"Phrases Tacked Together Like the Sections of a Prefabricated Henhouse"
"Allen said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu are reviewing a plan that BP filed at the government's request for how it will capture oil going forward, increase the capacity of the system, and have backups in place in case there's a problem or the ships reach their capacity."
Look closely at that sentence. What purpose does the phrase"going forward" serve, given that it follows"how it will" -- how it will, necessarily in the future -- capture oil?
But that horrible phrase has percolated into our political discourse like, this is too easy and I apologize, oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It seems to have emerged in a particular context, and it seems to serve a particular purpose. Here's Obama last night:
"Tonight I'd like to lay out for you what our battle plan is going forward: what we're doing to clean up the oil, what we're doing to help our neighbors in the Gulf, and what we're doing to make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again."
Take out the"going forward": do you lose information? Does the paragraph become unclear? So why is everyone in politics using it?
It seems to me that this phrase first started to spread like cancer during the last year of the Bush administration, at the end of a long political disaster, and that it was meant to point the listener away from the past: No, the topic isn't some ancient set of decisions from way back in 2003, the topic is what we'll do from here.
Now, at the end of a year and a half of metastasizing political disaster -- and two months of shoddy stumbling around during the worst environmental disaster in immediate memory -- the phrase is meant to do the same thing: The issue isn't what we did in late April, the issue is what we'll do next week.
It's"don't look back" language, meant to dismiss as meaningless a past that embarrasses the speaker. I doubt it's a deliberate rhetorical strategy -- more like a reflex, an I-don't-want-them-to-look twitch.
Thoughts? I'd be particularly interested to read historical examples of similar history-erasing political language.
I can also, going forward, offer hundreds of other examples of the use of this phrase. But maybe we should save ourselves the pain.