Two parents have twins who are each irritating in their own way. One is relentlessly pessimistic and griping, and the other irritatingly optimistic. Finally, fed up, the parents decide that they’ll give the pessimist gifts so wonderful he can’t possibly be unhappy, and the optimist a gift so awful he can’t possibly be positive about it. Birthday morning, they send the pessimist to a room filled with all the best and most desirable toys, and the optimist to a room filled with horse shit.
They wait a bit, and then go to the pessimist. He’s sitting, sulking, in the middle of the room. They say, “But, why are you so unhappy?” And he says, “Because you gave me all this crap, and not what I really wanted.” They’re discouraged, but they go on to the other room, thinking, “He can’t possibly like horse shit.” They get there, and find the optimist cheerfully shovelling the horse shit out of the room. They ask, “What are you doing?” And he says, “With all this shit, there has to be a pony someplace.”
I’ve read a lot of self-help (some of it from as far back as the 17th century), and there’s often a pony, and I like the ponies. But there’s also a lot of horse shit. As it happens, I don’t need horse shit, but other people might be looking for manure, so they might find it useful. Or they might find ponies I didn’t notice. I’m grateful for self-help rhetoric.
Some of that shit, however, is toxic.
Self-help rhetoric has a structure. It says you have this problem, you’ve tried to solve this problem in various ways, and none of them have worked. It proposes a solution to the problem (the plan), shows how the plan will solve the problem, shows it’s feasible, and, ideally, argues that there won’t be unintended consequences worse than the problem it’s solving. In other words, it relies on the stock issues of policy argumentation.
I like policy argumentation, so I don’t think self-help rhetoric using that structure is a problem. Like any other discourse, it can be a problem depending on how the stock issues in policy argumentation are used. When self-help rhetoric is damaging, it tends to engage in shaming and/or fear-mongering in the need part. Often, it relies on identifying the problem as at least partially that we are bad people, or members of a bad group. It often says that the cause of the problem is a personal failing on our part and/or the machinations of a malevolent out-group. Thus, even though it isn’t necessarily political, it has a lot of qualities of demagoguery.
The plan they propose is to join their group, buy their product, pay for their advice. An important part of the argument for their plan is that they and only they or their product can solve our problem. They say the plan is feasible (is this policy practical) because you can pay in installments, or you just have to buy this one thing, read this one book, watch these free videos. They deal with stock issue of solvency (how will this plan solve the ill) in two ways. First, they provide testimonials, sometimes by representatives of the five percent (or less) that have succeeded (so far), or, second, by simply asserting that their group/plan/product will solve the problem if you commit with enough will.
Many of these ways of arguing are shared with discourses outside of self-help, and sometimes we argue one of these ways because it’s true. If our car’s brakes are failing, someone insisting that we might die if we don’t deal with this issue is not fear-mongering, and it may be that our options are limited. But it’s fairly rare that there is only one possible solution. There are many places that can fix our brakes, we might be able to take the bus for a while instead of driving, we might be able to borrow a car, or even buy a new one. So, one of the things that makes some self-help rhetoric toxic is that it says there is only one solution, and it’s the one they’re advocating.
Second, it says that, if this solution doesn’t work (and, honestly, I think every solution fails from time to time), it is our fault—we did it wrong, usually because of our inadequate will. So, there is no way that their plan/policy/product can be proven wrong because it can never fail; only you can. That evasion of accountability moves this whole discourse out of the rational, or even reasonable, and into the realm of a religious—perhaps even cult-like—way of thinking about the world. Because we failed, we have to recommit with greater effort and resources; we need to pay for another workshop, buy more products, perhaps even spend more time with other consumers of this product/members of this ideology. When it gets really toxic is when it says that we shouldn’t listen to any information that might weaken our resolve or make us doubt what we are being told.[1]
Just to be clear: what I’m saying is that the toxic kinds of self-help set you up for failure. And they set you up so that your failure will make you more dependent on the group/product.
It does this partially through appealing to the binary paired terms of good is to bad as pure is to mixed.
Good Pure Pride Determination
_____ :: _____ :: _____ :: ____________
Bad Mixed Shame “Doubt”
That we have this problem (procrastination, debt, low income) means that we are in the category of bad (the shaming part). The solution is for us to become good. If we want to be good, we need to think in absolute terms, with absolute (i.e., pure) commitment, cleansing our thinking of nuance, uncertainty, doubt, purifying our world of bad influences who might encourage us to doubt. We need to commit to this one group or one policy, and stick with it regardless of whether it works because, if it didn’t work, it’s our fault for not believing in it enough. In toxic discourses, purity becomes about opting for commitment rather than consideration. They say that we need to believe rather than think.
Far too much of our public (and even private) discourse about policy issues is the toxic kind of self-help rhetoric.
[1] Thus, as far as what makes something a pony is self-help rhetoric that is clearly presented as one way of doing things, doesn’t frame the issue as Good v. Evil, doesn’t promise its solution as one that will always work, avoids shaming, sets out reasonable expectations, recommends practices/products from which it doesn’t profit (or even benefit), can often be combined with advice/practices from elsewhere, and doesn’t present deeper commitment (more purchases) as the only possible response to setbacks or failure.
[This is from a book I’m writing about how we deliberate about war]
In this book I’ve emphasized “paired terms” because (too) much public discourse presumes that issues can be thought of in terms of a set of associations and opposition as though: 1) those characteristics are necessarily associated or opposed, and 2) are necessarily epitomized in the association/opposition of liberal v. conservative, democrat/republican, and 3) these relationships are causal. That is, we too often talk as though Martin Luther King opposed the Vietnam War because he was liberal, and liberals opposed the Vietnam War because of their liberalism. This way of thinking about politics depoliticizes public discourse, in the sense that we don’t argue about whether, for instance, the policies regarding Vietnam are sensible, likely to get a good outcome, worth the costs, and other policy issues—instead, we argue (or, more accurately, fling assertions) about whether “liberals” or “conservatives” are better people. The false assumption is that, if we can prove that our group is good (or that the out-group is bad), we have thereby proven that our policies are good. That way of thinking about politics in terms of associations and oppositions is false at every step, and the public discourse about Vietnam exemplifies how inaccurate and damaging it is to displace policy argumentation with paired terms.
For instance, we now use the term “conservative” as though it were interchangeable with “Republican,” even when the Republican Party advocates a policy that is a striking violation with past practices (such as Romneycare, the adoption of preventive war in regard to Iraq, the level of governmental surveillance allowed by the USAPATRIOT Act ). Many people use the term “liberal” as though it were interchangeable with “democratic socialist,” “progressive,” and “communist” (when those are four different political philosophies). Democrats are not consistently “liberal,” and Republicans are not consistently “conservative.” In fact, it is simply not possible to define either “liberal” or “conservative” as a political philosophy that either the Democrats or Republicans consistently pursue in terms of policies—both parties advocate small government, big government, low taxes, high taxes, military intervention, states’ rights, federalism, and so on at different points, for different reasons, and generally because of short-term election strategies. Sometimes one party takes a stance simply because it is the opposite of what the other party is advocating—as when the GOP flipped on Romneycare. This observation is not a criticism of either party—that’s what political parties do–, but it is a criticism of thinking that partisanship is an intelligent substitution for policy argumentation.
Martin Luther King and Henry Steele Commager criticized US policies in regard to Vietnam, and both did so from what might usefully be called a “liberal” and Christian perspective, both believing that American foreign policy had to be grounded in moral principles. Hans Morgenthau, conservative, Jewish, and a “realist” in regard to international relations, was also a severe critic of American policies in Vietnam, and on April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial he wrote in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.”
Although Morgenthau had a very different philosophical perspective from either HSC or MLK, his criticisms of American policies in Vietnam had some overlap with theirs. While he agreed that China should be contained, he argued that it was a wrongheaded fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” Like HSC and MLK (and as even Robert McNamara would later admit was true), he insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.” Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like HSC and MLK, he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform).
Unlike HSC and MLK, Morgenthau spelled out a plan that went beyond simply negotiating with North Vietnam. His plan had four parts: (1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States. In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”
Just to be clear: Morgenthau had no sympathy for communism. His argument that we should ally ourselves with some communist regimes was, as I said, exactly the same one used for rationalizing our alliances with authoritarian–even fascistic–regimes. His argument that communists should be included in the group that might be the enemy of our enemies was grounded in realism. Realism, as a political theory, values putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?
If we think about the point of public discourse as debating various reasonable arguments, rather than a realm in which we will strive to silence all other points of view, then his is an argument that should be considered. Since support for Diem was grounded in the assumption that we should tolerate mass killings, corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism if the regime is useful to the US, why not try to assess utility without assuming that an unpopular and incompetent anti-Chinese anti-communist is necessarily and inevitably more useful than a competent, popular, anti-Chinese communist?
Because of paired terms. Because, as Morgenthau says, public discourse, and especially the PR about how Vietnam was being handled, was based in an obviously flawed binary: It is ironic that this simple juxtaposition of “Communism” and “free world” was erected by John Fuster Dulles ‘s crusading moralism into the guiding principle of American foreign policy at a time when the national Communism of Yugoslavia, the neutralism of the third world and the incipient split between the Soviet Union and China were rendering that juxtaposition invalid. After all, Nixon decided that China could be treated as an ally–why not North Vietnam? In other words, the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-communism was an act (or, as Morgenthau said, PR); it wasn’t grounded in a consistent set of criteria of assessment utility to the US, even about shared enemies. Morgenthau’s point was that we shouldn’t be alternately moralist and realist, and that is what American foreign policy was—“realist” (that is, thinking purely in terms of utility) when it came to authoritarian governments, but “moralist” when it came to self-identified “communist.”
Whether we should be more consistent about those criteria is an interesting argument, and Morgenthau makes the argument for a more consistent approach to other countries from a coherent realist position. I don’t agree with Morgenthau (I think it’s unrealistic, in a different sense of the term, to believe that power politics is amoral), but even I will say it’s an argument worth making, debating, and considering. To say that an argument is worth being taken seriously is not to say we think it’s true, but it’s plausible.
Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted his argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam. They shifted the stasis away from defending LBJ’s Vietnam policies to whether Morgenthau was a good person whose view should be considered. On April 23, 1965, Joseph Alsop responded (sort of) to Morgenthau’s argument in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times called “Expansionism Is a Continuing Theme in the History of China.”
In rhetorical terms, Morgenthau’s argument was a “counter-plan.” Morgenthau agreed with the goal of constraining China, but argued that the current strategy was an ineffective means of achieving that goal. Thus, a reasonable response to Morgenthau’s argument would argue that these means (a military response in Vietnam supporting the unpopular Diem regime) are likely to work in these conditions. That wasn’t Alsop’s response. He characterized Morgenthau’s argument as an argument for appeasing China and letting it “gobble their neighbors at will, even though their neighbors happen to be our friends and allies.” Morgenthau never argued for allowing China to gobble up other countries; he argued that the current American strategy for trying to stop China was ineffective. Alsop was not an idiot; he knew what Morgenthau was arguing. He chose to misrepresent it.
And he chose to take swipes along the way at professors who don’t really know what they’re talking about—as though being a journalist makes someone more of an expert on foreign policy?
Alsop’s argument, in other words, never responded to Morgenthau’s, instead attributing to Morgenthau a profoundly dumb argument that had nothing to do with what he’d actually said. Alsop’s argument wouldn’t work with anyone who’d read Morgenthau’s argument, but it would work with someone who already believed that the only legitimate position in regard to Vietnam was the one advocating a military solution—that is, people unwilling to engage in argumentation about their policy preferences, who instead believed that the way to think about policy option is good (us) v. evil (every other position). McNamara—the architect of the Vietnam War–would later decide that people like Morgenthau, MLK, and HSC were right. It was a civil war, Minh had considerable popular support, communism was not being forced on a completely unwilling populace by the Chinese, the situation was not amenable to a military solution. There were over 50,000 US deaths in the Vietnam conflict after Morgenthau made his argument. If even McNamara came around to Morgenthau’s position, doesn’t that suggest it was a position worth taking seriously in 1965?
I’m not saying Morgenthau’s policy should have been adopted in 1965; I’m saying it should have been argued.
Alsop (and others) did their best to ensure it wouldn’t be argued by making sure their audience never heard it, and instead heard a position too dumb to argue. And that is what partisans all over the political spectrum do—take all the various, nuanced, and sometimes smart critics of their position and homogenize them into the dumbest possible version, and they can count on an audience that never takes the time to figure out if they’re reading straw man versions of the various possible oppositions and critics. There are two lessons from Morgenthau’s treatment by people like Alsop. First, don’t be that audience.
We would never think we have been heard if people have only heard what our enemies say about us. Why should we think we have heard what others have to say if we only listen to what their enemies say about them?
Second, Morgenthau was conservative. He was a critic of how LBJ, a liberal, was handling the Vietnam conflict. MLK was liberal. He was a critic of how LBJ, a liberal, was handling the Vietnam conflict. Paired terms are wrong. It isn’t an accurate map of how beliefs and political affiliations and policies actually work. Good people endorse bad policies; our political options are not bifurcated into liberal v. conservative; being “conservative” (or atheist, Christian, democratic socialist, Jewish, liberal, libertarian, Muslim, progressive, reactionary, realist) doesn’t mean you necessarily endorse one of only two options in terms of policy agenda.
We need to argue policies.
McGeorge Bundy “debated” Han Morgenthau on CBS in June of 1965, and the scholar of rhetoric Robert Newman wrote a critique of Bundy’s rhetoric in the journal Today’s Speech. He said, and it’s worth quoting at length: Much of the profound disquiet about Viet Nam policy results from the increasing and systematic distortion of official news. There are, of course, especially in academic circles, the “doves” who want peace and noninvolvement even if this means communist control of some distant land. Bundy was not talking to them; nor is Morgenthau one of them. But even those of us who are inclined to be “hawks” are not anxious to back losers. We have had enough of this with Chiang Kai-Shek. We are afraid that Viet Nam, also, is the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. And we are tired of being lied to.
Newman goes on to list the post-war intelligence debacles of the CIA—the Bay of Pigs, wishful thinking about what the Chicoms would do in the Korean conflict, bad predictions about the Viet Cong in 1961. He mentions Secretary Rusk claiming in 1963 that the “strategic hamlet program was producing excellent results” when, actually, “this whole operation was a disastrous failure,” and, well, many other, if not outright lies, then instances of unmoored optimism that were quickly and unequivocally exposed as false. Newman concludes about Bundy’s treatment of Morgenthau, “Thus i[n] a situation where what was desperately needed was reinforcement of the shattered credibility of the government which Mr. Bundy represents, we got only ad hominem attack on a critical professor.”
And that is the problem with our political discourse, all over the political spectrum. That’s all we get, Two Minutes Hate about “the” opposition. What we need is policy argumentation. If you don’t read primary opposition sources, and you only rely on in-group sources for what “they” believe, you’re no better off than fans of Alsop.
A quote attributed to Margaret Mead is going around, which she may or may not have said. People sharing that quote have had various commenters disagree with Mead about her implicit definition of civilization—as far as I can tell, none of them cultural anthropologists or sociologists. (I’ll come back to that.)
While the quote is very badly sourced, it’s possible that she said something along the lines of the quote, since it’s in line with other things she said. And, if she said it, it was not an invitation to debate the distinction between civilized and non-civilized cultures but her attempt to show that distinction is always grounded in the wrong goals. This is, after all, among the scholars who advocated “cultural relativism.” She was never in favor of anthropology as a justification for imperialism. And it often was, and the civilized v. non-civilized binary was crucial to various projects of imperialism and extermination.
When that binary was popular, and (for complicated reasons) I happen to have read a lot of “scholars” and “experts” who endorsed that binary, none of them put their favored cultures in the “non-civilized” category. That’s one sign that a binary is part of a set of paired terms, in which everything good is associated with the in-group, and everything bad is associated with the out-group. The entry from the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences shows why it isn’t a concept much used by scholars (except for understanding rhetorics of exploitation):
“Thus, the significations accruing to civilization have been the following: European/Western; urban and urbane; secular and spiritual; law-abiding and nonviolent (i.e., limited to legalized violence, both within and between states); polished, courteous, and polite; disciplined, orderly, and productive; laissez faire, bourgeois, and comfortable; respectful of private property; fraternal and free; cultured, knowledgeable, and the master of nature. The uncivilized conversely are: non-Western; rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous, fanatical, literalist, and theocratic; unlawful and violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree; uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy. Given this stark set of binaries, it is not surprising that the civilizing mission (a related concept that emerged in the nineteenth century) has often been the ideological counterpart of projects of colonial domination and genocide, especially in the non-Western world, but also in the European hinterland and vis-à-vis European minorities and subaltern classes.” “Civilization.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 557-559. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.
As an aside, I have to note that I keep telling people that what is kind of a throwaway in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric is actually crucial to understanding public discourse, especially as that discourse crawls up the ladder of demagoguery: the concept of paired terms. The civilized/non-civilized distinction is a great example of why the notion of paired terms is so useful. For each good term, there is a bad one, and so it reinforces the notion that there are two kinds of groups: good (in-group) and bad (out-group).
But, back to the Mead quote. The whole notion that there is some kind of line between civilized and uncivilized cultures is self-serving nonsense, and that was a point she often made. At the time that Mead was working, it would have been easy to notice that genocidal projects relied on this binary, even when it made no sense (Nazi rhetoric framed Slavs and Jews as uncivilized; genocides of indigenous peoples depended on pretending that they didn’t have organized cultures). And she noticed. There are problems with her research, and she was no saint, but, for her era, she was surprisingly aware of the political uses of cultural anthropology, and she tried to resist some of the nastiest uses.
The groups thrown into the “uncivilized” category were actually wildly different from each other. In other words, the distinction itself is demagogic—it’s saying that the complicated and nuanced world of cultures is really a binary. That binary, which was really just a strategically incoherent us v. them binary, “justified” violence against out-groups–all out-groups. Because this out-group is like that out-group, and that out-group is dangerous, all out-groups are dangerous in all the ways any individual out-group is. That’s what this binary does. The whole project of defining a culture as civilized or not is about rationalizing the exploitation, oppression, and/or extermination of some group.
There are two other points I want to make. First, if you pay attention to pro-GOP rhetoric, then you might be aware that they try to employ this same set of paired terms against “liberals.” If, like me, you pay attention to pro-GOP talking points, then you can see that they frame “liberals” (just as much a phantasmagoric construction as “Jews”) as (from the entry above): “non-Western; […] fanatical […] violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree.”
You might notice that I’ve removed “rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous” “literalist, and theocratic” “uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy.” Pro-GOP is either silent on those characteristics or actively promotes them as virtues.
And that bring me to the fourth point, and the most complicated.
Many years ago, I was talking with someone who hadn’t taken a history class since high school, but who, on the basis of a paper he wrote in high school, thought he was an expert on Hitler, whose opinion about Hitler was as valid as any actual scholar. Once, in front of a colleague who was a devotee of Limbaugh, I said, “Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could make a Hitler analogy without citing two scholars in support,” and he said, “Oh, so you think common people should be silenced.”
I was speechless. (That doesn’t often happen.) He was projecting his own tendency to think in binaries onto me—knowledge is either lay (true) or expert (head in the sky). That’s a Limbaugh talking point, but it had little to do with what I was saying. I was saying that lay claims about Hitler that were valid could be validated by appealing to experts. I didn’t (and don’t) see a binary of expert v. lay knowledge. After all, a lot of experts endorsed the notion of civilized v. non-civilized cultures. Experts aren’t always right, and they don’t always agree. If no expert supports a claim about Hitler (and there are lots of popular claims about Hitler that no expert supports, such as the notion that he was Marxist or even left-wing) then it’s probably a bad claim.
In addition, what does it mean to have lay knowledge of Hitler? This isn’t an issue for which there is direct experience v. expert (i.e., mediated) knowledge because I doubt there is anyone alive who had direct experience of Hitler. It’s all mediated. It’s all about what people have told us. All we have is what we have been told by teachers, articles we read, papers we wrote in high school. The reason this point matters is that it means that privileging lay knowledge on the grounds that it is more direct (less mediated) is nonsense.
If we acknowledge it’s mediated then we can talk about what mediates it. In other words, cite your sources, and then we can argue about your sources.
If we think about it this way—how good are your sources of information—then we can have a better argument about argument.
We aren’t in a world in which experts are right and non-experts are always wrong or vice versa. We’ve never been in that world because the whole project of responsible scholarship is not about being right, but about making the argument that looks the most right given the evidence we’ve got at this moment.
And here we’re back to people arguing that something that Mead may or may not have said is wrong because, although they aren’t cultural anthropologists, they have beliefs.
They can have those beliefs. And just because Mead has degrees they don’t doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They can engage in argumentation with Mead all they want (and there are a lot of reasons to engage in argumentation with Mead), but flicking Mead away because of something they assert to be true because it’s what they have been told without trying to understand why Mead (might have) said what she did or whether their sources were reliable is exactly what is wrong with our public discourse.
Showing that Mead is wrong in her definition of civilization requires understanding what she (might have) meant in that definition. She almost certainly meant that the civilized/non-civilized binary is nonsense, so saying her position was wrong because the civilized/non-civilized division should have been placed elsewhere doesn’t show she was wrong. It shows she was right.
