Musings from abroad: The Invisible Plural
The mass media in both the U.S. and the U.K. (as well as Internet discussion groups) are full of assessments of President Obama's leadership as Barack Obama nears the end of his first year in the top elective U.S. office and prepares for year two. Yet in many ways, President Obama is a fiction. By that I mean the notion that any one person is in charge of, and able to do, everything we expect of a head of a democratic state is a fiction. For those who think the President is performing well, the fiction is comforting; for those with the opposite view, the fiction is disturbing.
Journalists - and citizens alike - seem to have a hard time distinguishing between President Obama as an individual and the Obama Administration, which is an immense collective of reasonably diverse individuals. Only occasionally do reporters and pundits make this plurality visible by emphasizing Obama's leadership as a collective endeavor - a time when this did happen was coverage of the presidential review of the Afghan war strategy, when news columns and newscasts gave attention to multiple voices in the administration.
Perhaps keeping track of the many players (inside and outside the administration) who help shape particular policies simply is too hard. Moreover, we never get a chance to elect most of them. Ultimately, because the president is the one person U.S. citizens get to elect (other than the vice president) to the executive branch of the national government, we do hold him responsible for adept orchestration of the collective endeavor that constitutes the administration that bears his name.
Still, I wonder if public understanding of a U.S. president and his or her administration might be enhanced if the collective, or "invisible plural," could be made more visible. A modest but possibly revolutionary grammatical shift, borrowed from the British, might be a sensible shift. For example, if Prime Minister Gordon Brown is consulting his cabinet about a plan to impose a higher tax on bankers' bonuses, the news reports might say, "The Cabinet today are considering a controversial proposal to claw back bankers' profits." The British practice of using plural verbs for groups sounds bizarre to my American ears, but I begin to see its usefulness. If U.S. speakers and writers were to adopt it to refer to a presidential administration or cabinet, would that be retro-revolutionary?
