Djelloul Marbrook

If I told you I can tell a lot about a man by the way he ties his tie, you might be tempted to say: a) that’s why ties are going out of fashion, or b) the Malarkey Quotient is pretty high among bloggers.

Actually I think the MQ is pretty high in public life. The media enjoy a towering lack of esteem, but it hasn’t dawned on their owners that this precipitous decline of respect corresponds to the rise of infotainment, which is their formula for operating on the cheap.

About those ties, I notice that CNN’s Lou Dobbs, America’s favorite fulminator, doesn’t indent his ties as they pour out of their knot, while Sen. John McCain prefers the dimpled tie. Does this mean Mr. Dobbs is reliably upfront while shadows lurk in the senator’s persona? Or does it mean the Arizonan is a tad more stylish than the journalist?

I think this entire kerfuffle started with a bartender named Malarkey who delighted in plopping Red Dye Number Two cherries in Martinis. Such a sot is liable to say anything, and you can be sure it will be carried out of his bar as absolute truth. I mean, if you want to be taken seriously you have to come up with some serious content, right? Ahem, media muckymucks, you listening?

Malarkey plays an important role in American life and it ought to be celebrated at least as much as random violence, simplemindedness and good Nielsen ratings. If it can be used to grease the skids to the White House or to Iraq, then I think we should handle it like baseball stats. We know Randy Johnson’s ERA, so why shouldn’t we track Dubya’s MQ? He’s at least as good as the Big Unit at pitching it. We should figure out how to quantify it. If baseball is the sport of stats, shouldn’t politics be the sport of people who enjoy a good laugh?

Back to those ties for a moment. You didn’t think I had anything as important to say as your average talking head, did you? I will say, though, that some of my ties just naturally dimple and some don’t, which maybe is to say you have to find the wont of things in life. A carpenter can tell you that (in fact, one did tell us that), but don’t expect world leaders to listen to a carpenter. If they did, would there be wars? People have their wont too. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to tie people the wrong way, and I’m deeply ashamed of that.

We don’t know the origin of the word malarkey, but of course we can’t help noting it sounds vaguely Celtic. It has a big clan of boisterous cousins: balderdash, blather, bunkum, claptrap, drivel, piffle, poppycock, rigmarole, twaddle and tomfoolery, among others. I’ve lived next door to quite a few of them and I’ve spent a lot of time in bars and political rallies listening to them.

Now kerfuffle is another matter entirely. We know just where it comes from: the Scots word caerr, meaning wrong, and fuffle, meaning to become disheveled. Sounds like a political campaign to me. You know, where the truth gets fuffled. But I could be caerr.