If today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, (and it BE, bucko), then I think Monday should be National Talk Like A Veep Candidate Day.
There is something very soothing about adopting a sort of Scandinavian, Minnesotan, Yooper, Alaskan accent. It’s really hard to think badly about your lot in life when sounding out those long OOOOs and sharp EYEs, and speaking in the little lilt that you might use in front of a Sunday School class (when you weren’t asking them to pray the gay away). It’s like a lullaby. There may be something hard-wired about it in our brain’s box, like a prosaic version of a meditative Om. Remember Steve Martin’s old bit about banjo playing, and how everyone should be issued a banjo because it just makes bad news sound good to hear it mixed with that twangy sound? This is the same thing.
Hey, maybe that’s what the Treasury Department ought to do. Instead of guaranteeing a bunch of crappy mortgages and banning short-selling on financial stocks–wow, how pointy headed is that?–they should just issue banjos to everyone, domestically AND internationally. That would stop the whining, eh? Make Wall Street into the biggest hoedown outside Branson, and the markets would just overdose on optimism.
But if we issue banjos to everyone then the old “paddle faster, I hear banjos” joke would lose all its sting. And we can’t have that.