waterloo, watergate, whitewatergate, and just plain old gate

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW what Wa­terloo and Wa­ter­gate and White­wa­ter­gate have to with each other? And what does a just plain old gate have to do with any­thing and where does ABBA fit into this? What if I brought an­other, more re­cent gate into the conversation—like Beng­hazi­gate? Yes­terday I posted a piece on Trey Gowdy and Hillary Clinton and who’s lying about whose lies and out of that came this …

In “an­other fishing ex­pe­di­tion without a bite,” I called the at­tempts of the oh-so par­tisan Con­gres­sional com­mittee in­ves­ti­ga­tions to un­cover the elu­sive and un­de­fined ‘truth’ about Beng­hazi a never-ending story and the most re­cent as “the latest round of Clinton-bashing by the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy.”

Noting that this was the ninth (!) such com­mittee, I stated that it was “com­mitted to fishing—er, I mean finding—the ‘truth’ about what hap­pened in Beng­hazi three years ago.” ¹

Ac­cu­sa­tions against the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion of every­thing from mere in­com­pe­tence to a cover-up followed.

Of course.

After the first few Republican-chaired com­mit­tees found no wrong-doing, shouldn’t they have quit?

Of course.

But they haven’t and the at­tack, its af­ter­math, and the on­going se­ries of in­ves­ti­ga­tions are re­ferred to as Beng­hazi­gate, which is seen around the world as a se­ries of par­tisan at­tacks that have fanned the flames of ha­tred against cur­rent Pres­i­dent Obama and fu­ture Pres­i­dent Clinton while failing to un­cover a single shred of ev­i­dence to use as a foun­da­tion for that ha­tred or the investigations.

Alas, that is how the Vast Rightwing Con­spiracy works.

This car­toon by Jeff Danziger for The New York Times is ti­tled “Trent Gowdy’s Lip­stick” and refers to the rhetor­ical ex­pres­sion ‘To put lip­stick on a pig.’ This idiom refers to making cos­metic changes in an at­tempt to dis­guise the true na­ture of something.

The void that is the Internet

As usual, when I com­pose at my com­puter, I have ac­cess to the In­ternet and the stag­gering array of facts and fig­ures and even opin­ions. And I can get lost there: open up Google and type in a phrase and sud­denly I am looking at some­thing else only tan­gen­tially re­lated but nonethe­less re­lated to my topic that sends my mind ca­reening off in a new di­rec­tion and I just have to add this stuff to my essay and some­times I do but mostly I don’t.

For ex­ample, yes­terday a friend posted a line from a ’60s album on one of my Face­book en­tries: “but still you can say ‘darker and darker’.” I knew I knew that line but at first I thought it was Fire­sign The­ater. So I typed those words into Google, but I er­ro­neously sub­sti­tuted and for but and that al­tered the re­sults of the search. Still, I had more than 43,000,000 sites to choose from! ²

On the first page, I had links to sites about Fifty Shades Of Darker, Donald Trump, lake sur­faces, and staying out of the sun. The second Google page was even better be­cause I found an ar­ticle ti­tled “What The Color of Your Urine Says About You.”

And that al­lowed me to use a line from that ar­ticle as a non-sequitur re­sponse to the ‘darker and darker’ quote. (You had to have been there.)

When using a search en­gine, the re­sulting pos­si­bil­i­ties may be prac­ti­cally end­less if one keeps his mind open to those pos­si­bil­i­ties and out of that search came this …

This car­toon by Clay Ben­nett of the Chat­tanooga Free Press de­picts Hillary Clinton non­cha­lantly fending off the many swords of the many Beng­hazi com­mit­tees out to flay her.

I stuck mostly to the subject

I find his­tory and pol­i­tics and pop­ular cul­ture and rock & roll and grammar and word-play al­most equally fas­ci­nating topics, and I some­times com­bine two or more in one essay. Yes­terday I did not.

I stuck to the subject.

Mostly.

But I did get side­tracked with the use of gate as a suffix and started bab­bling on with my two typing fin­gers when I re­al­ized that I was off on a side­track that would make for a more fun main track as its own post. So I ex­cised it from “an­other fishing ex­pe­di­tion without a bite” and saved it for this piece today.

So here we are at that post!

This car­toon by Signe Wilkinson of the Philadel­phia In­quirer & Daily News tells it all!

All gates are not Watergates

The use of gate as a suffix in Beng­hazi­gate and White­wa­ter­gate does not refer to that wooden con­trap­tion that you have to swing open to enter a garden. Adding gate to a noun is taken from and refers to Wa­ter­gate, which most people know has some­thing to do with the res­ig­na­tion of Richard Nixon from the Presidency.

Ac­tu­ally, the Wa­ter­gate is a hotel in Wash­ington, DC. The 1972 scandal as­so­ci­ated with it and Pres­i­dent Nixon in­volved breaking into the De­mo­c­ratic Na­tional Committee’s head­quar­ters along with lar­ceny, un­doc­u­mented slush funds, and ob­struc­tion of jus­tice, among others. These crimes and mis­de­meanors were car­ried out by Tricky Dick’s henchmen, a clan­des­tine co­terie of creepy char­ac­ters from C.R.E.E.P., a Rep*blican ver­sion of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (Look it up!)

The term Wa­ter­gate has come to en­com­pass an array of clan­des­tine and often il­legal ac­tiv­i­ties and gate has be­come a common suffix. At least common among elected Rep*blican of­fi­cials in the DC area in the past twenty-five years.

In brazen at­tempt after brazen at­tempt to create columns of smoke where only a match had been lit (if that!) during the pres­i­dency of Bill Clinton, those rep­re­sen­ta­tives have ac­cused the Clin­tons of one non-event after an­other, giving us such non-scandals as:

•  Trav­el­gate of 1993, in which we learned that the Clin­tons had the right to fire anyone they wanted to, in­cluding mem­bers of the White House Travel Office;

•  Troop­er­gate of 1993, in which we learned that mem­bers of the Arkansas State Troopers were paid to give tes­ti­mony against former Gov­ernor Clinton; and

•  White­wa­ter­gate of 1992, in which we learned that the Clin­tons may or may not have made a profit in a pri­vate busi­ness ven­ture in­volving the White­water De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion during the 1970s and ’80s.

There were more.

“Wa­terloo! I was de­feated, you won the war. Wa­terloo! Promise to love you for­ever more. Wa­terloo! Couldn’t es­cape if I wanted to. Wa­terloo! Knowing my fate is to be with you. Wa­terloo! Fi­nally facing my Wa­terloo.” See, I got ABBA into this thing after all!

Finally facing my Waterloo

Wa­ter­gate has taken on meaning sim­ilar to that of Wa­terloo, the de­ci­sive battle in 1815 in which Napoleon lost not just the battle but also his power, ab­di­cating his role as Em­peror of France. As an idiom, to refer to someone’s Wa­terloo is usu­ally a ref­er­ence to a de­ci­sion or ac­tion that de­cided the course of that person’s ca­reer or life—always negatively.

How could I not pay a nod to the grandeur that was ABBA? Wa­terloo was their first record to hit the charts where it mat­tered: in the US and the UK. As a ref­er­ence to Wa­terloo, it is prob­ably better known than the battle that caused Napolean to step down from power in France. Such is the power of pop­ular culture …

Gate as a transitive verb

The Urban Dic­tio­nary de­fines the non-capitalized word wa­ter­gate as “taping over a door latch to pre­vent the door from locking,” which is news to me as I have never heard or read the word used that way. But I haven’t read every­thing, so maybe it’s so, so I don’t want to con­fuse the sit­u­a­tion by giving yet an­other meaning to white­water.

What I sug­gest here is that we em­brace gate as a tran­si­tive verb: to gate someone is to ac­cuse them of scan­dalous be­havior without a shred of ac­tion­able ev­i­dence be­lieving the mere ac­cu­sa­tion will do them damage.

Ex­ample: During his pres­i­dency, Bill Clinton’s po­lit­ical en­e­mies gated him over the White­water investments.

Ex­ample: On Oc­tober 22, 2015, the Trey Gowdy-chaired com­mittee gated Hillary Clinton for more than ten hours.

It would prob­ably be best if we kept the use to gate to po­lit­ical sit­u­a­tions, but it could easily break out of those confines.

Ex­ample: Throughout the 1990s, Neal Umphred’s pro­fes­sional en­e­mies gated him in print about his work as the au­thor of price guides for record col­lec­tors. Would that be Col­lec­tors­gate? Priceguide­gate? O’Sullivan-Woodsidegate?

Somehow, using gate that way doesn’t carry as much clout, so I’m thinking we should just use gate for po­lit­ical conundrums.

That’s it: so I would like to hear from both of my readers where they stand on the use of gate as a verb …

Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!

HEADER IMAGE: Benny An­der­sson, Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyn­gstad, Ag­netha Fält­skog, and Björn Ul­vaeus. What is there to say? Oh, I know: Find your­self a copy of the 1994 movie The Ad­ven­tures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert with Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and the bloody amazing Ter­ence Stamp as three drag queens stuck in the out­back of Australia.

FOOTNOTES:

1   What hap­pened in Beng­hazi three years ago was an un­pro­voked at­tack on the US em­bassy there on Sep­tember 11, 2012. During this at­tack, four Amer­i­cans were mur­dered: J. Christo­pher Stevens, For­eign Ser­vice In­for­ma­tion Man­age­ment Of­ficer Sean Smith, and CIA con­trac­tors Ty­rone S. Woods and Glen Doherty.

2   The line is from a piece of non­sen­sical di­a­logue is from a sec­tion ti­tled Bit Of Nos­talgia from Frank Zappa’s 1967 album LUMPY GRAVY.