We Are All Something Agreeable Now

After raiding the newfound Language Log’s archive for a few minutes, I found this post, on the increasing usage of the “We are all x now” snowclone.

Quoting from a Jeffrey Kluger article in Time:

“This increasingly common trope has an easy, fill-in-the-blank quality to it that allows us to affect a bit of purloined heroism, put it on the credit card of someone else, and feel pretty darned good about ourselves in the bargain,” he writes.

A disturbing variant of this is the “I am x,” or “I am x’s y.” It’s a way of attaching oneself to a tragic event by way of casual tautology:

“I am Syria.”
“I am Boston.”
“I am Adam Lanza’s mother.”
“I am Adam Lanza’s therapist.”
“I am Hitler’s taxidermist.”

But it’s not always employed with lethal, negative events. The LL post links to a post by David Simon, written after Obama’s re-election^*. The acrobatic bootlicking he does in the name of collectivism is astounding and confusing:

Regardless of what happens with his second term, Barack Obama’s great victory has already been won: We are all the other now, in some sense. Special interests? That term has no more meaning in the New America. We are all — all of us, every last American, even the whitest of white guys — special interests.

Couldn’t he at least ask my permission before including me?

At what threshold does this random self-identification with people you’ve never met or with inanimate objects become absurd to most people? Because it’s already past that point for me.

* Obama’s re-election (or any Head Bureaucrat’s election/re-election) is lethal (for foreign brown children in the path of drone missiles) and tragic, but I didn’t want to split hairs.