On the
‘too many’ trope
Once
a certain Fox News commentator disgraced herself by saying that some female
soldiers had been ‘raped too often’. The comedian Jon Stewart then asked if
those soldiers should be raped ‘just enough’.
Just
so! Consider that phrase ‘too often’. I
call this the ‘too many trope’. Variants
of it are common in political speech. Candidates for office are wont to intone:
“For
too long we have had to endure Z…”
“Too many hard-working Americans suffer
from Z…”
“Too much Z is polluting our air…”
-
for various values of Z. There’s also too common, too rarely, too little, too few,
and on and on; and it’s always some evil that is in excess. But if that is the
trouble, then what is the alternative?
Logic
dictates that the only alternatives to ‘too many’ are ‘too few’ and ‘just
enough’. So I ask, with Jon Stewart, if the Fox news commentator was calling
for just enough rapes? Or even too few?
What
would be ‘just enough’ rapes? For fewer than just enough would be too few. Well,
how about a truly holy number: zero! More rapes than zero would be excessive,
fewer would be impossible; therefore zero is the precise optimal number.
But
if ‘just enough’ equals ‘zero’, then ‘too many’ equals ‘any at all’, and to say
“too many people have suffered from Z” is the same as saying “people have
suffered from Z”. So the words ‘too many’
can be deleted from all of its uses, without changing meaning.
But
not without changing rhetorical effect! For to say ‘too many have suffered from
Z’ is not just to say that Z exists and that people suffer from it; it also
says that we, the people, have been tolerating a non-zero quantity of Z, and
that it is now time to reduce Z to a lower, more tolerable, quantity. That
lower quantity will probably not be zero; such rigor would probably be
expensive, and we have other problems;
but rest assured that we, the people, now aroused from our slumber, will
combat Z until it declines to the point that we can return to our slumber.
Therefore
the ‘too many’ trope is not telling you what is true, nor what is good, but
instead how to think and what to feel. Worse, it does so covertly, while
pretending to tell you what is true and good. The ‘too many’ trope conveys, not
information, but manipulation.
