When I was a young’un, back in the late ’80s, I heard a tape of a comedy bit in which a metal-shop-esque instructor teaches the practical ins and outs of torture–a play on the US training of torturers in Central America. I can remember a couple of lines:
“The first thing you’re going to need is a big table. I prefer metal because it lasts longer…”
“Now just put the cigarette into their navel. Slides in soft, just like butter. Oh, it hurts, don’t you worry about that…”
Does this sound familiar to anyone? It’s been bugging me for a while–outside of those two lines, I can’t remember anything about it: who the artist was, the title, how long it was, whether I heard an excerpt or the whole bit, etc. I’ve googled both those lines (and reasonable variations) and came up empty-handed, so now I’m turning to the real experts, the Bloggonians. Any suggestions?
(Follow-up to Things My Language Told Me To Say )
As I mentioned, I believe a major weakness in Whorf’s thinking stems from his too-great reliance on Saussure, particularly Saussure’s separation of language into langue and parole (roughly: “language” and “speech”), and his insistence on langue (language as the total system, carried in our heads) as the correct object of scientific inquiry. Saussure was defining a particular kind of research program, a way of examining the internal structure of a language, and his exclusion of spoken language (parole) makes sense for his ends. Linguists would be utterly lost if they had to account for every possible variation in individual mastery and usage in their models–instead, Saussure provides a means to abstract these variations into a single “object” for study: a language. These standardized languages are not the languages we speak–they’re the whole language, even perfect speakers speak only part of the whole in any given utterance. After separating langue from parole, Saussure completely ignored the study of parole, and most linguists followed suit, for decades. So there was really no model for approaching spoken language, and especially discrete acts of speech, during Whorf’s career. The work of several later theorists–notably Émile Benveniste , JL Austin , and Roman Jakobson –starts to fill in this area, in ways that I think expand Whorf’s hypothesis greatly.
Benveniste’s most significant contribution (or one of them, at least) is his discussion of “shifters”. In Saussure’s schema, any given sign (in the case of language, a word) signifies something real in the world–an object, an action, a feeling, an idea. “Cow” signifies an object, “running” an action, “love” an emotion, “Communism” an idea. The signified does not have to be real–a faerie can grok a tralfamadorean. Colourless green ideas can sleep furiously. The point is that each sign has a fixed referent–”cow” doesn’t mean a bovine animal today and a toaster oven tomorrow (note: homonyms are different signs, e.g. “cow”–the animal–and “cow”–to hide in fear–are two separate signs, even though they sound the same in English). But Benveniste noticed that there is a class of words, mostly pronouns, that do not have fixed references, and these he called “shifters”. Consider the sentence “I want that for him, but you think they will be angry.” This sentence contains 5 words–”I”, “that”, “him”, “you”, “they”–whose referent is entirely dependent on the context in which it is spoken. Their referents “shift” depending on who is doing the speaking, who is listening, who is the object of the sentence, what the speaker wants for the object, and who the listener thinks will be angry if the object gets whatever the speaker is talking about. While the structure of this sentence can be sussed out as langue, the meaning only exists in the realm of parole.
What’s interesting about this is that it’s reflexive–the context of the sentence is constructed in the speaking of the sentence. “I”, “that”, “him”, “you”, and “they” only take meaning as they are spoken, in the moment of their utterance. What’s more, we construct ourselves as acting subjects–I become the “I” of the sentence in speaking it. Consider the alternative: “Dustin wants that…”–the subject of that sentence is removed, distanced from the speaker of the sentence, even though they (we) are ostensibly the same person.
This ability to construct and shape the context in which we find ourselves is not limited to shifters. Benveniste opens discussion on another class of linguistic acts he calls “performative speech” or just “performatives”. Performatives are sentences that actually do what they say, that act on the world. “I now pronounce you man and wife”–spoken under the right circumstances by the right “I” actually changes two unrelated people who happen to like each other an awful lot into relatives, into a family. They are no longer the same people–their legal status has changed, their names might be changed, their social role has changed–all because of a sentence. “I hereby declare War on Syria” creates a state of war with Syria. “I christen thee Christopher Robins” confers a name onto a nameless infant–and in some cases, a soul. And so on. Performatives not only shape the way we see the world, as Whorf saw language doing, they shape the world itself.
While Benveniste might be credited with the “discovery” of performative speech, it was Austin who developed the idea, in his insanely frustrating How to Do Things With Words . Austin begins innocently enough, well within the bounds of Benveniste’s work, but at each step he finds himself frustrated by a too-narrow conception of what usages actually qualify as performative usages. Ultimately, he arrives at a conception of all language as performative, and all utterances as “speech acts”. What this means in practical terms is that saying something is an act, and particularly an act of power. “The sky is blue” is not merely a reflection of an external reality, it is an assertion about that external reality. Furthermore, it is not an assertion made in a vacuum, but an assertion made by a speaking subject (an “I”) directed towards a listening audience (a “you”). It is an assertion intended to persuade that “you” of my world-view, and thus to define the relationship between us.
At first glance, Jakobson doesn’t seem to follow from what I’ve said. Jakobson wrote literary analysis, especially on the use of “parallelism” in language. Parallelism is the use of linguistic devices that enlarge and reinforce the message of a statement. For instance, the use of alliteration, consonance, rhythm, and rhyme in poetry imparts a subtle palpability to the lines, making them more effective. Consider this line from Poe: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door…”. “Nodded nearly napping”, with its rhythm and alliteration, conveys the idea of being almost asleep in a way that “While I was nearly asleep” does not. Consider a non-poetic translation of the phrase: “While I was nearly asleep, I heard someone knocking at the door…”. In Poe, you can actually hear–even feel–the person knocking at the door, waking the speaker out of his near-sleep, adding a layer of sensation to the literal meaning.
What this has to do with Austin is two-fold. First, parallelism performs the meaning of the utterance. Think of the rhythm of Poe’s “The Raven”–a good drummer could probably convey the sense of the poem without uttering a word. Second, because of the almost over-abundance of meaning, parallelism makes utterances far more persuasive–they add to the power of the utterance–even more so for being almost subliminal. Parallelism works below the level of conscious thought, conveying meaning almost viscerally.
Parallelism is yet another way in which meaning is conveyed outside of the formal boundaries of Saussure’s langue. In fact, Saussure explicitly denounced what he called the “bow-wow” theory of language–theories that located the origin and meaning of language in its mimicry of sounds found in the real world. Saussure insisted on the the arbitrariness of signification–that is, that the sound of a word had nothing to do with its meaning. Jakobson’s parallelism directly challenge Saussure on this point, showing that, in some cases, the sound of a word does, in fact, impact it’s meaning–and can add meanings to the word that have nothing to do with the “official” referent of the word.
Whorf’s conception of language had seen it determining the ways in which its bearers perceive and act in the world. The work I have discussed here expands on that conception, seeing language more as a medium through and in which we encounter the world–and each other. Through language we not only apprehend the world, but actively engage and construct it. Furthermore, in relation with the world and one another, we change and adapt our language. To be fair, Whorf allowed for the possibility of a sort of “feedback loop” between language and culture, but understanding the process of change over time was not really on his agenda. Following from Saussure, he viewed language as something external to individual actors, something more or less fixed and constant that individuals took on as a whole. Following from Benveniste, Austin, and Jakobson, we might think of language as something that emerges in the interaction between social actors. In this view, the vocabulary and grammar of a language are only a part of the overall phenomena, the building blocks out of which social interactions are forged.
Such a view is not inconsistent with the general principles of Whorfian Relativism. The basic principle–that language, thought, and reality are intertwined in our relations with the world and each other–still stands. What’s changed is the level at which relativism is applied: Whorf saw cultures and languages as discrete “units”, each culture-language pair tied to a particular social, economic, political, and ecological reality. The Inuit world-view differed from the Nambikwara world-view because the realities they inhabited were different. The work of Benveniste, Austin, and Jakobson applies at a much more local level than that, ultimately to the specific interaction between individuals. It is in the multiplication and recurrence of such interactions that culture occurs, not at the artificial unit of “the culture”, and we see in every conversation a reshaping of the cultural world in which its participants live. Rather than language determining culture, as in the original S-W formulation, or language as a part of culture as some opponents of S-W assert, language is culture, and vice versa.
There is a debate going on at several blogs (starting at EmptyBottle and continuing at the heart of things , akma’s random thoughts , commonplaces , Ming the Mechanic , Epeus’ epigone , and elseblog) about the relationship between language and thought, and about the Sapir-Whorf Relativity Hypothesis (S-W) in particular. As might be expected of a theory that reached it’s peak over a lifetime ago and whose primary intellectual developer died in his early 40s, S-W comes in for something of a beating. Since one of my central interests is the relation between thought and cultural expression (including language, but also art, music, consumption, ritual, and so on), I thought I’d throw my two cents (in large bills) into the fray. It bears pointing out at the beginning that, although the work of Sapir and Whorf are linked in our memory, their work was quite different, and it is really Whorf’s work which makes up the bulk of what we today know as the Sapir-Whorf Relativity Hypothesis. Sapir made some important contributions, but never focused on the problem with the intensity or the lucidity with which Whorf attacked it. So, below, I’ll refer to “Whorfian relativism” more often than S-W.
So, first of all, what is it? Sapir and Whorf were anthropologists in the early part of the 20th century, students of Franz Boas and strongly influenced by his largely undeveloped (by Boas, that is) relativism. A common sort of relativist device is to examine a cultural trait or complex of traits, something that may seem primitive, silly, or even stupid to outsiders, and to show how it “fits” into the world-view of it’s practitioners. Sapir and Whorf were arguing against the idea that Western languages were more “developed” than “primitive” languages–that they were better able to describe the world, and to describe it truthfully (i.e. scientifically) than non-Western languages–and were therefore a mark of the inferiority of non-Western peoples. Thus the famous example of the many Eskimo words which describe the multitude of variations that English-speakers refer to simply as “snow”–Whorf showed that in matters where it mattered to them, Eskimos could be every bit as precise, indeed even more precise, than their Western counterparts. This is more than simply a matter of vocabulary, however–Whorf saw this as an example of the differences in the way people actually saw and interacted with the world around them. The Eskimo doesn’t see “snow” and then categorize it–s/he perceives the different kinds of crystalline water the same way we perceive the difference between a tree and a car: immediately, unconsciously, directly. Drawing on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, Whorf saw language as the instrument of categorization, in effect saying that our language determines the way we perceive and act in the world.
The problem is that most people get stuck at the level of vocabulary suggested by the “snow” example, while Whorf and Sapir are both fairly clear in using this as an illustration, not as evidence. For instance, of the ” Great Eskimo Snow Silliness”, Stavros of Emptybottle says “This… is where the argument runs off the rails for me” (but later reddems himself by embracing a strong Whorfian Relativism while attempting its critique). Fleming Flunch of Ming the Mechanic writes “For an English speaker it is obvious that noodles is plural, because there are many noodles on a plate. A Chinese person is just as likely to call it “noodle”, not because he can’t count, but because he’s seeing it differently. I suppose focusing on the substance, not on the individual pieces”–a good example of the power of vocabulary in shaping perceptions, but only a tiny foray into Whorfian territory.
The real action in Whorf’s theory–as befitting one strongly influenced by Saussurean structuralism–takes place at the level of structure: grammar, syntax, semiotics. For instance, a standard sentence in most languages (maybe all–I’m not much of an expert in comparative linguistics) has a “subject-predicate” structure–that is, a subject performs an action. According to Whorf, this deep structure of language shapes the way we interact with the world around us, that it shapes the way we imagine ourselves as actors in the world. Whorf saw this “deep structure” as varying between populations, though–good Saussurean that he is–he doesn’t get into the problem of origins. A debate arises with Chomskyans who see many elements of linguistic structure as innate, but I don’t think it matters–if there are universal structures, there may very well be elements that all world-views share. I would say that the subject-predicate structure is fairly universal, although Whorf describes some languages he feels don’t share this structure. Though his linguistic knowledge was undoubtedly superiour to mine, I don’t find these examples very compelling; I see them as variations on a theme, rather than a different order of things. Regardless, even the Chomskyans recognize that linguistic variations exist, whether or not it is constrained by inborn tendencies, so there is still a lot of world-view left unaccounted for.
Which is not to say that Whorf had all the answers. I’ve called attention to the Saussurean influence because, in some ways, I think Saussure led Whorf astray. I wrote an essay some years ago on S-W some years ago that explains my thoughts in full–as well as providing a much more fulfilling look at Whorf’s work than I feel comfortable making space for here–which, to keep this already lengthy post from becoming ungodly, I have posted separately: Notes on Whorfian Relativism . Basically, I see in Whorf an attempt to force a model that Saussure intended for studying language in the abstract into service to study the concrete use of language–which Saussure explicitly excludes. Whorf made excellent use of the best tools available to him at the time, but the best tools weren’t quite good enough.
I have more on this, but this is enough for now: what I want to get into more is the linguistic structuring of the relationship between subjects and the world around them, as well as the way language changes and is reshaped by speakers. The über-hangup for most people thinking about Whorf is the determinism, which implies both a lack of agency on the part of language users and an inflexibility in the language itself. As I noted, Whorf left the question of language change unaddressed. This follows directly from Saussure, and fits quite comfortably with the anthropology of his time, which tended to ignore history and focus on the “ethnographic present”, the unchanging now to which the researcher has access. But I don’t think Whorf’s thinking is strictly opposed to these considerations–they just weren’t his considerations. But more on this when I get my head together.
I saw X-Men 2 on Friday, not so much because I’m a big fan of the X-Men (I don’t really read comic books) but because I love seeing “event movies” like this on opening night–there’s such a charge from all the hard-core fans and the interaction with the movie. People applaud the entry of their favorite characters and the performance of heroic acts, they laugh harder (and often at scenes that aren’t meant to be funny), and, especially in movies based on stories with devoted experts like the X-Men community, there’s a running commentary on the characters, actions, and even the film’s direction (apparently the end of X-Men 2 references the end of Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan, though I didn’t really catch the parallel–unless it was just in setting the movie up for a sequel, but we knew that months, if not years ago).
Like I said, I’m not a particularly big fan of X-Men–in fact, I only saw the first one a few months ago, after seeing the preview for the new one. I enjoyed both movies–they’re pure summer blockbuster entertainment, which is sometimes good enough, but there’s something else. They’re smart, in an understated way. I mean, on the face of it you have these petty romantic entanglements, hammy performances (not “bad performances”–these are good actors playing tights-wearing superheroes, they’re supposed to ham it up a bit), somewhat predictable plot devices (which never fail to keep us on the edge of our seats, of course), all the earmarks of superhero movies. But X-Men has this other thing going on under the surface, this very intelligent parallel to the oppression of “genetically inferior” Jews, Slavs, Rom, disabled persons, and homosexuals under the Nazis. In addition to saving the world from the Bad Guys, the X-Men (who are about 50% female, go figure–I guess you take the smart with the dumb with these movies) are embroiled in the moral quandary around their relationship with their fellow, non-mutant humans, who hunt and persecute them mercilessly. In one scene in X-Men 2, one of the younger characters has to “out” himself as a mutant to his parents, a situation that is portrayed with all the tension and awkwardness that young gay people face–or often avoid–with their parents (although I doubt if any gay person has ever been asked to demonstrate his or her “difference” to the rest of the family…).
As well, the movie obliquely references present day anti-terrorist hysteria, with family members phoning in tips and the actions of a political fringe being used to criminalize an entire minority population. The bad guy seems to come straight out of George Bush’s cabinet. The civilian population in X-Men is terrified and easily led to complicity in the inhumanity of an explicitly Holocuast-modeled state.
In pitting these super-human outsiders against the ills of the time–as well as in using explicit Holocaust references, e.g. in the opening scene of the first movie, and in the bios of both Xavier and his arch-nemesis Magneto–X-Men pays homage to the comic books’ “Golden Age” in the years before and immediately after WWII. I’ve said I don’t really read comic books, not so much out of distaste or a feeling that comic books are for children–some of them are most emphatically not for children–but because at some point I just sort of stopped. As a teenager, I followed several series intently, although I was never really drawn to the superhero comics. I read Lone Wolf and Cub and Area 88, both of which were plotted around intractible ethical dilemmas that inflected the action with a sort of sadness and despair that was only starting to seep into the superhero comics at the time. But I’ve been very interested in the deep history of superhero comics in the years leading up to WWII, when young, mostly-Jewish men with a passion for illustration in the service of the fantastic invented characters like Superman and Batman and their derivatives. This period forms the backdrop in the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, about two young Jewish cousins who invent a superhero called “The Escapist” who vicariously carries out Czech exile Kavalier’s revenge fantasies against Hitler and the Nazis. The first half is an excellent introduction to what exactly was going on with comic books in those years, the various ways they intersected with and engaged the major issues of the day, although the book degenerates in the second half, becoming somewhat formulaic, although still managing a pretty good exposition of the McCarthy-era crackdown on comic books as a threat to the morals of the youth, especially in the way it deals with the links between anti-communist furor on one side and anti-Semitism and homophobia on the other. In its conscious use of the Holocaust as a moral backdrop, X-Men explicitly references these years at the dawn of the superhero era.
Superhero comic books were a very American way of dealing with the issues around the rise of Nazism and fascism, both abroad and closer to home, although they lost some of that moral complexity in the years after the war when, their ranks thinned by anti-communist purges, comic books were enlisted in the Cold War. Although comic books still reflected the underlying anxieties of the nuclear age (think of Hulk and Spiderman, both victims of nuclear accidents), the structure of anti-communism did not leave them much room to maneuver. When comic book artists were attacking Nazism, they did so as minorities, immigrants, and sons of immigrants, with all the fierce loyalty and pride in the new homeland that engenders, as well as with an awareness of their own exclusion and marginalization in a society that was, for instance, actively excluding Jewish refugees from Nazi countries, using many of the same excuses of cultural and genetic purity that the Nazis had mobilized. Anti-Nazi comic books, particularly before America’s entry into WWII, were aimed not at the Germans but at fellow Americans, at an America that had refused to fight fascism in Spain and was balking at fighting it in Germany. In the service of anti-communism, however, there was no home audience to convince, to persuade, to expose the evils of communism to. There was no room for moral ambiguity in the face of an audience that demanded simplistic confirmations of their moral superiority. As well, the anti-comics crusade had eviscerated comic books, demanding they be “child-safe” and thus virtually defining them as children’s literature. This one-two punch led to the rapid decline of comic books in the Cold War era, a blow that they didn’t really begin to recover from until the last decade.
One of the consequences of this history, both of the origin and of the decline of comic books, is that superheros became and remained American superheros. Metropolis and Gotham were American cities, the Justice League an American institution. Like Superman, superheroes in general were drafted into service of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”–many of them even served in the American armed forces. X-Men 2 follows this path, with the first movie opening (after the “prologue” set in a Nazi death camp) in the US Congress and the second in the White House. Superman, of course, is the most American of superheroes, and nothing sums up this association better than the scene at the close of Superman 2 where Superman replaces the dome of the White House, the American flag billowing behind him as he flashes the President his All-American grin. As the first and most prominent of superheroes, Superman was perhaps the most obvious victim of anti-communist co-optation, and his middle years became stagnant and dreary. As I came out of X-Men 2, I started wondering about this essential tie to America, and wondered especially how American superheroes might fit in, say, Paris, or Berlin. I even imagined a story arc–a black soldier who is captured by Germans and, in contravention of the regulations on prisoners of war, is used for Mengele-ish medical experimentation which bestow him with super powers (but also, maybe, a touch of madness). Like many black American soldiers, he returns home after the war to a society that rejects him as surely as the Jews were rejected by the Nazis he helped to defeat–a society where blacks are also used in medical experimentation (though that wouldn’t have been revealed at that time). Again, like many black American veterans, he flees America for the relative security of France, where he begins to become aware of the extent of the changes rought in him by the Nazis, and thus begins life as a superhero. What kind of villains would he fight in France (or Europe in general)? How would French society react to him? Would he live a Batman-esque life of seclusion on the margins of society, or would he be embraced by the French as they tended to embrace American expatriates in general?
Anyway, that though experiment was running through my mind when I came, quite by accident, on a link to this interview with Mark Millar, who has worked on the X-Men and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight series. Millar describes his new series, a three-parter entitled Superman: Red Son, which stems from the premise that young Kal-El’s ship crashed in Soviet Ukraine instead of middle-American Smallville. In Red Son, Superman is raised as a champion of Truth, Justice, and The Communist Way, and grows into a functionary for the Soviet government in their work to unite the workers of the world. Along the way he encounters the Sovietised Batman, an anti-Stalinist revolutionary terrorist, who brings home the moral ambiguities of Superman’s communist nationalism. This definitely looks like a realization of the promise of comic books, and certainly like a realization of some of the questions I tried to work through with my hackneyed outsider’s “faux” comic book story. The first installment just came out, and if I can find it and scrape the money together, I’m going to buy it–my first comic book in I don’t know how long. Of course, it’s been so long, that I’m really not sure even where to buy it–my neighborhood book store, while carrying comics, doesn’t seem to carry it. And I don’t know anything about the various formats that seem to have emerged since my teenage years, when graphic novels were still a rarity, especially as a format for original work. But these obstacles, I’m sure, can be overcome. Where’s Superman when you need him?!
Gender Construction and Transexuality
Ampersand has an interesting post on transexuality, with an even more interesting discussion in the comments. Transexuality poses a strong challenge to some kinds of feminism, as the idea of bringing one’s biology into line with one’s gender undermines feminist assertions that gender and biology are independent. Transexuals also make activists uncomfortable by their sometimes stereotypical performances of femininity. On the other hand, transexuals are walking, talking proof of the ambiguity and flexibility of gender–some male transexuals are and remain attracted to females, and vice versa, becoming in effect “gay” upon their transformation. Other transexuals opt out of the process at a pre-operative stage, retaining their unmodified genitalia alongside secondary sex characteristics like breasts, “masculine” hair growth, altered voices, etc. These “ambiguous” transexuals should be welcomed as further proof of the variety of gender expressions possible within the limited biology of the human form.
To me, the problems that some feminists and more non-feminists have with transexuality stems from a misunderstanding of what it means for gender to be “constructed”. There is, for example,a belief–particularly strong in conservative circles–that showing a biological dissimilarity between men and women, something like the influence of testosterone on personality and aggression, somehow means that gender is not constructed. This opposition between biology and constructionism is simply false. Most people have a penis or a vagina (some people have both, and a few have neither)–what is constructed is what possession of a particular piece of anatomy means, the kinds of behaviour it is linked to. Testosterone may very well make people more aggressive, and owners of testicles might indeed have significantly different levels of testosterone that would cause them to be more aggressive–but it is society that lets them be more aggressive, society that constructs the aggression associated with testosterone with a particular set of gendered behaviours. And this doesn’t take into account the many, many women who have levels of testosterone similar to or exceeding many, many men’s, or the various expressions of aggression that have nothing to do with testosterone, or the many non-aggressive acts that even the most aggressive persons can and do perform.
In short form, while there is (almost) certainly a physical reality “out there”, it is only in the human mind that that reality comes to mean, and behaviours based on that reality emerge. It is in the intersection between thinking, social humans and that physical reality that construction takes place, not in the opposition of the two.
Donna Schaper is a garden hobbyist and author of The Art of Spiritual Rock Gardening. Schaper lives in Florida and was recently rejected admission to the Coral Gables Garden Club on the grounds that she is “too liberal”. She has been outspoken in opposition to the war, as well as in her support for abortion rights and racial justice and the other Coral Gables gardeners felt, apparently, that this was not the sort of element with whom they wanted to hobnob. Her gardening skills are not in question–in fact, the same club had featured Schaper as a speaker, before word of her particular political bent reached their delicate ears.
Thus we step further into the Age of Unreason. I often wonder what it must have felt like on the day that Germany took its first baby step towards the Third Reich. Such a big thing happening, and yet on that day, it must have been invisible, something far off and not especially worrisome. The same with the second step, and the third. Heck, for years even Germany’s Jews felt that things would get better, that their worst fears–which didn’t even approximate the real future in store for them–were so unrealistic as to be laughable. There’s a brilliant film, Jew Boy Levi, set in the Black Forest in 1935. Levi is a Jewish cattle dealer who makes a circuit of all the towns and hamlets in the region, buying cattle to take to market. He is well-liked by his clients and is planning to marry a young Catholic woman in one of the villages when a team of Nazi Party functionaries set up in town while working on the railroad line. Through an excruciatingly subtle series of rumours, backroom dealing, differential treatment, and eventually outright incitement, this village full of upstanding, friendly, and endearing Germans is brought to bear against Levi. The anti-Semitism that turns Levi from a beloved member of the community into an outcast Jude progresses not in one fell swoop, but by baby steps, each moment only minutely more charged than the one before it.
Or consider McCarthyism. Not just Senator McCarthy’s campaign, but the whole complex of paranoia and backstabbing that enabled McCarthy’s work and those of his successors. Taken alone, no particular act in this march towards absurdity seemed poorly intentioned or evil, but they all added up to a criminal campaign against the bedrock values of the American system.
What is insidious about these examples is not so much that the respective governments actions against their subjects–which is certainly bad, but at least they were public actions–but the actions of those subjects against each other, the rumour-mongering and petty exclusions and power-plays of scurrilous neighbors peeking over the fence at each other’s backyards. For all her gardening skills, Donna Schaper’s backyard is not in order. She writes of the steps she might take to fall in line, ironically and perhaps unintentionally repeating the ideals of the German native plant movement that fed into the racial science of Nazi eugenics:
Perhaps I should write a new book called “Politically Correct Gardening.” In it I could show the single right way to plant, hoe, seed and compost. I would focus on native plants (or ones that originated in countries among America’s coalition of the willing). I would avoid pink flowers altogether [because of the colour’s association with communist sympathizers]. Nothing French would be mentioned. All plants would have to look good in [red, white, and blue] bunting.
For all that gardening seems an innocuous enterprise with little or no greater political relevance, it is a powerful field for the cultivation of nationalism. People who grow things, who bring a harvest forth from the earth, have long been symbols of the strength and fitness of a nation, a role easily pressed into the service of the worst forms of nationalism. I have already mentioned the role of “innocuous” gardening in cultivating the ideas that would fuel the Nazi Party–consider as well the role of the kibbutz in the establishment of an Israeli national identity, the mythological status of those who “made the desert bloom”. Consider the exclusion of “aliens” from owning farmland in California under the Alien Land Laws of the early 20th century. Or the French settlers in Algeria who blamed the local population’s inferiority for allowing the land–once called the “breadbasket of Rome”–to lapse into desert, and the belief that noble Frenchmen could turn it back into the breadbasket of Greater France. Or the Dutch settlement of New Guinea, driven by an ideology seeking to redeem a degenerate land from its stewardship under a degenerate people.
Farming, gardening, ranching, logging, all tie a people, literally and figuratively, to the earth, to the land in which the nation itself is rooted. In the industrial era, we might also include mining and oil drilling as providing the fuel for nationalism–certainly they are an active part of today’s American nationalism–but these industries place us at a remove from the land itself in a way that farming and especially gardening do not. People who work the earth with their hands play a special role in the definition of a nation–their ideas about our relationship with the physical land become our ideas about our relation with the ideological land. They wield a lot of power with their hand shovels and trowels, and it is frustrating to see that power turned to a policy of exclusion, of blind loyalty to a government that is becoming increasingly oppressive. It is also frustrating to see a group–any group–turning its back on dissension and debate, to see a man or woman denied a platform for expression–on whatever topic, be it baseball, charity, poetry, literature, or gardening–out of the fear that they may speak their mind on politics. Not because it is harmful to people like Donna Schaper (or actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, or poets like Marilyn Nelson and Jay Parini, whom she mentions in her article) but because it degrades citizens like those in the Coral Gables Garden Club. It shows them up as cheap, petty, and thoughtless, unwilling to even entertain the idea of dissent, and eager to play bit parts in whatever the next baby step in the Age of Unreason might be. My admiration is reserved for people like Schaper, people who stand up and challenge such small-mindedness. Alas, history has rarely been kind to the excluded, but we shall see.
The playing cards issued to service members in Iraq, with the pictures of the baddest of Ba’athist bad men, have been something of a joke since their introduction. But here’s someone that’s found a good way to use a silly idea: playing cards with pictures of looted museum pieces. One of the big problems in recovering the material stolen from Iraqi museums has been that few outside of Iraq know what these works look like–as noted last week, law enforcement in the US doesn’t know what to look for, auction houses don’t know what to look for, customs doesn’t know what to look for. Doc Searls’ “barnraising” is a great idea, but in the meantime, any way that information about these pieces can get out into the public is good. From the website, it appears that they will be selling these cards, as soon as they can get enough images.
After you’ve had a look, you can visit an Iraqi National Museum website, which doesn’t appear to be an official site, but rather the work of a devoted museum fan (apparently an Austrian one). Another good look at the works now slipping out of public grasp forever…
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I would like to suggest a new word to be entered into the English vocabulary: “to fleischer”. Fleischering is to avoid answering a question by making a statement that is formally an answer but actually does not even address the topic of the question. For example, when asked if the president’s lack of comment on Sen. Santorum’s equation of homosexuality with incest and bestiality (and reference to priestly pedophilia as consensual homosexual intercourse) represented ” a conscious decision to just keep clear of this one?” on the part of the administration, fleischering’s namesake said:
Let me put it to you this way. The President typically never does comment on anything involving a Supreme Court case, a Supreme Court ruling or a Supreme Court finding — typically. And in this case, we also have no comment on anything that involves any one person’s interpretation of the legalities of an issue that may be considered before the Court.
This is neither an admittal or denial that the White House has chosen not to address Santorum’s statements, while at the same time downplaying their importance (as “one person’s interpretation of the legalities of an issue”). That’s a mild example, but I really don’t feel up to going through the White House press briefing transcripts for a really strong one from Ari.
Fortunately, I don’t have to, because now fleischering has gone public. Here’s an excellent example from an interview with Darl McBride, president and CEO of The SCO Group. SCO is a Unix company that has lodged a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM over the release of SCO-licensed code by IBM to Linux developers (Linux being a powerful, free or low-cost alternative to SCO’s Unix):
CRN: Some are worried that a court case might give Microsoft a legal precedent that could be used to deaccelerate adoption of Linux at customer sites. What do you say to that?
McBride: In our case, Linux comes from Unix and we own the Unix operating system. How this plays out with other code bases, I don’t know.
CRN: What are you trying to do? Some say you are trying to compete against Linux by destroying it.
McBride: We will use our best efforts to protect our source code.
Truly a fine example of fleischering! The first question asks about the effect of SCO’s suit on Microsoft’s PR campaign, and McBride answers with an asseretion of ownership of Unix (and, by extension, Linux), and then avers a lack of opinion about Miscrosoft’s code, which was never even mentioned. The second question asks about the companies use of the lawsuit as a weapon against their competition, and is answered with a near non-sequiter about protecting their code base.
Fleischering is important because of the way it has shaped our political discourse. A freedom to ask questions is useless in a society where questions are not answered, where the give-and-take of a press briefing or interview is reshaped as a monologue interpersed with questions that are merely opportunities to expound, rather then to respond. There’s a great scene in the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement where Gregory Peck, playing a journalist pretends to be Jewish in order to write about how anti-Semitism is felt and experienced, confronts the manager of a restricted hotel. The manager refuses to come straight out and say that Jews are not allowed in the hotel, and the exchange grows more heated until, finally, the manager turns his back, walks into the back room, and closes the door, leaving Peck fuming but without any target for his righteous anger. This is what fleischering does–it refuses any “sticking point” for criticism of or challenge to one’s position. A little later in the press briefing I cited above, the following exchange occured, after Ari said that France was beginning to come around to America’s view regarding Iraqi sanctions, but had not gone far enough (“Greg” is apparently the next reporter in line for questions):
Q: You’re saying they’ve turned the corner, they just haven’t gone quite far enough?
MR. FLEISCHER: I’ll leave it as I put it.
Q: Why won’t you answer the question about —
MR. FLEISCHER: Greg.
Q: Hold on. We’re entitled to follow up, Ari — this isn’t homeroom.
MR. FLEISCHER: Greg.
Q: Why won’t you answer the question about whether or not — he said there are going to be consequences —
MR. FLEISCHER: David, there are other qualified reporters in here, too, who can follow-up.
Q: I didn’t say they were not qualified, Ari. I’m saying you’re running it like it’s homeroom, like we can’t follow-up when you’re refusing to answer a question that’s been posed twice to you, directly. The Secretary of State said that there would be consequences. Why won’t you say what they might be?
MR. FLEISCHER: Greg.
Q: Do you want to elaborate on what those consequences would be?
MR. FLEISCHER: I addressed it earlier. You heard what I said about consequences.
Q: You didn’t address it, which is the point. But you can’t tolerate that kind of dissent.
Q: [Assumedly Greg] On the home front, the Senate GOP is beginning the early discussions on their tax bill, which — a net of $350 billion. Does the White House have a preferred level of revenue raisers they’d like to see added to that bill that would allow you to extend, in effect, the overall size —
I think we can safely assume that David will join the crowd of exiled journalists in the back of the Press Room from here on in. The point is the absolute refusal to offer any sort of defense or explanation, the rejection of any concession to dialogue. Now, of course, press briefings are not necessarily about dialogue, but they are supposed to be about providing journalists the information they need to convey to the rest of us just what’s going on behind the Blue Curtain. David, whoever he is, was doing his job, trying to get the information that the majority of Americans who have questions about our relationship with foreign countries alienated by the unilateralism of this administration want and need to be informed citizens. It’s not, then, that Ari fleischered the journalist, but that he fleischered the journalist’s public–and that’s you and me. And it’s unacceptable. So I’d like to make sure that this tactic is perpetually linked with the infamy of the man who raised it not only to an art, but to public policy.
[Thanks to eschaton for the Ari Fleischer quotes.]
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A few of the stories I’ve been meaning to blog but just haven’t found the energy for:
- First, a Retraction: My post yesterday should have referred to the Dog Run, not the Dog Pound. I don’t know what I was thinking–I was looking straight at the site when I was writing the post…
- Looted Art News: Some of the looted pieces from Iraq are already turning up in the US. The FBI has already started receiving tips from customs agents, collectors, and auction-house agents about suspicious pieces. Unfortunately, there is as of yet no comprehensive source for identifying these artworks.
- A Barn-Raising for Civilization:: Doc Searls’ suggestions might go some ways towards remedying the difficulties in identifying and recovering looted artworks. Among other things (such as creating an all-looted-artwork, all-the-time Iraqi network to inform Iraqis and encourage looters, at least looters of conscience, to return stolen works) Searls recommends
Create an .iq Web site devoted entirely to aggregating and displaying photographs of Baghdad museum properties, and of lost or damaged Iraqi antiquities. Perhaps the British Museum (which has already pledged help) or British Petroleum (its Web site sponsor) could run this thing–or fund somebody else willing to run the thing.
This is a great idea, and might I suggest, especially given the number of folks surfing the blogosphere that are involved in high-tech industries, that they initiate efforts in their companies to donate equipment, expertise, and funding to such a project? I know that Intel is especially eager to invest in cultural uses of the Internet, and is a frequent sponsor of museum exhibitions and programs, and I assume other companies might be similarly inclined. That’s great PR, too–what company doesn’t want to save civilization? This isn’t something that the Garner team is going to push for on their own, but if a team of techs with a truckload of servers, scanners and digital cameras, and free software were to be put into their laps…
- Economies of Now: Jason Kottke has a short post describing a study on NYC MetroCard usage. MetroCards, for non-New Yorkers, fully replaced tokens for subway and bus travel a couple of years ago, and are available (as of last June, anyway) in one-day unlimited ($4), one-week unlimited ($17), or one-month unlimited ($63) varieties, or you can fill them with any number of individual fares for $1.50 per ride ($1.35 for everything you buy over $15.00). If you use the subway system or busses regularly (back and forth to work, plus a few more rides a week) the $63 monthly card is the best value, but the weekly cards are much more popular. I myself never bought a monthly card, despite being a regular subeway and bus user for several years since they were introduced. According to the study, one of the reasons people don’t buy monthly cards is that, though in the long run it saves them money, in the short run, they can’t afford it. Many people–especially in expensive NYC–live paycheck to paycheck, and $63 is a big chunk to take out of the budget all at once. The study’s author suggests setting up a “MetroCard fund”, where commuters can pay a couple of dollars in a day towards their next monthly card–the thing is, NYC already has a fund like that, called “MetroCheck”. Employees can use MetroCheck not only to have a portion of their paycheck applied towards their MetroCard, but to have it come out of their pre-tax income, meaning that they save even more (if only a few dollars a month). The problem is that employers either don’t understand the program or are not willing to implement it, or they don’t explain it well when they do implement it. It’s like direct deposit was a few years ago–in theory, all you had to do was ask, but in practice, it was too much bother for employers. Today, most employers prefer to pay via direct deposit, and I imagine that as empoyers “get it” in NYC, they will realize how far their involvement in their employees commuting life can go for them. At the minimum, assuring that every employee has a valid MetroCard at any given time means that late employees will not be able to say “Sorry I’m late–my MetroCard expired and I didn’t have enough money on me to buy a new one.”
- Sugar’s good for you. Really!: The World Health Organization (WHO) is compiling a report on healthy diets, with a set of recommendations similar to the American “food pyramid”, only based on reality instead of industry PR. Or is it? Not if the sugar industry has it’s way, apparently. Seems that the Sugar Association, a coalition of sugar companies and growers “committed to integrity and sound scientific principles” (code for “deceptive research and industry PR”; see Trust Us We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future for a key to sound-science advocacy/PR shilling) is very upset by the WHO’s suggestion that sugar should be consumed in moderation, composing at most 10% of your daily caloric intake, complaining that “We remain adamant that any scientific report that affects world health policies and global implementation strategies must be based on the preponderance of scientific evidence.” The Who report is, admittedly, based on the recommendations of 30 independant experts, who arrived at the 10% figure by as the average recommendation of 23 separate national studies of sugar intake–but none of those studies was sponsored by the sugar industry, and none of the experts are on Big Sugar’s payroll, and so their results are clearly “unscientific”.
Now, here’s where it gets ugly: to prevent the release of this report, the sugar industry, backed by big sugar-peddlers like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, is threatening to demand that Congress withdraw American funding of the WHO unless the recommendation in the report is raised to 25% (what’s worse is that the recommendation is, as far as I can make out, for added sugar–that is, soda pop, candy, and the sugar you sprinkle on your morning cereal, and doesn’t include naturally-occuring sugars already in many foods). This is no idle threat–the food lobby is the most powerful and influential lobby on the United States, outweighing–in terms of financial resources and personnel–both the oil lobby and the tobacco lobby. And, as the world’s largest economy, the US contributes the largest part of the financial support to international organizations: $406 million in the WHO’s case. Lest it be forgotten, as fallible as the WHO can be sometimes, it is the only world-wide organization capable of even beginning to deal with and somewhat controlling tuberculosis, AIDS, SARS, malaria, and any number of other dangerous and virulent diseases, in addition to providing basic medical care to millions around the world. The fact that they are willing to hold the world’s health hostage to insure their market share is not only sad, it’s a travesty. Alas, given the high ethical standards of our Congresspersons, Big Sugar will probably prevail, one way or another.
- Sorry, that’s secret: The Pentagon has forwarded a list of regular reports to Congress that they feel are unnecessary. While reducing paperwork is good for both government efficiency and for the environment, I suspect different motives behind some ofthese requests. Many of the reports do seem superfluous, but Daniel Cornwall, Librarian, has compiled a list of 35 reports of “Special Concern”, including reports on the cost of maintaining overseas military stations, the protection of nuclear material, special operations forces training with foreign military forces, humanitarian assistance, military housing, and various reports on expenditures and commercial activities. Now, leaving aside that I don’t trust the Pentagon any further than I could throw it (if I could get close enough), most of these reports seem like the kind of thing we’d want our lawmakers to know about. The Pentagon cites either national security concerns or internal oversight as their reason for wanting to get rid of most of the reports, but a) I think–I hope!–that our elected leaders can be trusted not to release sensitive information to the public, and 2) “internal oversight” means “if we do something you wouldn’t approve of, we’ll tell you. Trust us.” We have checks and balances for a reason, and if Congress is to be an effective check against administrative power, this information is crucial.
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The Talking Dog added me to the Dog Pound, his collection of “sites approved for romping and reading”. What separates this event from other blogrolling instances is not only that the Talking Dog is a fellow Brooklynite (though I am currently in exile) who specializes in performing name change operations for transsexuals (nice work, if you can get it), but the review:
One Man’s Opinion is the work of One Man a/k/a Dustin M. Wax o.k. whoever he (or she) REALLY is. What he (or she) writes is some diabolically clever good-guy agitprop (wait a minute…can the good guys produce agitprop?) A solid lefty blogroll, most of whom are already dog run denizens (and the rest will be soon), and in one talking dog’s opinion, over the plate commentary from a left-handed fireballer.
That’s “he”, for the foreseeable future, by the way.
My Talking Dog (TD) Designation is “Dunker”. A TD Designation is like those internet quizzes that tell you which Star Wars character you are, what flavour Doritos you would be, or which transcendental philosopher you should date, except where those are based on solid and objective methodological principles, TD Designations are the subjective opinion of Mr. Dog.
As a Dunker, there are a few things you should know about me. I am a Group 6 “scent hound” from Norway. Ideally, I should be medium-sized and powerfully built, but should not appear heavy, and should convey the impression of endurance. My head is not to be carried highly. It should be clean and noble with good length and parallel planes, not wedge shaped. Finally, I should have two apparently normal testicles fully descended into the scrotum. And that’s good to know. (This information gleaned from ZooClub.)
Anyway, thanks Talking Dog.
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