Labile

Did you catch Leslie Stahl's interview with John Boehner last Sunday night on 60 Minutes? Most news shows picked it up, The Sniffle Heard Round The World. Stahl seemed utterly charmed, as if she'd just been whining to her girlfriends at lunch that she'd give her all for a man who could show his feelings.



His Teariness is not only not charming; he's not okay. If he were a woman--say, Pelosi or Clinton or Kagan-- there'd be some misogynistic mumbling in the Congressional gym locker room about "time of the month."

I've seen those alligator tears before in so-called self-made men. They don't indicate empathy; they point to shallow, mawkish sentimentality and maudlin self-pity. Pick that performance up and move it to a doctor's office and the prescription pad would come out. Put it on the stage and the stage hook would shoot out.

Definitions are in order.

sen·ti·men·tal·i·ty 

n. pl. sen·ti·men·tal·i·ties

1. The quality or condition of being excessively or affectedly sentimental. (The Free Dictionary)

"Rhetoric is fooling others. Sentimentality is fooling yourself." - Yeats

"In modern times  'sentimental' is a term that has been casually applied to works of art and literature that exceed the viewer or reader's sense of decorum—the extent of permissible emotion—and standards of taste: 'excessiveness' is the criterion; 'Meretricious' and 'contrived' sham pathos are the hallmark of sentimentality, where the morality that underlies the work is both intrusive and pat." - Wikipedia 

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Labile: Unstable, unsteady, not fixed.

In psychology or psychiatry, labile denotes free and uncontrolled moods or behaviors expressing emotions. (MedicineNet dictionary of Medical terms)

emotional lability,

a condition of excessive emotional reactions and frequent mood changes. (The Free Dictionary)

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Gail Collins in her NYTimes piece, The Crying Game:

O.K. About Boehner. Many of us first noticed his tendency toward tears when he appeared on election night to celebrate his party’s taking control of the House. He had hardly gotten in front of the microphone before things got watery.

“I spent my whole life chasing (sob) the American dream,” he told the cameras. “Put myself through school, working every rotten job there was ...”

The American Dream has had such a bad year. During the campaign, it was tossed around by billionaire candidates who insisted on telling groups of underprivileged children that they, too, could someday own a mega-yacht or run a slimy but extremely profitable health care corporation.

Now, John Boehner is blaming the Dream for making him howl like an abandoned puppy. It’s what my friend Rebecca Traister calls “Boehner doing Masterpiece Theater on the hard life of John Boehner.”