"Everybody," "Nobody," and Other Absolutes in The Age of Ads and Trump (repeat post)

CAUTION: Repeat rant from recovering English Teacher trying to get people to cut back the BS of everyday semi-communication.

What's on my mind is the click-invitation Link title (different from the article title) in the e-mail to me from THE NATION for current stories: "All Eyes Are Now on Robert Mueller [...]" / [by] GEORGE ZORNICK

Uh, no; "All Eyes" are not. Not even all human eyes among American adults. This is part of the "EVERYBODY/NOBODY" problem where we habitually forget to mention the population of which EVERYBODY is or is not doing something (etc.) and how the hell we might be able to know.

This is not a good thing, and how not-good has become especially clear the last couple of years.

* Politically-involved people tend to think *everybody* is politically involved. That's patently untrue: check out the large number of Americans who don't even bother to vote.

* Politically-involved people of Leftish persuasion can come to think that *everybody* is ready to impeach Donald Trump or struggle to retain the Affordable Care Act, or whatever. Unfortunately, "whatever" can include such delusions as some activists in the late 1960s thinking the USA in a pre-revolutionary state. We were not, as the 1972 Presidential election convincingly demonstrated.

*Everybody* they knew was ready to "take it to the streets": (1) probably not, even among those they knew; (2) they didn't know enough people, or a statistically useful sample.

* Donald J. Trump is on an extreme of the continuum, but there is a continuum of everyday, hyperbolic bullshit that American speakers of English (and probably others) clearly tolerate way too much. Your kids tell you "But *everybody* in my class is getting tattooed," and you know to tell them, "Name two." Try similar challenges when adults (with less excuse than kids) hit you with AdSpeak, CoachSpeak, CampaignSpeak, AcademicSpeak — all those "disruptive interventions" by just a journal article — CorpSpeak, and similar fonts of hyperbole and other usually misused figures of speech. The road to Trump was paved with sloppy use of language (superlatives anyone?) and bullshit clichés like, "Since the beginning of time" — Really? Is that since the Big Bang or the rise of human consciousness (for highly local, subjective time), or even the last odd 6K years for a popular Mythic Time? "We want 110%?" — Uh, huh: You're saying you want a blank check on my time, right? "The worst/best _______ ever." (1) Again, probably not. (2) Something doesn't have to be THE WORST EVER!!! to be very, very bad. The pizza you're selling doesn't have to be the best in this arm of the galaxy to be a good buy: In a big city, as MAD Magazine pointed out long ago, best on the block is probably good enough.

People who (figuratively) bend over backwards not to offend their auditors on identity grounds should take at least a bit of care not to offend their auditors' intelligence.

Trump's Tweets Revisited: Concerning Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, 12 Dec. 2017, 5:03 AM US Eastern Time

"Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, [...] 

someone who would come to my office 'begging' 

for campaign contributions not so long ago 

(and would do anything for them), 

is now in the ring fighting against Trump. 

Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!"

— @realDonald Trump

On 8 August 2017, President Trump threatened North Korea "with fire and fury [...] the likes of which this world has never seen before." The 8th of August falls between the 6th of August, the anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and 9 August, the bombing of Nagasaki. So whatever Mr. Trump intended to say, in that context of basic calendar what he did say was a threat against North Korea of "fire and fury" exceeding two smallish atomic bombs, a degree of "fire and fury" that would require a hydrogen bomb or several substantial fission bombs. That's what the words mean. 

"Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand [...] would come to my office 'begging' for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them) [...]" is ambiguous only insofar as some people use quotation marks for emphasis, which is a bad idea, since _fresh_ fruit is claimed to be definitely fresh while "fresh" fruit may not be (etc.). Aside from that, the text *says* that L. Gillibrand "would do anything" for campaign contributions; so it means she'd do anything up to the point readers think the tweet has moved into hyperbole and, well, bullshit. When people say "By any means necessary" or "nothing is off the table" or "we will do anything" — I challenge them with the question from NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, if they'd be willing "to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face [...]." If not (and let us hope not) — spare us such unmodified, "use-your-imagination" threats. 

Given the image of "begging" (in quotation marks especially), one may stop far short of having Gillibrand start a war or throw acid in a child's face and take Trump's comment as a suggestion of fellatio or other sex act.

WORDS MEAN, if sometimes in complex ways; but Trump has invited such readings and must take responsibility for them. The words of the President of the United States, in a medium we've been told to see as official, had damn well better _mean_ and be chosen carefully. Trump in this recent tweet either has a serious accusation to make or he's defamed a US Senator in a crude and misogynist way — and/or he's shown himself too damaged in his use of language to be trusted in any position of trust or authority.

Honor: Shakespeare's Falstaff, Trump's Vocabulary

Well, ’tis no matter. Honor pricks me on.

Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on?

 How then? Can honor set to a leg? no. Or an arm? no.

Or take away the grief of a wound?

No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No.

What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”?

— Falstaff, before the Battle of Shrewsbury, 1 Henry IV 5.1.129-33

            In "The Pretty Complete Shakespeare Guide to Donald Trump," I list among the parallels to Trump Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff. I don't quote the line, but the primary parallel was summed up in Falstaff's reflection "Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!" (ˆ2 Henry IV 3.2.301-2) and how in both cases the "lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable" (1 Henry IV 2.4.212-14).

            A more subtle parallel came up around 4 and 5 May of 2017: dates I remember since the 4^th of May is the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, and 5 May is Cinco de Mayo, with a capital "C": a holiday in my part of the US as well as Battle of Puebla Day in Mexico. When asked about meeting with Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea, Mr. Trump responded, CNN reported, "If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it."

            I have no complaints with the idea of the President of the United States calling the long-standing bluff of the North Koreans and arranging a full-scale peace conference to end the Korean War, with some of the groundwork laid in a quick, properly chaperoned, private meeting between the US President and the supreme leader of the PRK. My interest here is Mr. Trump saying he'd be honored.

            I quote as a headnote Falstaff's self-"catechism" asking himself if he should risk life and limb in battle for "honor." He does fight, sort of, but not for honor; and some people might not like the conclusion that "honor" is just a word: air, breath, a symbol like a scutcheon — a coat of arms ("escutcheon") displayed at a funeral. Honor, at least for Falstaff, at least of the military variety, is what makes living men dead soldiers.

            Note, though, that in the Henry plays and elsewhere people, especially men-type people, act for honor, but only Falstaff asks what the word means. It's a good question. "Honor" can imply mere reputation or even more crassly the sort of "honor" one gets on the Monarch's "Honour's List" as it was back in the day of, say, Macbeth, when an "honor" could imply a title, plus land, money, and power. That's behind the exchange when Macbeth before the murder of King Duncan so very carefully sounds out Banquo's willingness to support … something, at some time. Neither Macbeth nor Shakespeare had the phrase "plausible deniability," but they understood the concept.  

MACBETHIf you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,It shall make honour for you.

BANQUO                                                 So I lose noneIn seeking to augment it, but still keepMy bosom franchised and allegiance clear,I shall be counsell'd. (Macbeth 2.1.25-29)

Macbeth suggests there'll be "honour" as in profit for Banquo if he goes along with some action by Macbeth in the future. Banquo responds with a reference to a more refined honor when he puts a condition on his cooperation. He'll cooperate so long as doing so would be honorable, with "honorable" as in ethical and patriotic.

            Falstaff is the philosopher of 1 Henry IV, and a great comedian, a master of words.

            "Honor," Falstaff says, pricks him on — as in pricking with a goad for cattle (cf. to "goad someone [on]). But what if honor figuratively pricks him off — checks him off the list of the living — when he "comes on," i.e., presses forward into battle. There's a joke here, and it's a tribute to Falstaff's verbal brilliance that it's on us, his audience. Nowadays, to dirty-minded adolescent boys and some girls, "prick me off" and "come on" sound … suggestive. Same suggestions back in Shakespeare's day, with "prick," which has and had the slang meaning of "penis" and "come," which has possibilities. The joke is that this isn't dirty, and a good actor could look at the audience and get across, "Oh, you nasty-minded people!"

*

            Like Falstaff, the theoretically Honorable Donald J. Trump bends reality — as he perceives it — to his will with words; unlike Sir John, Trump is careless with words and possibly often ignorant.

            Since Kim Jong Un commands a military with several thousand artillery tubes that can be brought to bear on Seoul, South Korea, it is well for American presidents to avoid insulting him. Such prudence, however, does not require sucking up, which would be the case if Mr. Trump really expressed his feelings in indicated he'd feel honored to meet with Kim.

            Significant here, for me anyway, is that Mr. Trump doesn't much care what the word "honored" means and that most of his supporters apparently don't care that he doesn't care.

            We are seeing I think a temporary culmination of a long-running trend.

            Back when I was teaching, every few semesters I'd return essays and write on the chalkboard in large letters, Words mean. And one semester I got some pushback on that assertion. A moderately cute couple of my students branded me a Literalist and one or other of the pair wrote and submitted a satiric attack on The Literalist as a type. This was in a course in expository writing (i.e., essays), and I'm pretty sure it was during the period I was starting out our work with examining "Sayings and Such": sayings, proverbs, coachly clichés — that sort of stuff. The first one was, "A stich in time saves nine," and I asked the students to explain what that meant and what you had to do to figure it out (finish the thought for one thing: "A stich in time saves nine stiches"). And then we'd move on to meatier matters like "No Pain, / No Gain." Is that true for weight training"? (I was taught "No"; my students were taught "Yes"; and a lot depends on what one means by "pain.") And for coached team sports, Pain for whom? Gain for whom? (I received a hell of an essay on that one from a student who finished a high school football game with his knees shot up with a cortisone and Xylocaine cocktail. At the end of the term, I confirmed with the student that the "I" of the essay was he and asked how he was doing. He replied, "I can walk, but I'm not playing football." His father punched out the coach, but the coach and trainer were otherwise unpunished.)

            Or what does it mean when a coach or principal or boss asks you to devote "110%" to the team or school or job? Obviously, the statement is figurative since s/he can't demand 110%, not with percentages only going up to 100. What percent are we talking about here — and why don't players and students or teachers or workers ask just what percentage is being demanded? My last question is mostly rhetorical. Part of the answer, though, is that they'd get in trouble for pointing out that an authority figure was bullshitting and/or demanding a blank check; and another part is that people don't even notice the bullshit or care much. People could say, "Okay, I realize that "110%" is a figure of speech, but what do you literally have in mind? Personally, I have other demands on me — legitimate demands — so I can give the team (school, job) maybe 20%."

            Few people say such things 'cause they want to avoid trouble, and over hundreds and thousands of unresisted utterances of such bullshit, it gets normalized and becomes unremarkable.

            More innocent is the sort of carelessness encapsulated in one of my oldest school memories. The pedantic old woman who taught my fourth grade class — fourth grade or thereabouts — complained about people's saying they "love ice cream." They wouldn't run back into a burning building to save Ice Cream, and they don't have a personal relationship with it, so she wondered why we couldn't just say we like ice cream. She was pedantic, overly fastidious, and right.

            Over hundreds and thousands of casual sloppy utterances, an important word like "love" gets a little trivialized and moves toward a heart-shape on Facebook.

*

            Other aspects of the hyperbole subset of bullshit were a problem for me writing recommendations. The Director of Film Studies told me I was screwing over students in saying that they were "competent, diligent, reliable, and bright." That was damning with faint praise. The graduate programs and grants and transfers our students applied for demanded brilliance and unique qualifications. I noted to the Director that if the applicants were as good as the screening committees apparently demanded, what the hell were they doing in our program much less why would they go to programs little better than ours? Applicants as good as the programs seemed to be demanding would do better than those programs.

            What I ended up doing was using my old terms but explaining them and, on occasion, giving where I was coming from.

                        Item 1: In response to something I said, the Chair of my department looked at me and replied, "Oh, come on, Rich; you've got a second-rate mind." To which I replied, "Yes, but I'm at a third-rate school." He didn't argue the point. If Cambridge and Chicago in their glory days, and Harvard and Stanford were or are first-rate; if the Big Ten school my boss and I attended was second-rate — then a school like Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) was third-rate.

                        Item 2: Probably in response to a self-deprecating remark I'd made, and quite likely after a couple or more gin-and-tonics, the great scholar of Medieval literature, Robert Kaske said to me, "No Rich; you're bright. (beat) Not brilliant, but bright." Kaske was brilliant; I was and generally still am, bright. I was and am also competent, professional, diligent, and dependable, and when I call an applicant those things it's significant praise. Brilliant is nice, but brilliant people aren't always diligent and dependable — or loyal to the people who gave them a break or their first job. Brilliant people can do better.

            With one candidate I really wanted to praise, I wrote that the person "is one of the most intelligent people I've met. He is not as bright as, say, Susan Sontag, Octavia Butler, Michael Harrington, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Senator Paul Douglas, but [s/he] is in their league and is among the brightest of the people who were my instructors, students, colleagues, and/or superiors in the hierarchies at the University of Illinois, Michael Reese Medical Center, Cornell University, and Miami University."

* *

We can be more careful with language, and one good thing Mr. Trump may accomplish is showing how important such care can be. Now that lesson may be taught if he makes some horrible verbal error and Kim Jong Un orders the bombardment of Seoul — but short of that, he can teach some valuable lessons on what not to do.

            "What is honor?" Well, it's not a meeting with a two-bit dictator.

Hi, I'm Rich, and I'm a Simple-Minded Literalist

After their fashion, they were kind of cute: picture the Macbeths at age 18, or Claire and Frank Underwood of House of Cards as high-school sweethearts. Now reduce their evil by two-thirds and their cunning by half, and you have the two students in my career who took the time and exerted the effort to do some really nasty critiquing of my teaching.

Or one aspect of my teaching, personality, and way of being in the world.

What angered them was that I was a simple-minded "Literalist" and I had marked down the young woman of the pair for using words inexactly in her writing in a College Composition course (at Miami U, Oxford, Ohio, some time in the late 20th century).

This story would be totally irrelevant to anyone except to me and the couple if it weren't for "journalist Salena Zito’s analytical couplet on the surprise winner of [US Presidential] Campaign 2016 [... that] The press took Republican Donald Trump 'literally, but not seriously' [...], whereas Trump’s supporters took him 'seriously, but not literally.'"

The quotation above is from Charles Lane in an opinion piece published 16 November 2016 in The Washington Post, and Zito's differentiation between taking Trump "literally" and "seriously" has become a commonplace — and we're on our way to that degree of familiarity with Lane's advice that we should take Trump both literally and seriously.

I'd expand that advice and recommend taking every speaker with power both literally and seriously, while allowing, and allowing a lot, for the possibilities of such figurative language as hyperbole — and allowing for plain old bullshit and lying.

One example I gave was a coach demanding "one hundred and ten percent dedication to the team." I suggested pointing out to the coach that his demand was clearly figurative — there can only be 100% dedication to anything — but also excessive. He obviously wasn't demanding 110% dedication, but he was demanding a blank check, so to speak, and it would be well if team members got him to clarify by pointing out they had demands on their time — school, work, family — that were also legitimate and pressing and make a counter- offer of a very generous 30% dedication. 

There's a good chance that even star athletes would be thrown off the team — I once won a bet with some students that coachly authority would trump winning and that even a tennis coach would purge a disobedient player — ahem, there's a good chance any uppity high school or college players trying to negotiate dedication would be cut, but the point would be made.

If you can help it, it don't allow other people to make unlimited demands on your time, not unless you're a bonded pair and you really, really love and trust the other party. 

WORDS MEAN, goddamn it, and if "I want 110% dedication" doesn't mean "110% dedication," it does mean an open-ended demand that you should be very careful in allowing. 

Later in my career, I was going to learn the paradoxical Daoist teaching that no one lies. The paradox is resolved with the very sensible idea that if you listen carefully enough you can figure our what the person is really trying to say — but I'm pretty sure you have to be a Daoist sage to do that reliably.

Where we have trouble taking people literally or seriously is with pathological liars, of which I've met another couple. More exactly, I dealt with, let's say, a congenital liar in senior year of high school and was one among a number of people who had to deal with a pathological liar in college.

The congenital liar was a guy — we'll call him "Todd" — somewhat on the periphery of my life but still a friend and kind of classmate. (Chicago schools divided up by semesters, and he graduated the same year I did but a semester earlier.) Anyway, he was someone I was friendly with and had no reason to doubt him when he said he was taking ... let's call her Dolores to the prom. I did have reason to doubt him when Dolores asked me why I hadn't asked her to prom, and I told her because Todd said that she was going to the prom with him, and she said "Huh?!" and then some stronger things, and I went off looking for the first real fight since I was seven. Todd won, but I owe him this much: he was my introduction to the idea that some people would lie for the hell of it; that even when there was no reason to lie, some people might.

More powerful blows to my worldview came in college, when I learned that some people could behave with literal malice: i.e., that they would hurt someone not for any profit for themselves, not for revenge, but just to hurt someone they disliked. (In literature, I learned of people who just hurt other people — period; Shakespeare's Iago says he hates Othello, but maybe he doesn't; he may just despise everyone). More to the immediate point, I and the guys I lived with learned about pathological lying.

After his fashion, he was a cool guy: president of his pledge class, and, he said, working his way through school, including working at the job we offered him at the house, work beyond his chores as a pledge. And he was just cool, a smooth talker, personable — and an obsessive, compulsive, pathological liar who could make you think you'd gone crazy because he could assert obvious untruths with more assurance than most of us could talk about what was right in front of us.

After our experience with this guy, we had a new rule for our chapter: A pledge caught in lies was "depleged," and the burden of proof was on him to be repledged, and if he couldn't do that we'd pay whatever it cost for him to move out of the house and elsewhere. An honest, plain-speaking character in Shakespeare's King Lear describes the most contemptible of the villains in that play in terms of, "Such smiling rogues as these," who "Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain" that bind together people and society. Our cool, personable, pathological pledge wasn't that bad, but he was on the continuum.

When lies become constant, words no longer really mean, and that way lies social chaos.

So in good, simple-minded fashion, let us take seriously what people say, especially people with power — and start with the literal meaning of words and then work through the dangerous and wonderful complexities of language. 

And, while we're at it, let us hold the President of the United States to standards of exactness a competent teacher and pretty nice guy like me would hold college frosh to — and to standards of honesty a bunch of undergrads ca. 1962 could figure out they had to hold themselves to in order to live together even as a group of 50. If Mr. Trump says he'll torture prisoners and kill the families of terrorists, and we elect him president — which under the Electoral College system favoring small states and rural folk we did — then we've written that figurative blank check for actions up to the rack and more elegant means of torture, and the killing of children. This isn't "110%": torture and the murder of children (and the torture of children in front of their parents) are indeed possible: we can be sure of that since they have been done. And if someone recommends doing such things, and you empower him to do so, well that is exactly what almost half of the US electorate have done.

WORDS MEAN, damn it: often in complex ways, but they do indeed mean.

"Everybody/Nobody Is Talking About ..." — A Note on Usage

      This is from an e-blast from the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I've encountered the line a number of places: "Here's something nobody in the media is talking about: ..." Or it's a rhetorical question, "Why is nobody talking about ...?" Or, for the flip side, the assertion, "Everybody is talking about ...."
      Uh-huh.
      First off, as the wise-ass saying reminds us, "'media' are a plural noun," less plural than it should be in terms of serious journalism, but plural up the whazoo on the web. Whatever it is, there's a good chance somebody on the web is talking about it, and fairly often on a site that most of us would accept as a politically relevant medium. So before people hit Send for posts with assertions like "Nobody/Everybody is talking about," they should do a quick Google search and test the assertion. "The exception proves" — i.e., tests — "the rule," and if even one person out there is talking about it, it ain't nobody. "Everybody" is more difficult to test empirically, but common sense can be useful: just limiting ourselves to human beings on our planet gives over seven billion "somebodies," and short of basics like breathing, it's unlikely that everybody is doing it or saying it or believing it or whatever.
      A couple or three decades back, one of my students in a College Composition class ("Freshman English") started an essay with, "Since the beginning of time, Man ...." I asked him if he dated "the beginning of time" with the Big Bang or the rise of human consciousness or the first day of creation in Genesis — and whether "Man" included women and children. A few question got to the, uh, "data set" for his exposition: "Me and my buddies back in high school"; so I asked him why he didn't just write about his group in high school. He noted that I'd taught that a useful strategy for an opening paragraph was to start broad and then narrow down to a thesis statement. I said that the advice held but by "broad" I didn't mean cosmic. I also taught "Write about what you know about" — adding that sometimes that required research.)
      Similarly, there are all sorts of useful things one can say about the major media or the media one reads or some set of mediums where one could legitimately talk about "no one" or "every one" — or one can cut the absolutes like "everyone" and "no one"  (and a bit of the crap) and just announce "Here's a topic I wish more people would talk about, and here's a thing or two I wish you-all would get off your sorry asses and work on."
      We live in an era of hype, and pretentious bullshit like "From the beginning of time, Man" will get attention — it worked in a deodorant commercial — and sound impressive to people with a fair amount of schooling and insufficient education. Similarly for lines insisting that "Just everybody" is doing thus-and-so or plaintively asking "Why is nobody talking about ...."
      Such talk is excusable in a college freshperson or from your kids when they tell you how just everybody is getting tongue studs, facial brands, tattoos, and/or scarification. I pressed my student on just what the hell he was actually talking about, and if you've had any success at all raising kids you know to demand that they "Name two" with anything "just everybody" is doing.

Addendum: Journalistic "C's" — Historical Context (6 March 2015)

In an article published in my local newspaper on 6 March 2015, the columnist Martin Schram quotes US House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, Republican of California chiding his colleagues for holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security when "We face more global and domestic threats today than ever before […]." 

Mr. Schram says the Congressman "blasted" his fellow conservatives, and certainly the blast was well deserved — but Mr. Schram should have provided an introductory warning such as, "Using the rhetorical device of hyperbole, Nunes blasted his fellow conservatives …." 

'Cause come on! British forces burned public building in Washington, DC, in 1814 — including "the presidential mansion" — and the War of 1812 was a fairly close thing. The US Civil War was by definition a deadly threat to the American Union, and the United States was in great danger during World War II and the Cold War. The Great Depression and the protests and the riots of the long 1960s weren't on the threat level of Fascism or Stalinist Russia, but they were very serious, as was the crime wave of the 1980s.

The threat of thermonuclear annihilation is still with us, but that's a matter for nuclear build-down, which Mr. Nunes probably doesn't have in mind — and probably ditto for resource depletion and climate change.

So, again: Context, journalists, context, in this case historical, and a sense of proportion. It's a good idea to fund the Department of Homeland Security, period. There are threats out there; they don't have to be the worst in history.

Existential Threats (19 Sept. 2014)

            An existential threat to the human species is a large-ish asteroid or middling-size comet hitting the Earth, or a mega-super-volcanic event — a Yellowstone eruption, say, as the start of a series of super eruptions — or a full-out thermonuclear war bringing on nuclear winter.
            There are things we can do about cosmic and geologic threats, but they're mostly long-haul strategies and desperate stabs at survival. We need better inventories of asteroids and planetoids and planetesimals and all, and much better understanding of geophysics generally and volcanoes in particular. So governments should be doing more of what they should be doing anyway in financing scientific research. We also need to expand programs with the "Noah's Arc" approach, preserving plant seeds and other preservable genomes, plus some human beings: shelters on Earth for the very long term, plus, as soon as affordable, colonies and the Moon and nearby planets so we do not have all the human eggs in one basket, all our genes and cultures on one vulnerable planet.
            A whole lot simpler and cheaper is a crash program for what we should be doing anyway: immediately cutting back Russian, US, and Chinese nuclear weapons to where we have enough to destroy one another only a couple times over, but (probably) too few to trigger climate disaster. And after that exercise has concentrated our figurative minds, all the countries with nukes — I'm look at you Israel, Pakistan, and India — all those with nukes can move rapidly to reduce nuclear arsenals to the handful of atomic bombs (not hydrogen) quite sufficient to deter attack.
            And then, with the human-controlled existential threat removed, we can consider working on the merely horrendous, horrific, and horrible threat of small-scale nuclear warfare or large-scale conventional wars.
            Before another politician, pundit, or other propagandizer uses the phrase "existential threat," I'd like them to consider the factoid that from 1900 C.E. to 1950, despite two world wars, the human population rose from about 1.65 billion to about 2.52 billion. They should consider the fact that the USSR suffered some 20 million deaths in World War II, and numerous other casualties, and survived as a state and society. Germany and Japan lost entire cities and had regimes toppled but still survived as societies and were again thriving countries again — West Germany, anyway — within two generations.
            So please get this straight: ISIS and terrorists and terrorism as such are not existential threats to the United States, not directly. The United States as a state, society, and people can absorb even the atomic destruction of a city or two, to say nothing of casualties in numbers well below those killed each years in gun deaths or highway accidents or from cigarettes.
            ISIS and terrorists and terrorism as such are not a direct threat to America at all — not as a state and society — but to Americans, which is different, and lesser threats to us individual Americans than tobacco, alcohol, fire-arms, reckless drivers, and the other sources of "mortality and morbidity" that are part of everyday life.
            To repeat the point, what terrorists threaten isn't America and not even many Americans but the American Republic.
            As a candidate for the US presidency, John Kerry learned that politicians commit a serious gaffe when they are (gasp!) insensitive enough to slip and allow the fact that terrorism, in geo-political terms, is a "nuisance" — a fact that can lead to the nastily pragmatic thought that one does what one can against terrorists and then, as a society, suck up the occasional losses. Terrorism has been a documented tactic since at least the time Judah Maccabee's freedom fighters were killing off Seleucids and Jewish collaborators in the victorious guerilla war commemorated each year at Hanukkah. Terrorism is a tactic; it is a tactic that can work: from time to time, it will be used.
            The Republic is at risk because we Americans can get rather extreme in our reluctance to die and overly hypocritical in talking about "bearing any cost" and using clichés like "freedom isn't free" without adding that we usually want somebody else paying for it. The threat of ISIS and terrorism and all is that the third or fourth time some Mall of America is bombed or machine-gunned by (non-White/Christian) terrorists, most Americans will be sufficiently terrorized to demand moving beyond "The National Security State" to a downright police state, where they will feel, and probably be, safer.
            We Americans don't do risk assessment very well, and for all our glorification of heroes and entrepreneurs and all, most of us are really risk-averse for ourselves and those we love — as we understand risks, which is often poorly.
            You want to reduce an existential threat? Work for rapid and radical reduction in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, starting with a risk-free, and money-saving, unilateral reduction in US nuclear weaponry. Beyond that, join the fight against language inflation and manipulation through fear. Threats can be serious without being "existential" or sensational. Global warming is not an existential threat to the human species or to the United States, but it does threaten an ironic combination of flooding and desiccation to where I live, and serious harm to millions (eventually billions?) of others who live on a coast and/or where it's hot and dry — or where it used to be cold. A group like ISIS causes great local misery and may spark a Sunni v. Shi'a (etc.!) civil war and another round of global terrorism.
            Such risks are bad enough without hyperbole.