Tempest in a teapot?

Reader question:

Please explain “tempest in a teapot”, as in: Due to a misunderstanding on the facts and the law by both sides, the squabble is nothing more than a tempest in a teapot.

My comments:

In other words, no big deal. The incident is a non-issue – after both sides come to grips with the facts and relevant laws, the quarrel will cease.

In another cliché, the incident is nothing more than making a mountain out of a molehill.

The molehill is a tiny pile of earth made by a mole, a blind furry creature that lives underground by digging tunnels here and there – that’s the way moles forage for food. The molehill is the earth they dig out from the tunnels. A typical pile is, like, a meter tall, if that.

And so obviously one is making a fuss if they call that pile of earth a mountain, which is a big hill. The Himalayas, for instance, are mountains.

Alright, let’s get back to the tempest currently brewing in the teapot. A tempest is a literary man’s word for a wild storm. A storm is extreme whether featuring heavy downpours, thunders and lightening. The worst storm gives one the impression that the world is coming to an end.

The teapot is, say, a kettle for boiling water in preparation for tea. If you open the lid of the teapot to observe the water boiling and evaporating, you’d observe something pretty, well, tumultuous going on. Tempestuous, too, if you insist, but obviously the world is not coming to an end or anything of that magnitude is going to happen.

Hence, “tempest in a teapot” refers to a situation where something has been exaggerated out of proportion.

“Tempest in a teapot”, by the way, is American. The British call the same thing a “storm in a teapot” or more frequently still a “storm in a teacup” and they’ve been using these expressions for 300 years, obviously ever since the day when they first began to drink the leaves. The American expression on the other hand was “first recorded in 1854” (YourDictionary.com), and changing “storm” to “tempest” presumably made Americans sound more learned.

Shakespeare, of course – and you can’t sound more learned than this man, come to that – would’ve said:

Much ado about nothing.

Alright, enough said. Here are media examples:

1. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expressing her personal opinion when she criticized Canada’s maternal health initiative, not the policy of the Obama administration, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Sunday.

“Mrs. Clinton expressed not her government's position; she expressed her personal point of view...her personal opinion,” Cannon told CTV’s Question Period.

But in the wake of Clinton's criticism of the Canadian initiative, a key foreign policy program for the Conservative government going into this summer’s G8 summit, Cannon acknowledged that the Canadian plan may have to be amended.

During a visit to Canada last week, Clinton said any maternal health plan must include family planning and abortion, issues the federal government had initially attempted to leave out of its initiative.

Cannon said the issue will be on the agenda when ministers of international aid and development from the G8 nations meet later this month.

“This is a discussion that is ongoing. There are other options that are out there [and] they’ll be looked at.”

But Liberal MP Scott Brison called Clinton’s criticism a “smack down” of the Harper government’s maternal health initiative.

“You can’t improve the lives of women in the developing world or the lives of children in the developing world without a maternal health plan that includes contraception and family planning as part of it. And everybody knows that,” Brison told Question Period.

“Hillary Clinton was simply stating a fact. Her words were welcomed by a lot of progressive Canadians on this issue.”

Cannon said that the criticisms voiced by his blunt and outspoken U.S. counterpart during last week’s visit did not signal a cooling of relations between Ottawa and Washington.

Clinton appealed to the government to consider keeping some Canadian troops in Afghanistan after their 2011 deadline for withdrawal, and criticized its decision not to invite indigenous groups and Scandinavian countries to talks on the Arctic.

“This is a tempest in a teapot,” Cannon said. “This is not snubbing anybody; this is nothing that is detrimental to Canada-U.S. relations. Our relations are the best relations in the world.”

- Clinton criticism 'tempest in a teapot,' Cannon says, CTV.ca, April 10, 2010.

2. When Barack Obama visited France last year a British reporter asked the president whether he believed in American exceptionalism. Mr Obama said he did—“just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” You may think that an agreeably tactful answer. And yet some conservatives have turned it into a profane text, one that proves Mr Obama’s unfitness for the great office he holds. More than a year after the event they are still banging on about it. In the Washington Post last week Charles Krauthammer wrote the latest of a stream of articles about the Perfidious Reply. With these words, say his detractors, Mr Obama showed his true colours as a man who does not believe genuinely in America’s greatness and is secretly reconciled to its eventual decline.

What is going on? The simplest explanation for this tempest in a teapot is that Mr Obama’s critics will seize on any perceived error. But it may be that those critics need to hear constant reaffirmations of American greatness because of the doubt planted in their own hearts by the country’s present travails.

This would not be the first time American intellectuals have been troubled by the sense of greatness slipping away. Previous episodes have not always coincided with hardship at home or testing foreign wars. Times of ease and plenty can bring on the same longing. In the 1950s, that golden age, Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote “The Decline of Greatness”, lamenting the departure of great men and the nation’s descent into bland conformity.

This is why the greatness talk is not only divisive and obfuscatory but also sometimes dangerous. One antidote to ennui is war. In a recent history of American foreign policy, “The Icarus Syndrome”, Peter Beinart draws a comparison between the Kennedy administration and that of George W. Bush. Kennedy was ardent for glory and the cold war provided the arena. In the eyes of some American conservatives, the war against al-Qaeda offered a similar opportunity to answer the call of greatness. In both cases, Mr Beinart argues, the desire to do great deeds and not simply what was necessary led to episodes of overreach and disappointment.

Asking for the moon

When war loses its capacity to exhilarate, seekers after national greatness need something else. Re-enter Mr Krauthammer, fulminating this time against Mr Obama’s sensible decision to downsize the plan he inherited from Mr Bush for America to return to the moon by 2020, and thence to Mars. Would returning to the moon and heading for Mars reconnect Americans with their greatness? Many might think the idea batty in present circumstances. But that, of course, is the whole trouble when greatness, undefined, is made into an objective in its own right.

In 1997 David Brooks, writing then for the Weekly Standard and now at the New York Times, wrote an essay called “A Return to National Greatness”, complaining that America had abandoned high public aspiration and become preoccupied with “the narrower concerns of private life”. It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself, Mr Brooks said, “as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness”.

If that was ever good advice, it is rotten advice now. Americans are not unhappy because they lack an energetic government; many think Mr Obama’s administration too energetic by half. The last thing the country needs is to be distracted from its practical problems by the quest for an elusive greatness. Put such language away, says Lexington. America is indeed a great and exceptional country. But it isn’t talking about it that makes it so.

- Lexington: Where has all the greatness gone? The Economist, July 15, 2010.