Sun, Nov 21, 2004 page9

• Kumbaya prize not available for those who like to game the system

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Interrogated this year by US investigators in his Iraq prison cell about prewar UN inspections, former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz quoted then-president Saddam Hussein as having told his manipulative Higher Committee in 2002, "These people are playing a game with us -- we'll play a game with them."

  That technique is known in the American vernacular as "gaming the system." This summer, US President George W. Bush said of Saddam, "Intelligence clearly says that he was gaming the system." In an October news conference, the president used the phrase redundantly: "The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the UN oil-for-food program to try to influence countries ... to undermine sanctions."

  Sarah Green, in e-mail-land, writes: "Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky accused his opponent, a doctor, of gaming the medical system. Environmentalists accused utility companies of getting away with lax water-safety standards -- again by gaming the system. What I want to know is, what is this game, and will they let me play?"

  You don't want to play this ancient game. In Standard English, the verb rooted in the Teutonic gamen became to game and had the innocent meaning of "to play, to amuse." As a noun, that meaning still holds; but as a verb and its participle, gaming, along with the related gambling, the word gained a rakish connotation.

  As a slang adjective, however, game began as a synonym for "whorish"; in the 1698 Dictionary of the Canting Crew, it is defined as "at a Bawdy-house, Lewd Women," and Farmer and Henley's 1890 slang dictionary has an entry for game-woman defined as "a prostitute." Although Cab Calloway's 1944 Hepster's Dictionary defined gammin' as merely "flirtatious," the nonsexual slang meaning of the verb to game has long been "to swindle."

  But when was gaming, in its slangy, crapshooting sense, applied to a system? Earliest citation I can find in the Factiva database comes from the March 24, 1985, Sunday Oklahoman, in an article by Chris Casteel about DNR (do not resuscitate) orders in hospitals. The sponsor of state legislation dealing with this issue, Cal Hobson, was quoted saying, "We're gaming the system to deal with the problem."

  The system was the insurance system, and the phrase was familiar throughout the medical community. In 1987, Robert Pear of The New York Times quoted an American Medical Association official in vigorous denial of fabricated diagnoses and the misuse of billing codes to increase payments from insurance companies: "There is no hard evidence that doctors are up-coding or gaming the system."

  The phrase, with its larcenous connotation, quickly made its way from the world of medical insurance into the arena of politics. In 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new first lady, may have been the one who built the linguistic bridge: Heading a health-insurance task force that turned out to be ill fated, she told the Service Employees International Union, "Explain how you see the system that is being gamed and ripped off." A decade later, energy executives in California were accused of gaming the system, and the phrase was widely understood to mean "corruptly exploiting the complexities of regulation to cheat, or rip off, the consumer." It was a short step to applying the charge to any complicated arrangement, as Bush did in the UN oil-for-food scandal.

  No longer do people shrug helplessly and say, "You can't beat the system," because they suspect that others know how the system can be gamed.

  KUMBAYA

  In what may have been the most nonpartisan moment of this past summer, the official White House portraits of Bill Clinton and his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, were unveiled in an unabashedly sentimental ceremony. Bush praised his predecessor as a man "with far-ranging knowledge of public policy, a great compassion for people in need," and "42," as Bush nicknamed him, was grateful "for all those kind and generous things you've said." David Sanger, a New York Times reporter, wrote, "Graciousness oozed from all sides," and Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who had been one of Clinton's most effectively partisan White House aides, noted, "I thought everybody was going to break out in Kumbaya."

  As the campaign heated up, the conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham told Larry King of CNN that "while this kumbaya moment that we're all sharing about party unity is wonderful, the truth of the matter is -- " and then popped Senator John Kerry for his blast at the president for outsourcing the hunt for Osama bin Laden. John Tierney of The New York Times, in his lively Political Points column, quoted Kerry's call for a "more sensitive war on terror" and awarded him the "Kumbaya Prize."

  On election eve, Mortimer Zuckerman, the editor of US News & World Report, wrote, "What stopped Saddam was the will of a few strong-minded leaders who believed in a more forceful response than simply joining hands and singing Kumbaya." And after Bush's talk of "reaching out" to those who voted against him in his victory speech, the CNN anchor Carol Lin noted, "It's very easy to talk kumbaya the day after an election, but there are some really tough issues that he's going to face that there is a lot of opposition to."

  What is this symbol of sweetness and light, of warmth and goodness, that has been seized upon as an object of scorn?

  The word is Creole for "come by here." According to Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable, it is the title of a spiritual sung in the dialect of Gullah (that word possibly a variant of Angola, where the song may have originated about a century ago). It was revived in the folk-singing '50s and '60s, was popularized by groups like Peter, Paul and Mary, and epitomizes the gentle, peace-yearning spirituality (often derided as pot-smoking narcissism by hardhearted elders) of some of the hirsute youth of that generation. Typical English-language lines of one version of the song are "Sinners need you, Lord, kumbaya ... Come by here, my Lord, kumbaya."

  Evidently the word has now come to mean "excessively idealistic." Its earnest innocence is usually regarded by today's realists with varying degrees of disdain, and the dreamy mood of the era that it evokes is far from the grounded, centered rationality of today. But nobody can say the song's lyrics are not faith-based.
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