David Brooks on last night's Democratic presidential debate in Michigan ("Republicans Brawl, Democrats Yawn", NYT, 1/15/2008):
The Democratic debate has been a love fest. The candidates have all (for very good reasons) decided to pull back from the mutual kamikaze tone of the past few days. Their discussion constituted a repudiation of the old Boss Daley of Chicago, who famously said that politics ain’t beanbag. Apparently politics is beanbag, because that’s all the Democrats threw at each other tonight. I’ve seen more conflict at a pacifists’ stir-fry. [emphasis added]
I've never been at a pacifists' stir-fry, myself, and I doubt that David Brooks has either. But my general experience with pacifists has been that they're more argumentative than average, not less.
All the same, Brooks' little rhetorical gesture made me wonder about the nature of the conventional association that he's evoking, which I guess depends on ideas like pacifists tend to be vegetarians, and a stir-fry is a characteristic dish for a party of vegetarians; pacifists tend to be cosmopolitan, and stir-frying is outside the bounds of traditional American cooking. But here's a bit of independent evidence from Google web-search counts:
| stir-fry | BBQ | BBQ/stir-fry ratio | |
| pacifist | |||
| militarist |
However, linguists and lawyers are even lower than pacifists on the BBQ/stir-fry scale, and no one who has ever spent much time with members of either group is likely to accuse them of conversational disarmament:
| stir-fry | BBQ | BBQ/stir-fry ratio | |
| doctor | |||
| linguist | |||
| lawyer | |||
| commando |
So score one for Brooks on stereotypical association (his strong point in general), but deduct points for factual accuracy and logical argumentation (areas where he is traditionally weaker).
Posted by Mark Liberman at January 16, 2008 07:40 AM