinued the practice of delivering the State of the Union in person before Congress, instead submitting a written report. For a blessed century, Jefferson’s example was followed, and, despite civil war and the occasional financial panic, the nation thrived without an ersatz Caesar to rule over it.

It will come as no surprise that the imperial model was reinstated by Woodrow Wilson, Princeton’s answer to Benito Mussolini and the most dangerous man ever elected to the American presidency, a would-be dictator who attempted to criminalize the act of criticizing the state, dismissed the very idea of individual rights as “a lot of nonsense,” and described his vision of the presidency as effectively unlimited (“The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can”).

A thing of beauty: and like all good art, in some alchemical fashion, it rises above the pomposity and humbug is the State of the Union address.

Just remember: as source code has to be modified to be applicable in new situations, you have to break down the techniques. The first paragraph is a rhetorical list of all that is wrong with the current institution of the Presidency, not merely this moronic ritual. It uses heightened language: it engages you with its outrage. The prose would be called “purple” by the modernists. Then comes the hyperbole. The author was less nauseated at the Adult Film Awards (which was another essay, and a fairly sad one). Adding in the PG version of selling flesh — the Oscars — adds a touch of lightness, and at the same time intensifies the rhetoric. At this point the language is more simple.

I have put an ellipsis in the text, but I so love the line about Wilson as ‘Princeton’s answer to Benito Mussolini’ — set up by comparing him to the rectitude of the previous presidents, who merely tabled a report — that it is worthy of adding to the exemplar. Note the use of contrast, of historical examples and then contrasting this by calling Woodrow — boldly, blatantly and accurately, a fascist before his time.

This man understands Rhetoric. I would speculate he has read his Cicero. He has taken the time to examine his prose and polish it with the aim of enhancing the acidic brilliance of the text.

He is mocking, rude, disrespectful, truthful and cares not a whit about the tears of those who follow the Unicorn sitting in a repainted house in Washington. He is being deliberately offensive. He has written as fine an example of rhetoric as you will see this year.

Go and do likewise.