White House press secretary Jay Carney recently dismissed a Republican payroll tax cut proposal as “window dressing or gorilla dust.” Since no one in the press room understood exactly what Carney had meant by that second metaphor, The Washington Post investigated. Turns out it was a phrase Carney learned in the early 1990s from his old boss in the Washington bureau of Time magazine, a guy named Dan Goodgame:
And where did Goodgame pick it up?
“Ross Perot used to use it,” Goodgame said. “It was Ross. I wish I could claim it. I love to do Ross Perot impressions. I can’t remember if we ever used it other than quoting Perot. It became bureau slang.”
The Post confirmed, thanks to a William Safire column in the New York Times, that Dallas’ own Ross Perot used it in a debate about NAFTA televised on an episode of Larry King Live.
And this is where I either count or curse the blessing that we live during a time when seemingly any scrap of video a person might want has been uploaded online by some crank somewhere. I went through half an hour of footage of then-Vice President Al Gore and Perot having a testy discussion about the merits of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Many times Perot looks like he can barely restrain himself from slugging Gore, who keeps asking repeatedly where the funding for Perot’s anti-NAFTA organization comes from. Perot says Gore’s only raising the issue as “propaganda,” a distraction from the central debate on NAFTA. Finally he arrives at the quote I’d been searching for. The 2:35 mark on this video. (Sorry, embedding was disabled):
“See, again, he throws up propaganda. He throws up gorilla dust. It makes no sense.”
So, is this a phrase peculiar to Perot himself? Or can anyone claim it as a Dallas-ism?
5 comments
“is this a phrase peculiar to Perot himself? Or can anyone claim it as a Dallas-ism?”
Short answer is no. i remember running across it in a Dictionary of Slang when i was in high school, which pre-dates the Perot-Gore debates. I’ve always liked that phrase, but i’ve had few occasions to use it.
yes
in the 1970’s gorilla dust was a form of pcp that when ingested, made you go ape s%^t
There is apparently a Perot usage of the term that predates the use on Larry King in ‘93. An abstract of an ‘86 Washington Post story titled “Smith, Perot All Smiles At Encounter” includes this: “More than 7,000 people showed up here today to witness what one business publication billed as a ‘clash of titans.’ But the actual event amounted to little more than a cloud of what one of the combatants called ‘gorilla dust.’
Presumably that combatant was Ross.
And I suppose the term isn’t related to a “monkey f**k,” the late Jim Mattox’s favorite expression for a situation that was hopelessly confused and screwed up.
Bulls do the same thing for intimidation. And I think in all aspects, “Bull Dust”, is the better metaphor. Especially in Dallas. I’ve heard it used long before the 90s.
A phrase I heard from a WW2 Vet from the S.E.Asian Theater was “Donkey Dust”. He had used this to explain to an Asian just what he meant by a ‘falsehood’. He first used the expression ‘Bulls..t, and the Asian looked confused, Tom then said ‘Horses..t’, still no comprehension. He then said ‘Donkey Dust’ and got the “Aah So”
reaction. It seemed that ‘Donkey Dust’ was understood by Asiatics. Tom Conley was an Ice Cream store propriator in South Providence, R.I., and a great friend, as well as an accomplished storyteller.