This week’s TIME issue, “The List Issue,” takes an interesting and comprehensive look back at 2008 through a “collection of serious and not-so-serious Top 10 lists.”
The list includes:
*Top 10 under-reported stories
*Top 10 medical breakthroughs
*Top 10 green stories
*Top 10 political lines
*Top 10 movies
*Top 10 books
Of course, also the “top 10 scandals.” This one should have given the TIME staff a nearly limitless universe to choose from.
And several more.
One that caught my interest was the “top 10 quotes,” as I feel that words publicly spoken by people, especially by those in leadership positions, can “capture the very essence of their character and personality.”
One of the top 10 quotes just happened to be one single word long, and a “little word” at that: “So?”
TIME describes this quote as: “Dick Cheney, when told that two-thirds of Americans did not support the war in Iraq.”
In my first post for The Moderate Voice, “Dick Cheney’s “So?” Or The Power of “Little Words,” I described my reaction, in part, as follows:
Dick Cheney responded with one word in a recent interview when he was asked what he thought about polls that indicate two-thirds of Americans believe the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, that the cost in lives was not worth the gains.
One single word!
“So?” the vice president said.
So. Even a “little word” is powerful, carries significance and — on many occasions — can and has become a defining moment for the person using that or those “little words.”
When pressed by the reporter whether he cares about the opinion of the American people, instead of bristling at the suggestion, Dick Cheney tried to emend his response by saying “I think you can not be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.” You know, those pesky polls that merely reflect the will of the people.
.
.
“So?”
Condescending? Slip of the tongue? Or a slip in Cheney’s gravitas?
This from a man who assured us “we will be greeted as liberators” … “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
From time to time our leaders utter words that not only define their term in office and their legacy, but words that also capture the very essence of their character and personality.
This is certainly one of those occasions.
Today, eight months later, the impression which that “one little word” made on me, and my impression of the man who said it, have not changed, and I am glad that TIME reminds us of it in their “Top 10 quotes.”
