Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

“Would Mr. Updike [who described a fictional someone as ‘a rich Jew’] describe someone as ‘a rich Catholic’ or ‘a rich Protestant’?”

New York Observer, Nov 26, 2003.

Rhetorical questions don’t really seek information. They assume that nobody can really give an answer–they strongly suggest that we know what the answer would be.

“Happily,” (to quote Timothy Noah’s Slate chatterbox column) “we live in an age when this sort of accusation can be subjected to empirical analysis.”

Noah used the appropriate search engine–in this case, Amazon’s new search-inside-the-book rather than Feedster–to answer the Observer’s no-longer-unanswerable question.

• Noah found no example of Updike’s using “rich Protestant” or “rich Catholic.”
• Noah found several places where Updike refered to characters as “rich” in paragraphs that gave their religious affiliation as “Catholic” (twice) and “Presbyterian” (once)
• Noah found many examples of other writers using the phrase “rich Jew” as if it had no antisemitic intent.

My point here is not that I like Updike’s wording myself. “Jew” makes me uncomfortable in a way that hearing “Catholic” or “Presbyterian” used as a noun would not–no matter who sticks what adjectives nearby. (My own background? NH-folksinging-Catholic.)

My point is that rhetorical questions get used to ratchet up conflict with nasty but thinly disguised accusations.*

I don’t like to see my opponents use dirty tricks–I like even less to see dirty tricks being used by folks on my side.

This is one more way search engines make all of us smarter.

* A second example from the Observer piece: “Is The New Yorker implicitly endorsing anti-Semitism in its pages?”