"Can you, in a million years, imagine another female senator - Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Claire McCaskill - reacting to being called 'ma'am' like Barbara Boxer did? This is the kind of sanctimonious self-absorption on the modern left that makes my teeth itch"
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Davis opens with a dare disguised as a question, the kind that pretends to invite imagination while actually foreclosing it. "In a million years" doesn’t measure time; it signals certainty, preloading the reader with the assumption that Boxer’s reaction is uniquely performative. The name-checking of Hutchinson and McCaskill is strategic: two women from opposite parties, used as props to argue that "reasonable" female senators wouldn’t make a fuss. It’s a move meant to launder a partisan grievance through a gendered comparison, framing Boxer not as an individual with a specific boundary but as an emblem of a broader ideological pathology.
The real payload arrives in the phrase "sanctimonious self-absorption on the modern left". That’s not criticism of an etiquette dispute; it’s a cultural diagnosis. "Sanctimonious" implies moral vanity, "self-absorption" implies narcissism, and together they paint political correctness as both preachy and selfish - a neat rhetorical trick, since those traits are usually treated as opposites. Boxer’s objection to "ma’am" becomes, in this framing, less about power dynamics or respect and more about a supposed hunger for grievance.
"Teeth itch" is the tell: a bodily metaphor that performs disgust, recruiting the reader’s nerves more than their logic. Davis isn’t trying to adjudicate whether "ma’am" was appropriate; he’s building an affective alliance. The subtext is that the left manufactures offense to police language, and that such policing is not merely wrong but physically irritating - an intolerance presented as common sense.
The real payload arrives in the phrase "sanctimonious self-absorption on the modern left". That’s not criticism of an etiquette dispute; it’s a cultural diagnosis. "Sanctimonious" implies moral vanity, "self-absorption" implies narcissism, and together they paint political correctness as both preachy and selfish - a neat rhetorical trick, since those traits are usually treated as opposites. Boxer’s objection to "ma’am" becomes, in this framing, less about power dynamics or respect and more about a supposed hunger for grievance.
"Teeth itch" is the tell: a bodily metaphor that performs disgust, recruiting the reader’s nerves more than their logic. Davis isn’t trying to adjudicate whether "ma’am" was appropriate; he’s building an affective alliance. The subtext is that the left manufactures offense to police language, and that such policing is not merely wrong but physically irritating - an intolerance presented as common sense.
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| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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