Rhetorical questions

I don't want to be an etiquette fussbudget. There are too many people who'd be well advised to spend a bit less time judging other people's manners and a bit more time minding their own. That said, I have my pet peeves in this department.

One of them is aggressive rhetorical questions. Parents and teachers sometimes take that approach with kids. I recall hearing Bill Cosby (no jokes here) recalling how he confronted his son or daughter with "Why did you do that when I told you not to?" and making fun of the latter for having "brain damage" because he or she was incapable of any answer other than "I don't know." You win, dick. (I would have said, "Because it's my nature.")

And of course there's the workplace boss or army officer who says to his luckless underling, "How could you be so stupid?" He isn't interested, it goes without saying, in actually finding out why you were stupid; he's just getting in your face.

And there's Simon Cowell on American Idol telling William Hung or some other hapless singer, "What the hell was that?" But that's clearly deliberate rudeness, to grab the attention of the show's young, scatterbrained viewers. Which is contemptible. I'm sure that today's movies aimed at teenagers--which means most Hollywood movies, as if you didn't know--have characters behaving dickishly or with general rudeness because it's attention-grabbing.

Not to mention the United States just after 9/11. (Give me a second to duck your brickbats, yankee readers.) There were some Americans who asked, "Why are we hated so much?" I suppose some of them really wanted to know the answer, but most of them were clearly just asking it as a rhetorical question to impose their sense of victimhood on everyone. Predictably, they didn't want to hear any answer that didn't have a pro-American spin: to point out that some Moslems in the Middle East might see themselves as victims was to be "anti-American." But that didn't leave a lot of alternative explanations, just the self-serving half-truth "They hate us for our freedoms." Don't ask the question if you don't want to hear the answer, my friends to the south.