Thursday
The drama surrounding the Mueller Report continues to become more postmodern with every passing day. Or rather, the Trump administration has been trying to render it so. To highlight how Attorney General William Barr is throwing up smokescreens, I turn to my favorite passage from Sense and Sensibility.
First, however, let’s note that the report is not postmodern at all. Postmodernism throws into doubt the possibility that truth can ever be attained, and Mueller—while he doesn’t answer every question—has produced a clear story of what happened: the Trump campaign willingly accepted help from the Russians to beat Hillary Clinton and the president has been working to cover up that fact ever since. The cover-up has included attacking the various investigative bodies, firing people, and dangling pardons.
Acting more like Trump’s attorney than America’s, Barr has engaged in various forms of obfuscation, failing to (in Mueller’s words) “fully capture the context, nature, and substance.”
Mueller must be particularly aggrieved by how Barr cherry picks his language, as in the following key example from Barr’s four-page “summary”:
The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
For a day or two, Barr’s conclusion reigned supreme. Trump crowed that he had been exonerated while his supporters demanded apologies and called for the investigators to themselves be investigated.
Observant commentators like MSNBC’s Ari Melber, however, pointed to the use of brackets and observed that a subordinate clause appeared to have been omitted. In Sense and SensibilityJane Austen demonstrates the potential power of such a clause.
At the end of the novel, we appear to witness a miscarriage of justice. Edward Ferrars, the deserving son, has been dispossessed of his inheritance because he won’t renege on a marriage pledge made to gold digger Lucy Steele, even though she is not worthy of him and he now loves Elinor. When Lucy sees him lose his fortune, she switches to his younger brother Robert, now the heir. At the end of the novel, Robert and Lucy are living with his execrable mother and his equally execrable sister and her husband, Fanny and John Dashwood. If we are hoping that the virtuous Elinor will get a Pemberley-like estate along with Edward, we are disappointed.
Only Austen, through the strategic use of a subordinate clause, makes it clear we should prefer this outcome. The author knows how to wield a subtle stiletto better than almost anyone and she draws blood here. The clause I have in mind begins after the semi-colon:
They settled in town, received very liberal assistance from Mrs. Ferrars, were on the best terms imaginable with the Dashwoods; and setting aside the jealousies and ill-will continually subsisting between Fanny and Lucy, in which their husbands of course took a part, as well as the frequent domestic disagreements between Robert and Lucy themselves, nothing could exceed the harmony in which they all lived together.
Austen’s withering irony signals that Elinor and Edward are well clear of this household. Who wants an estate that comes with such baggage?
Now for Mueller’s full sentence, starting with his own subordinate clause:
Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
If Barr were to summarize Austen’s report of life in the Ferrars/Dashwood household, he would write:
As the report states: “[N]othing could exceed the harmony in which they all lived together.”
As to which Jane Austen character Barr most resembles, I propose the weaselly Mr. Elliot from Persuasion.
