What does the expression “wag the dog” mean and where did it originate?
I first heard it as a title of a movie about Bill Clinton.
It means things are being done in completely the opposite way they should be (the whole expression is, “The tail is wagging the dog”).
In the case of the movie, to have cause and effect reversed. You create an (artificial) effect in order to justify an otherwise unrelated cause.
What you refer to, Hail Ants, sounds more like putting the cart before the horse; the expression the tail is wagging the dog (in my experience) usually, if not always specifically relates to the reversal of hierarchy (the junior asking the manager to make the tea), rather than, say, a simple reversal of cause and effect in logical analysis.
The movie Wag the Dog is not “about Bill Clinton,” although the sex scandal Clinton became involved with certainly added plausability to the plot (and possibly inspired the plot).
In the movie an incumbent President (who I don’t believe is ever named) gets caught in a sex scandal (with a Girl Scout Troop, IIRC) shortly before the election for his second term.
To get his man elected, the president’s “spin doctor” or public relations expert (played by Robert De Niro) , concocts a scheme to invent a war crisis to move the sex scandal off the front pages and have the public too concerned with the “war” to bother looking into the Prez’s peccadillos.
He hires a hollywood producer (played by Dustin Hoffman) to do the movie magic required. Anne Heche plays a presidential aide who sort of works out the logistics needed.
I thought it was a pretty good satire on both hollywood and Washington, and as I think about it now I think much of the “hero” stuff towards the end of the film bears a remarkable resemblance to the way the press immortalized the “heroes” of 9/11. (And just to prevent any flaming, I am NOT suggesting that the 9/11 heroes were “made up” like the hero of the film, just that the movie did a good job of predicting the way the press would treat such heroes, which in the movie they obviously did not know was made up).
There was a movie called http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120885]Wag the Dog, but it wasn’t about Bill Clinton. It was based on a novel called American Hero, authored by Larry Beinhart.
Whatever the original meaning of “wag the dog” may have been, thanks to this movie the only time I’ve heard the expression used lately in the media has been in the context of a politician (usually the President) arranging some public spectacle in order to distract their attention away from something else. Clinton was accused of this after he ordered a missile strike against that “pharmaceutical company” in the (?)Sudan, while the Monica Lewinsky scandal was well under way.
:smack:
Let’s try that IMDb link again.
I always thought that it meant that an offshoot of a particular entity became more powerful, or more demanding, than the entity itself.
For example: Big Impressive University begins its football program in 1910. By 2002, the football program has become so crucial to the university that its concerns are put before those of the students, professors, etc. A student at BIU could complain about the football program saying, “The tail is wagging the dog!”
rastahomie has it. To enlarge upon the metaphor: a tail, while useful for brushing flies and keeping balance, is not strictly necessary to a dog. In several breeds, the tail is cut off very young puppies and the dogs grow up to be capable of many types of work. Usually a dog wags its tail when happy, but a complete role reversal would have this nearly irrelevant appendage wagging the dog.
Well, the movie WAS about Bill Clinton, even though it didn’t mention him by name. The book, American Hero, was directly about Bush. In the novel, Lee Atwater, before his death, plans the Gulf War to get Bush reelected in '92.
So were left, as yet, with no one quite agreeing what the expression means. Perhaps these colloquialisms perpetuate partly because they express thoughts that are hard to put into concrete speech.
As I recall, the expression became associated with President Clinton when, shortly after the movie’s appearance, he launched a cruise missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Somalia that many Americans suspected was not so much an attack on terrorists as an attempt to divert public attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was at a fever pitch then.
A less emotionally charged example might be if an attorney sees that they might subpoena a witness to whom they’re attracted, and with whom they desire further social contact, for a disposition even when they know such disposition is unlikely to be fruitful for their client’s case.
So what is it now? I think Mangetout’s description is perhaps an archaic (and thus truer, possibly, to meaning of the words) interpretation, and it now means something more along the lines of a decision regarding what should be a primary consideration being driven by what should be a secondary consideration.
Perhaps that’s what rastahomie already said, and I just had to rephrase it for myself.
we’re - crap! - we’re…
I’m in agreement with rastahomie; I just phrased it differently.
As I understand it, the expression refers to a condition where something that was supposed to be useful has become so large and complex that most of your attention must be diverted to maintaining it.
As an example, consider an accountant who buys a computer, expecting it will make his work easier. The computer may require upgrades, repairs, software patches as well as lots of training and practice to use the thing properly. The accountant spends much of his time struggling with his computer, so he ends up serving it, it doesn’t serve him.
This is somewhat descriptive of the events in the movie Wag the Dog, in which the plan to solve one problem becomes so complex that it creates larger problems of its own.
The quote at the beginning of the movie provides a good context for the meaning of the movie title:
What it means to me (in terms of this movie, at least) is that we (the American people) are the “Dog” and the President and his advisors are the “Tail” - we’re supposed to be collectively smarter than them, and consequently they’re supposed to do what WE want them to (the will of the people), or he’ll lose his position of power - The dog(The American people) wagging (the President following the will of the people) the tail (the President)
However, in this case (at least in the movie) the President and his team, in order to protect his position, use and manipulate our traditional media outlets to make the people believe that he’s doing stuff (making war against an offending country) that warrants keeping him in office, and making them think what he wants them to think. The tail (President) wagging (manipulating the thoughts and feelings of the American People to retain power) the dog (the American People).
Hopefully that’s clear enough (6am - up for 25 hours now - hallucinations should start any time now 
- I cannot rationally determine if anything I write is currently lucid )
After rereading this post, it occurs to me that I should mentionn that I’m in complete agreement with Mangetout,rastahomie, et al.
critter42
from http://www.wordorigins.org./
Wag the Dog
The phrase “the tail that wags the dog” dates to the turn of the century. In 1907, it appeared in Von Arnum’s Fraulein Schmidt. F. Scott Fitzgerald used it in 1935. The meaning is quite obvious, the subsidiary part is controlling the major part. In its most current usage, the case is of the media creating the crisis instead of the crisis generating media interest.