B4


EZ BD


KLMNO Give that lame duck a new name lame duck from B1


related political term, according to Sa- fire, is the “eunuch rule,” which refers to term limits that keep governors from succeeding themselves immediately, to prevent the building of potent political machines.) But now the “lame ducks” need a new


name. On Twitter, someone floated the notion of an “angry bird Congress,” a great term to note the passion of the past few weeks, but perhaps tied a bit too closely to a faddish, Finnish video game. What other words can we use to convey the last-minute rush of effort by these legislators? If we want to keep the hyphen, we


could turn the focus from their status to their efforts: a last-minute, last-ditch or all-out Congress (that last working on two levels: Lawmakers go all-out before they all go out). We could use time metaphors and talk


of the legislators’ rapidly approaching curfew, or borrow theDoomsdayClock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and talk about the “two-weeks-to-midnight” Congress, with big countdown graphics in all the papers. The lawmakers could be like college


students, pulling all-nighters to meet deadlines and get their work in under the wire.


And there are always sports meta-


phors in Washington, lots of Hail Mary passes, getting back in the game and so


forth. Perhaps the most aptmetaphor for this Congress is to call its members “buzzer beaters” and say they “left it all on the field.” Or maybe it’s better to focus on what


this legislative body is: the expired prod- uct of an old election.We could call it the relict Congress (as in “the relict of the last election”), the leftovers or the tail end. If we think of lawmaking as an indus-


trial process and the lame-duck session as a byproduct, we could call it the tailings (what’s left over after ore has been processed), or we could use the fancy Latin “caput mortuum” (what’s left over after the distilling process) or “resid- uum”—“that which is left over after any process,” according to the Century Dic- tionary. This leads to the question of nominative determinism (the phenome- non by which people named Payne be- come dentists, etc.):Would a more indus- trial-sounding Congress have been able to take up cap-and-trade?


I think our best option is to gender-


neutralize and reclaim the term “dowa- ger” for our soon-to-leave legislators. “Dowager” is technically, also accord-


ing to the Century Dictionary, the “title given to a widow to distinguish her from the wife of her husband’s heir bearing the same name: applied particularly to the widowsof princesandpersons of rank.” If you think of the old election as the late prince, then the new legislature is the spouse of the most recent election—the heir — and the dowager Congress is the widow: displaced, sure, but not power- less. (There are many “dower houses” in Britain where old spouses had to move. This could lead to puns involving the House of Representatives — think of the headline writers, people.) Using “dowager” would help report-


ers, too. Instead of having to laboriously indicate which lawmakers hadn’t been reelected, they could just say “the dowa- ger senator from State X.” However bad “lame duck” is, it could


be worse — we could have the Rump Congress, on the model of the British Rump Parliament, the members of the Long Parliament who escaped being ex- pelled by Oliver Cromwell in 1648 for being unwilling to try King Charles for treason. Legislators are compared to that part of the anatomy often enough. I’m sure they prefer thecomparisontowater- fowl, however lame.


erin@wordnik.com


suspicious. But what’s in it? L


Looks


ast Christmas, underwear bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab alleged- ly tried to ignite a suspicious package he’d smuggled in his pants onto a jet


bound for Detroit. In the year since, authorities have investigated thousands of sus- picious packages around the world. Some were real dangers, such as the package bombs at the Swiss and Chilean Embassies in Rome last week. Most others, like the package of crawfish-stuffed frozen chicken that shut down Lafayette Regional Air- port in Louisiana onWednesday, turned out to be nothing harmful at all. A road flare near Phoenix, a crate with audio-visual equipment in Tacoma,Wash.,


a bag of trash on an Ohio River bridge, an “Australian noisemaker” in San Diego— all raised alarm in a nation ready to see something and say something.When suspi- cious packages are found not to be suspicious, what are they? And how many of them are just Christmas ornaments?


Dec. 15:Metro closes the Pentagon sta- tion to investigate a blinking suspicious package—a Christmas ornament.


Dec. 14: Transit officials clear part of Salt Lake City’s central station for a suspicious package; it turns out to be a homeless person’s pillow.


Dec. 4: James Mullan, frustrated that a suspicious package has shut down the street in front of his Ipswich, England, watch shop for nearly three hours, de- fies police and opens the package to prove it is harmless. He is right—and arrested. Says his lawyer: “Ironically, he did help the operation by revealing there was nothing explosive there.”


Dec. 3: Salem, Ore., police shut down a title company’s garage on a report of a suspicious package; they discover a portable typewriter.


Nov. 23: Part of Boston’s Lo- gan Airport is closed because of a suspi- cious package fromNigeria; it contains bedsheets.


Nov. 17: A Namibian airport is shut down when a suspicious package bound for Germany is found. It turns out to be a fake suspicious package de- signed to test an airport’s ability to re- spond to suspicious packages.


KRISTIN LENZ/THE WASHINGTON POST


July 22: A New York bomb squad blows up a suspicious package on the Lake Erie shore; it’s a weather balloon.


June 30: Two separate suspicious packages close streets and the Colum- bia Heights Metro station in D.C. One is a pipe but is not a bomb; the other is a case full of tools. May 17: A San Antonio Toyota plant is evacuated after a package arrives from Nigeria; it is a turn-signal prototype, one of several that a Nigerian inventor sends to Toyota plants across country, also causing the evacuation of a post office in Indiana.


Jan. 6: The Secret Service investigates a suspicious package near theWhite House and finds clothes. The owner is later arrested for jogging naked nearby. “He wasn’t yelling or pro- testing, just going for a jog,” a Secret Service spokesperson said. “He was apprehend- ed, naked though he was.”


Jan. 1: A Northwest flight from Detroit to


Florida is diverted to


Nashville after the discov- ery of a suspicious package, which is revealed to be . . . a Christmas orna- ment.


—Justin Moyer moyer@washpost.com


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2010


IMAGES BIGSTOCK PHOTO


The liars, cheaters and CEOs we loved to hate P


hated from B1


for the populace to releasesomeinchoate anger. When issues are too morally am- biguous to grapple with, hate is an organizing principle, a way to start sort- ing out what we think about things. When national emotions begin to spiral out of control, hating is an act that ultimately contains them, creating defin- itive boundaries between when we’ll be tolerant and when we’ve had about enough of this nonsense. Should an Islamic cultural center be


built near Ground Zero? Dunno. The issue was huge and unwieldy. But while everyone else was picking through the elaborate minefield of politics and prin- ciples, Florida minister Terry Jones thought he’d just burn a pile of Korans. Everyone else still didn’t know what to think, except this:Thatmanhadgonetoo far.


Let us hate him. But briefly. Brief hate


was one of many varieties we experi- enced in 2010. There was divisive hate, applied by half of the population to either Nancy Pelosi or Sarah Palin; the unifying hate of Hayward (the whole country came together on that one); and the conflicting hate of John Edwards, who cheated on Elizabeth but then looked so bereft at her funeral, holding those little kids’ hands. There were nice people who made colossal mistakes, and there were BernieMadoff types whose moral make- up did not include remorse. Some people’s actions appeared iden-


tical, yet provoked opposite reactions. LeBron James took a pay cut so he could leave Cleveland to play basketball with his buddies in Miami, where he thought he’d have the best chance of winning a championship. Cliff Lee took a pay cut so he could go play baseball in Philadelphia, where, he said, he’d have the best chance of winning a championship. Cleveland fans burned No. 23 jerseys in protest, whileLeewasHosanna’dfor his ability to look beyond the money. Was the problem James’s statement


that “I’mgonna takemy talents to South Beach” — not merely to Miami, but to Botoxed, bottle-serviced South Beach? Was it the hour-long “Decision” special, as if viewers had nothing better to do than watch LeBron swan around a Boys & Girls Club? (Maybe if the special was just 30 minutes?) While Lee, meanwhile, was returning to the embrace of a hard city where they once booed Santa Claus? Surely no one expects hometown boys


to stay forever, but against the backdrop of Cleveland’s economy, where so many people were taking their talents to the unemployment office, the move seemed especially jerky. If Cleveland had been


onwashingtonpost.com 3Monica Hesse will discuss this


article Monday at 11 a.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline


flush, or Miami had been Detroit, or everyone had jobs, then maybe . . . But hate is contextual — a graphical


point on a chart where the X axis repre- sents the gall of the offense and Y represents the outside circumstances: the national mood, the economy, the weather. Our choice of where to plot the hate always says less about the people we are despising than it does about us. Take Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindel-


of, a duo of detested individuals who spent years courting the trust of “Lost” fans. Be patient, they said. We have a plan. The island’s not purgatory. But it waspurgatory,anditwasstupidpurgato- ry, and viewers invested six seasons of their time only to be rewarded with diminishing returns. That’s why it hurt.


It was our 401(K)s all over again.


sychologists have studied the social science behind hatred and declared that there’s increasing evidence


that people are evolutionary hard-wired to judge each other. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire recently decided to examine the earliest possible era with a recorded history and conclud- ed that the ancients weremakingperson- ality judgments as far back as 1,000 B.C. The Greek philosopher Theophrastus identified 30 personality types, some of which were determined to be totally undesirable, i.e. “UnsociableMan.” Morality “is used in large part to bind


people together to compete with other groups,” says JonathanHaidt, aUniversi- ty of Virginia psychologist who studies moral outrage. People “sacralize,” or make sacred, the figures who share their moral codes, and they villainize others. This is how power works: Hating Sarah Palin (or Bristol, her “Dancing With the Stars” proxy this year) is a way to mark


yourself as part of a certain group. Draw- ing other people into your hatred is one way to make sure they will side with you when the revolution comes. Class is often tiedupin this, sure—the


elitist snobs vs. the fear-mongering phi- listines—but at a very basic level, hating someone is a way of saying that they do not understand your values, your experi- ences, your way of life. Some of us hated the people who Wiki-leaked government documents all over the Internet. Others loved that and launched supporting “hacktivist” efforts, which everyone else hated. Some of us hated Mark Zuckerberg for making us leak ourownprivate information all over Facebook so that personalized ads could chide us about our muffin tops — and make him rich. Others named him “Per- son of the Year.” These kinds of feelings are universal


and eternal, but they are shaped by our times — the endless verbal stonings on talk radio or Keith Olbermann’s handy nightly guide to the “Worst Person in the


World.”Andas fractured and disassociat- ed as the country might be, one can always log on to Twitter for hashtagged hate and discover a community of people ready to loathe along with you. It is immensely complex to under-


stand the profit margins of a major network but immensely easy to pillorize Jay Leno. We have no idea how to clean up an oil spill, but a pretty good start might involve setting up a satirical fake Twitter account for Tony Hayward. The balance between government transpar- encyandprotecting state secrets issome- thing that four-star generals and PhD politicians are trying to suss out, but meanwhile, JulianAssange’s hair is really dumb. Hate can feel so good. It’s pure and


clarifying, reducing massive-firestormis- sues to intensely burning torches that individuals can carry around.Hatred as a form of public service! It’s also a fast-burning emotion, and


the residue it leaves is dark. Deep down, we know it’s corrosive, and so the top hate parable of 2010 is this: In June, at a home game in downtrod-


den Detroit, Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was just one out shy of becom- ing the 21st pitcher in the history of Major League Baseball to throw a perfect game. Then Jim Joyce, a 54-year-old umpire with two decades of experience, incorrectly declared that a batter from the Cleveland Indians was safe at first base, completely banjaxing the game. The crowd at Comerica Park erupted


Jesse James Jay Leno LeBron James


in low, dangerous boos. For one shining moment, Joyce was the most hated man in America. But only for a moment. Because after the game, it became clear that no one hated Joyce more than Joyce hated himself. And no one was more capable of forgiveness than Galarraga. “I did not get the call correct,” said the


teary ump. “I kicked the [snot] out of it. . . . I took a perfect game away from that kid over there who worked his [butt] off all night.” Joyce had made a bad mistake, but he


wasn’t a bad guy.His immediate recogni- tion of his wrongdoing preempted Keith Olbermann, preempted Twitter, pre- empted any coalitions that could be built around hating him. Galarraga accepted Joyce’s apology.


Mary Bale Tony Hayward Terry Jones


The two men hugged. The hot air evaporated, the hate


turned to love, and throughout the land the people — reminded that redemption is also a cleansing emotion, and one that is in their power to bestow — were peaceful. Until the next troll showed up. hessem@washpost.com


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