Genie out of the bottle

Reader question:

Please explain “transparency genie is out of the bottle” as in this passage:

“That’s the coolest part about this whole thing, the democratization of this information,” he said. “The transparency genie is out of the bottle. It’s unprecedented access. It’ll only get better.”

My comments:

The genie in the bottle refers to the ancient Arabian fable involving a poor fisherman and an evil genie in the bottle. The fisherman pulled a bottle from the sea and heard a voice from within. It was the voice from the genie who had been imprisoned in the bottle for 10,000 years as a form a punishment. The fisherman hence opened the bottle to let the genie out.

Instead of being grateful to the fisherman for saving his life, the genie would kill the fisherman instead because he had come late. Had someone come by earlier, say, 9,990 years before, the genie said he would have been grateful and would have demonstrated his gratefulness by making their wish, whatever it is, come true. Now, however, the genie said he is fed up with the waiting and therefore has decided to kill anyone who has the misfortune of letting him out of the bottle. The fisherman, therefore, had to die...

Hence, if someone says “the genie is out of the bottle”, they mean to say something bad is going to happen – and it’s unavoidable.

In the example from the top, by likening “transparency” to “the genie”, the person being quoted meant to say this: Now that the people have gained access to information, they’ll keep wanting for more. To those who oppose to this “democratization of information”, i.e. free information to the public, this must be something terrible. However, there’s nothing they can do now to stop the process – As the genie out of the bottle cannot be put back in, the wheels of the democratic process can not be rolled backwards.

In at least one popular version of the fable, though, the fisherman actually had the presence of mind to trick the genie back into the bottle – by asking the genie to prove to him that the genie’s big body can squeeze into the tiny bottle. When the genie duly complied, turning into a cloud of smoke before drifting back into the bottle, the fisherman swiftly sealed the bottle up again. In everyday usage today, however, people tend to ignore the fact that the genie could be put back. They instead use the genie metaphor to make this point alone – something bad is going to happen and that it’s inevitable.

Anyways, here are two media examples of the genie:

1. Weber said accountability was one of the biggest factors in deciding to have Bower coach. Bower built the Hornets’ roster and is now tasked with getting it to win.

“I told Jeff the genie is out of the bottle,” Weber said. “There’s no way he can say he doesn’t have the right players for the right reason. Jeff has hand-selected this team and we like the idea that now Jeff will be held accountable for results.”

- Floyd returning as Hornets assistant, AP, November 12, 2009.

2. “I think that the changes in Eastern Europe are now essentially irreversible,” Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute told a Heritage Foundation panel, adding, “That’s a funny word that’s come into our political vocabulary.”

Why funny, in the sense of odd? “Because, of course, in politics nothing is irreversible. . . . In using this word, we should assume that we don’t really quite mean it.” When Mr. Muravchik used the word, he limited his meaning to “the sense that I don’t believe that conservative forces within those Communist Parties have it in their power any longer to effect a reversal and a re-establishment of their authority by means of force.”

The closest synonym to irreversible is unrecallable, but that is rarely used; the more familiar irrevocable is available, but connotes specific laws rather than a movement or tide; unstoppable does not have the backward-turning sense; unalterable and unchangeable also miss the point of continuing change.

The word was carefully chosen, both by Mr. Gorbachev and by his translators, but has been used by different politicians in other circumstances. Delaware Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in April 1987 told an audience that, in the 1988 election, “the country will be set on an irreversible course, and once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no way to put her back in.”

That brings us to the figures of speech used to illustrate irreversibility. Mr. Biden’s genie out of the bottle is a reference to Aladdin and his Magic Lamp, from an ancient Persian folk tale. My copy of the Aladdin story in Richard F. Burton’s translation of “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments” does not have a passage showing the reluctance of the genie to go back into the lamp. (I am now rubbing my word processor in the hope that an expert in Persian folk tales will magically materialize, but it doesn’t work.) A 20th-century trope for the same idea is there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube, which was used sometime after 1895, when that dentifrice was first put into the container.

A third metaphor, turning back the clock or setting back the clock, can be tracked to 1635; perestroika-shocked cold warriors like to say that their favorite moment of the year comes in October, when daylight saving time ends, and “you actually get to turn back the clock.”

- No leading role, William Safire, New York Times, December 17, 1989.