FINALLY we have President Bush’s rationale for waging war on Saddam Hussein. It is, the president told several House and Senate leaders on Wednesday, that Saddam “has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction.” This use of “crawfished” says a lot about our president. But not what he and others think it says.
The first reaction of the press was to howl that “to crawfish” isn’t a verb. The second was to reverse course and admit that, well, yes, it is listed in the “Oxford English Dictionary.” It means “to retreat from a position taken up.”
The truth is that “crawfish” both is and isn’t a word. It certainly was used in the nineteenth century. A New York Voice article of 1888 includes the reference: “The remark defeated him for Governor. He tried to crawfish out of it . . . but it didn’t work.” But today it’s a word that can be used unironically only by an outright phony. Let’s take an example. In Mississippi earlier this year, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger ran an editorial attacking a legislator for reneging on commitments regarding the state’s tobacco settlement. It began, “Mississippians have a well-known term that describes one who doesn’t stand behind a public promise. Such a person is said to have ‘crawfished.'” This, of course, is baloney. There is no such thing as a well-known term that one has to define–and to the very people among whom it’s supposedly “well known”!–before using. But crawfish must always be defined; no one would ever simply say something like, “Hey! Don’t crawfish!” The president, too, had to define “crawfishing” before using it, although he did so in a cleverer way: by plugging it into a series of synonyms and hoping nobody would notice what he was doing.
In that sense, “to crawfish” is not a real word. It is an affectation. It is the kind of Southern slang used only by Southerners compelled to draw attention to themselves for the way they talk. The compulsion is particularly acute in those incapable of drawing attention to themselves for the way they think. This is the supremely annoying tic of the hero in Tom Wolfe’s novel “A Man in Full,” Charlie Croker, who lards his speech with stage-Southerner syntax to show off what a real son of the soil he is. (“Ain’t nobody makes turtle soup like Uncle Bud!”)
But Charlie Croker at least did his preening only in front of drunken dinner-party guests. The president chose to do his in front of a group of congressmen gathered solemnly to discuss a whether Saddam Hussein’s frightening weapons program justifies taking our nation into what might be a frightening war. What an inopportune time to behave like a poseur. It reminded one of the president’s Massachusetts-born, Connecticut-bred father, towards the end of his presidential term, trying to woo a group of oil-industry financial supporters by telling them that he himself had been in “d’awrl bidniss.” Or–to take a president with whom the current president has considerably more in common –of President Clinton during budget photo-ops, looking over his reading glasses to read the documents he had spread before him. In a Clintonesque way, President Bush is beginning to cleave the American public into two uneasy halves–opponents fulminating at his attempts to bamboozle, and supporters chuckling at his vanity.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
