The Copy-editors In Chief | Fred Clark - Patheos

Evangelicals love declarations, statements, open letters, and manifestos. This is by necessity as this big, sprawling family of churches and institutions lacks the kinds of formal structures that enable ecumenical Christians — Catholics or “Mainline” Protestants — to speak collectively.

The problem was that the initial drafts of many of these manifestos included bold, sweeping proclamations that were also written in the passive voice. In other words, the statements within these statements included lots of categorical imperative claims, but no subjects to go along with those imperative verbs.

This was not merely a grammatical problem. A statement proclaiming that “The hungry must be fed” needed to be rewritten to clarify who it was it was suggesting “must” feed the hungry. That sentence needed a subject, and choosing and providing that subject seemed, to me, to be above the pay grade of the intern assigned to copy-edit it.

The bosses were never happy about this. These president-and-founders and pastor-and-professors and author-and-activists weren’t thrilled when the intern they asked to look over their statement to check for typos came back to them asking for a near-total re-write. But — to their credit — they usually understood the problem and took responsibility for fixing it.

They understood that if they did not provide subjects for all those imperative statements, then I would have to provide those subjects for them — to supply and create the substance of those statements. And that wasn’t my job. It was theirs.

Cleaning up their sentences to help them communicate their message more clearly was my job. Creating that message was not. Turning those vague passive-voice sentences into clear statements by supplying subjects for all of those verbs wasn’t a matter of copy-editing, it was a matter of meaning-making, of stating and formulating policy. Going beyond cleaning up their grammar to actually formulate their policy for them would have been a kind of usurpation — a kind of coup in which I put words and ideas in the mouths of my leaders, serving in their stead and, in effect, replacing them.

I didn’t want that, and they didn’t want that.

So, to their credit, those bosses would go back to the drawing board, redrafting their statements in clearer language so that they were the ones supplying a coherent meaning and message.

I’m remembering this today because I just read this post from Heather Cox Richardson, which has me, against all odds, sympathizing with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt:

At 8:50 yesterday morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’ Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

As Alex Leary and Vera Bergengruen of the

Wall Street Journalobserved, the demand for unconditional surrender was quite a shift from Trump’s original promise to the people of Iran that the future is “yours to take,” or even his early claim that he was hoping to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump’s shift highlighted that there appears to have been very little planning for what would happen after U.S. and Israeli bombs began to rain on Iran.Leary and Bergengruen noted that Trump was bouncing ideas for the next stage of the assault off journalists even as ships stopped passing through the Strait of Hormuz, American citizens were stranded in the Middle East, the war spread to countries throughout the region, and U.S. military personnel died.

When reporters asked about what Trump meant by unconditional surrender, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to say that unconditional surrender meant whatever Trump decides it does whenever he decides what the goals of Operation Epic Fury are. She said: “What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has [sic] been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender whether they say it themselves or not.”

Leavitt’s statement is nonsense, but she was responding to reporters asking “what Trump meant,” and it probably seemed to her that the only way to clarify his nonsense was with some nonsense of her own.

My sympathy for Leavitt is, of course, limited by the fact that she chose this job and she knew what she was getting into. That’s also true of every other person now tasked with speaking on behalf of this administration and, thus, with defending the indefensible and with making sense of nonsense. Each of these people has tried — and failed — to “clarify” the president’s ever-shifting explanations and goals and contradictory statements. And each time one of them attempts this, they add their own “clarification” to the growing list of incoherent and contradictory statements.

The American military — the largest in the world — is directing its full fury on the people of Iran. Why? What for? Until what and until when?

No one seems to know. Those questions are being answered by dozens of different spokespeople whose answers change from day to day or even from hour to hour. All of these various spokespeople are not being tasked with clarifying America’s aims in this war, but with supplying those aims — with inventing them. And those aims of this war are all being invented and reinvented now, more than a week after the war began and while people are already dying.

We do not have a “commander in chief.” The interns are in charge. And they don’t know what’s going on either.