Words Words Words

This blog's title comes, as some of you literati might recognize, from "Hamlet." Polonius asks the obsessive prince, deeply involved in some text, what he's reading, and the contemptuous young Dane responds "Words, words, words..." This has always been a difficult test for actors, as the line could be read in countless ways. The potential power of words and their multiple interpretations is both a boon and a bane to our language. Three and a half centuries later George Orwell wrote his major essay "Politics and the English Language," elucidating on the potential persuasive energy contained in the lexicon. This theme is central to his masterwork, "1984," in which the power of the oligarchy depends largely on its (ab)use of language for propaganda purposes.

Which brings me to the current Republican spin machine, which has been largely successful in enacting Orwellian principles. Their sloganizing has not always been as devious as it is currently; the phrase "Contract with America" was great Madison Avenue, clear and concise, and sold really well, unlike Democratic claptrap such as "Hope is on the way." But since Dubya has been in Command, more or less, the use of language has become much more sinister, when not downright clumsy and insulting.

For instance, after 9/11, the President spoke loudly about a "Crusade," totally nebulous to how offensive that word was to the one billion Moslems whose simmering resentments against Christian First World hegemony found their most dire culmination in the terrorist attacks. He backed off of this quickly, but then promoted the bill that became known as The "Patriot Act." This was pure Orwellian lingo. Forget that Samuel Johnson called patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel." ("Who's Samuel Johnson ?" I'm sure Dubya would ask. "Didn't he pitch for the Padres?") The term "Patriot Act" clearly implies that anyone who disagrees with it is unpatriotic, however draconian its terms. Now I do believe that our current security system needed to be upgraded, and some aspects of the "Patriot Act" are valid; I am not even opposed to a certain degree of racial profiling, however distasteful. Its potential to intrude on our already beleaguered personal privacy is its major flaw. I resent, however, the implication that any disagreement with so severe a law makes a citizen unpatriotic, or worse, a traitor (which Ann Coulter would certainly suggest). For accuracy's sake, the set of regulations would have been more properly labeled "The Security Act," but its successful knife-through-butter path as legislation was due largely to its title. What congressman would vote against a Patriot Act?

I guess the word "Security" was already coopted in the most egregious of modern American terms, the "Department of Homeland Security." They couldn't have referred to this legitimate extension of the Department of Defense as the Department of Domestic Security? or the Department of National Security? I can't recall the word "Homeland" being uttered by any American politician, right or left, Kennedy or Reagan, because it inevitably evokes images of Nazis goosestepping to the strains of "Deutschland Uber Alles." But I guess that Karl Rove and the neoCons felt that the emotional resonance of the root word "home" would generate universal support, which for a time it did. Joe Goebbels would have been proud.

Then there's the War on Terror, a high-concept phrase of commanding militancy which made no more historical sense than a "War on Cockroaches" (or the lunatic "War on Drugs") yet it fed the vengeful American zeitgeist successfully, and was, well, terse and catchy. Terrorism some day could be eradicated from the human scene, as was smallpox, but the seeds of it will always exist, like the vials of smallpox virus contained in those "secured" labs.

Once the Republicans started faltering in the polls because the high-sounding "War on Terror" had found its real-life analogue in the bottomless War in Iraq, the administration decided to strike the word "war" entirely from the record and start calling the amorphous conflict the "global struggle against violent extremism." In one sense this is a step in the right direction, since it more accurately states the case, and shifts focus to the core problem of supporting moderation and reason rather than the unachievable goal of exterminating fringe maniacs. It also has a more inclusionary tone, admitting to the need of other counties to engage in the same cause. Which of course was John Kerry's main point, but I digress. An editorial in the New Yorker maintains the change was a tacit admission by the administration that its unilateral approach to terrorism, the Middle East and the whole fucking gestalt needs to be overhauled.

Whatever. But the phrase is totally awkward and unpronounceable, and will not serve as an effective rhetorical call to arms. Perhaps they need to shift the words around, to the "Struggle Against Global Extremism," whose acronym, SAGE, would at least carry the suggestion of intelligence.