Whip hand?

Reader question:

Please explain “whip hand”, as in this: Voters have the whip hand.

My comments:

In other words, your votes count. They mean something.

In an election for public office, for example, voters via their votes control who gets elected. Therefore, indirectly, they control the man or woman and their policies.

That’s the ideal, i.e. idealistic situation. Usually, you see, after people get elected, they begin to ignore their policy promises. Or, to put it another way, they often fail to keep their promises for whatever reason.

Otherwise, the world would’ve been different.

I mean, we won’t delve into it because it’s a big topic to tackle. Here, let’s instead be satisfied with mastering the phrase “whip hand”.

Whip hand, you see, is literally the hand that wields the whip. If you go to places driving a cart horse, as was the case in the old days before automobiles occupy all the streets, you’ll see the point immediately. The driver, by cracking the whip, leads the horse to go to this place and that, wherever.

Hence, he who has the whip in hand is the one who is in control. Metaphorically speaking, people who have the whip hand have power over others in a particular situation.

In other words, they have, um, the upper hand.

If, for example, we say so-and-so always have the whip hand over another, we notice that this so-and-so gets to boss the other one around.

If, for another example, someone is given the whip hand, they are given the rein, so to speak, and get to do pretty much what they want, whatever they want.

Here are more examples, in greater detail, from the media:

1. Modern medicine may help us to discover the real reasons behind King George III’s erratic behaviour, writes historian Lucy Worsley.

George III is well known in children’s history books for being the “mad king who lost America”.

In recent years, though, it has become fashionable among historians to put his “madness” down to the physical, genetic blood disorder called porphyria. Its symptoms include aches and pains, as well as blue urine.

The theory formed the basis of a long-running play by Alan Bennett, The Madness of George III, which was later adapted for film starring Nigel Hawthorne in the title role.

However, a new research project based at St George’s, University of London, has concluded that George III did actually suffer from mental illness after all.

Using the evidence of thousands of George III’s own handwritten letters, Dr Peter Garrard and Dr Vassiliki Rentoumi have been analysing his use of language. They have discovered that during his episodes of illness, his sentences were much longer than when he was well.

A sentence containing 400 words and eight verbs was not unusual. George III, when ill, often repeated himself, and at the same time his vocabulary became much more complex, creative and colourful.

These are features that can be seen today in the writing and speech of patients experiencing the manic phase of psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder.

Mania, or harmful euphoria, is at one end of a spectrum of mood disorders, with sadness, or depression, at the other. George’s being in a manic state would also match contemporary descriptions of his illness by witnesses.

They spoke of his “incessant loquacity” and his habit of talking until the foam ran out of his mouth. Sometimes he suffered from convulsions, and his pages had to sit on him to keep him safe on the floor.

The researchers have even thrown doubt on one of the key planks in the case for porphyria, the blue urine. George III’s medical records show that the king was given medicine based on gentian. This plant, with its deep blue flowers, is still used today as a mild tonic, but may turn the urine blue.

So maybe it wasn’t the king’s “madness” that caused his most famous symptom. It could have simply been his medicine. ...

George III’s recurring bouts of illness caused him to withdraw from daily business to recuperate out of the public eye at secluded Kew Palace, near Richmond.

Each time he withdrew to Kew, this triggered a crisis - who was to make decisions in his absence?

His son, the Prince of Wales, with whom George III had a terrible relationship, wanted to be appointed regent, and to act as the king in everything but name. But the future George IV was very much associated with the political opposition, and the government was determined to keep him out.

Strikingly, although the crisis caused a good deal of arguing, it was in fact resolved quite easily. This was partly because the king just got better (despite the bizarre and sometimes inhumane treatments given to him by the royal doctors) and partly because he was, by this stage in British history, a constitutional king.

When the Hanoverians had been invited over from Germany in 1714 to take the throne after the failure of the Stuart line, they came at the invitation of Parliament. Parliament therefore held the whip hand over them, and the powers of the monarchy declined.

But despite his illness, George III was a dedicated and diligent king, and won the respect of his politicians. In fact, when his illness drove him off the political scene, they realised how much they needed his calming effect on their squabbles.

It is counter-intuitive to suggest it, but royal health issues can actually strengthen the monarchy, not least by creating sympathy and affection for an afflicted individual.

- What was the truth about the madness of George III? BBC.com, April 15, 2013.

2. Two New York city council members, Brad Lander and Ritchie Torres, have called for an end to “school segregation” in the city and the elimination of “apartheid schools”—meaning schools in which 90 percent of the students are either black or Latino. Others have defined “apartheid schools” as those with less than 1 percent white enrollment.

The term “apartheid,” of course, refers to the brutal system of legalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Its use is meant to convey the sense that an elite minority population wields the whip hand over a racial majority. Most New Yorkers would probably wonder what the city’s Department of Education—not known as a nest of white supremacy—has in common with a programmatic policy of racial classification and restriction. While New York, like America in general, has divisions of income that sometimes cleave along ethno-racial lines, no well-off black or Latino families in New York are prevented from moving into any neighborhood they can afford. Ethnic enclaves in New York are largely determined by group affinity. Chinese immigrants have gravitated toward communities in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and Flushing, Queens, but it would be absurd to suggest that Asian-Americans in New York are somehow victims of segregation, along the lines of Jim Crow-era Dixie.

The 90 percent black and Hispanic figure cited by Lander and Torres is striking until one considers that more than two out of three kids (68 percent) in the city’s public school system are black and Latino. It thus takes only a minimal amount of population concentration for a public school to fall into the “apartheid” category—in which, as Lander and Torres see it, poor children are concentrated with one another in schools that consign them to “steep disadvantage.” The council members assert that “the average black or Latino student attends a school where nearly 70% of the students are low-income.” But again, context is needed: according to the Department of Education, 78 percent of all students in the system are poor or attend schools where all students get free lunches. And 90 percent of all city public schools have student bodies that are at least 50 percent poor. So it’s no surprise that black and Latino kids attend primarily lower-income schools.

- New York Has No “Apartheid” Schools, City-Journal.org, August 18, 2017.

3. Unloved, untimely, and unnecessary, the putative free trade pact between Europe and America is dying a slow death.

The Dutch people have amassed 100,000 signatures calling for a referendum on this Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP as we know it. The number is likely to soar after Greenpeace leaked 248 pages of negotiation papers over the weekend. The documents do not exactly show a “race to the bottom in environmental, consumer protection and public health standards” - as Greenpeace alleges - but they do raise red flags over who sets our laws and who holds the whip hand over our eviscerated parliaments.

Dutch voters have already rebuked Brussels once this year, throwing out an association agreement with Ukraine in what was really a protest against the wider conduct of European affairs by an EU priesthood that long ago lost touch with economic and political reality.

French president François Hollande cannot hide from that reality. Faced with approval ratings of 13pc in the latest TNS-Sofres poll, a TTIP mutiny within his own Socialist Party, and electoral annihilation in 2017, he is retreating. “We don't want unbridled free trade. We will never accept that basic principles are threatened,” he said.

In Germany, just 17pc now back the project, and barely half even accept that free trade itself a “good thing”, an astonishing turn for a mercantilist country that has geared its industrial system to exports.

The criticisms have struck home. The Dutch, Germans, and French, have come to suspect that TTIP is a secretive stitch-up by corporate lawyers, yet another backroom deal that allows the owners of capital to game the international system at the expense of common people.

- Let the TTIP trade pact die if it threatens Parliamentary democracy, Telegraph.co.uk, May 4, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.