Solnit on Greed, Language, and Politics

 Regular readers will know that I consider Rebecca Solnit an incisive, articulate analyst of politics and the arts. So, when I came across this essay of hers at TomDispatch.com I suspected it would be worth reading. It turns out that, as I sit in the cold, wet, grey backwash of Hurricane Sandy, anticipating days of bad weather, her focus on climate change and why it has made less than a cameo appearance in the ongoing election campaign is especially well taken. Her focus on the pervasive greed - and its converse, poverty and hardship - are especially relevant given that the University where I work is in the midst of more than one labor dispute. And her broader theme - the ways our political language is increasingly infested with euphemism, bullshit and deception - is one that I myself have taken up repeatedly here over the years. In any case, here, reprinted without permission, is her essay in its entirely.

 **********

 Our Words Are Our Weapons ~
Against the Destruction of the World by Greed
By Rebecca Solnit

In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.

This was part of what made Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our language and called many if not all things by their true names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected, Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled, parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything in our world -- a phenomenon which went supernova in this year of “legitimate rape,” “the apology tour,” and “job creators.”  Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a rectification of numbers, too.) 

Let’s rectify some names ourselves. We often speak as though the source of so many of our problems is complex and even mysterious. I'm not sure it is. You can blame it all on greed: the refusal to do anything about climate change, the attempts by the .01% to destroy our democracy, the constant robbing of the poor, the resultant starving children, the war against most of what is beautiful on this Earth.

Calling lies "lies" and theft "theft" and violence "violence," loudly, clearly, and consistently, until truth becomes more than a bump in the road, is a powerful aspect of political activism. Much of the work around human rights begins with accurately and aggressively reframing the status quo as an outrage, whether it’s misogyny or racism or poisoning the environment. What protects an outrage are disguises, circumlocutions, and euphemisms -- “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, “collateral damage” for killing civilians, “the war on terror” for the war against you and me and our Bill of Rights.

Change the language and you’ve begun to change the reality or at least to open the status quo to question. Here is Confucius on the rectification of names:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

So let’s start calling manifestations of greed by their true name. By greed, I mean the attempt of those who have plenty to get more, not the attempts of the rest of us to survive or lead a decent life. Look at the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame: the four main heirs are among the dozen richest people on the planet, each holding about $24 billion. Their wealth is equivalent to that of the bottom 40% of Americans. The corporation Sam Walton founded now employs 2.2 million workers, two-thirds of them in the U.S., and the great majority are poorly paid, intimidated, often underemployed people who routinely depend on government benefits to survive. You could call that Walton Family welfare -- a taxpayers' subsidy to their system. Strikes launched against Wal-Mart this summer and fall protested working conditions of astonishing barbarity -- warehouses that reach 120 degrees, a woman eight months pregnant forced to work at a brutal pace, commonplace exposure to pollutants, and the intimidation of those who attempted to organize or unionize.

You would think that $24,000,000,000 apiece would be enough, but the Walton family sits atop a machine intent upon brutalizing tens of millions of people -- the suppliers of Wal-Mart notorious for their abysmal working conditions, as well as the employees of the stores -- only to add to piles of wealth already obscenely vast. Of course, what we call corporations are, in fact, perpetual motion machines, set up to endlessly extract wealth (and leave slagheaps of poverty behind) no matter what.

They are generally organized in such a way that the brutality that leads to wealth extraction is committed by subcontractors at a distance or described in euphemisms, so that the stockholders, board members, and senior executives never really have to know what’s being done in their names. And yet it is their job to know -- just as it is each of our jobs to know what systems feed us and exploit or defend us, and the job of writers, historians, and journalists to rectify the names for all these things.   

Groton to Moloch 

The most terrifying passage in whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s gripping book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is not about his time in Vietnam, or his life as a fugitive after he released the Pentagon Papers. It’s about a 1969 dinnertime conversation with a co-worker in a swanky house in Pacific Palisades, California.  It took place right after Ellsberg and five of his colleagues had written a letter to the New York Times arguing for immediate withdrawal from the unwinnable, brutal war in Vietnam, and Ellsberg’s host said, “If I were willing to give up all this... if I were willing to renege on... my commitment to send my son to Groton... I would have signed the letter.”

In other words, his unnamed co-worker had weighed trying to prevent the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against the upper-middle-class perk of having his kid in a fancy prep school, and chosen the latter. The man who opted for Groton was, at least, someone who worked for what he had and who could imagine having painfully less. This is not true of the ultra-rich shaping the future of our planet.

They could send tens of thousands to Groton, buy more Renoirs and ranches, and still not exploit the poor or destroy the environment, but they’re as insatiable as they are ruthless. They are often celebrated in their aesthetic side effects: imposing mansions, cultural patronage, jewels, yachts.  But in many, maybe most, cases they got rich through something a lot uglier, and that ugliness is still ongoing. Rectifying the names would mean revealing the ugliness of the sources of their fortunes and the grotesque scale on which they contrive to amass them, rather than the gaudiness of the trinkets they buy with them. It would mean seeing and naming the destruction that is the corollary of most of this wealth creation.

A Storm Surge of Selfishness 

Where this matters most is climate change. Why have we done almost nothing over the past 25 years about what was then a terrifying threat and is now a present catastrophe? Because it was bad for quarterly returns and fossil-fuel portfolios. When posterity indicts our era, this will be the feeble answer for why we did so little -- that the rich and powerful with ties to the carbon-emitting industries have done everything in their power to prevent action on, or even recognition of, the problem. In this country in particular, they spent a fortune sowing doubt about the science of climate change and punishing politicians who brought the subject up. In this way have we gone through four “debates” and nearly a full election cycle with climate change unmentioned and unmentionable.

These three decades of refusing to respond have wasted crucial time. It’s as though you were prevented from putting out a fire until it was raging: now the tundra is thawing and Greenland’s ice shield is melting and nearly every natural system is disrupted, from the acidifying oceans to the erratic seasons to droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, and the failure of crops. We can still respond, but the climate is changed; the damage we all spoke of, only a few years ago, as being in the future is here, now.

You can look at the chief executive officers of the oil corporations -- Chevron’s John Watson, for example, who received almost $25 million ($1.57 million in salary and the rest in “compensation”) in 2011 -- or their major shareholders. They can want for nothing. They’re so rich they could quit the game at any moment. When it comes to climate change, some of the wealthiest people in the world have weighed the fate of the Earth and every living thing on it for untold generations to come, the seasons and the harvests, this whole exquisite planet we evolved on, and they have come down on the side of more profit for themselves, the least needy people the world has ever seen.

Take those billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David Koch, who are all over American politics these days. They are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat Obama, partly because he offends their conservative sensibilities, but also because he is less likely to be a completely devoted servant of their profit margins. He might, if we shout loud enough, rectify a few names.  Under pressure, he might even listen to the public or environmental groups, while Romney poses no such problem (and under a Romney administration they will probably make more back in tax cuts than they are gambling on his election).

Two years ago, the Koch brothers spent $1 million on California’s Proposition 23, an initiative written and put on the ballot by out-of-state oil companies to overturn our 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. It lost by a landslide, but the Koch brothers have also invested a small fortune in spreading climate-change denial and sponsoring the Tea Party (which they can count on to oppose climate change regulation as big government or interference with free enterprise). This year they’re backing a California initiative to silence unions. They want nothing to stand in the way of corporate power and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Think of it as another kind of war, and consider the early casualties.  

As the Irish Times put it in an editorial this summer:

“Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions are struggling to adapt to their changing climate. In the last three years, we have seen 10 million people displaced by floods in Pakistan, 13 million face hunger in east Africa, and over 10 million in the Sahel region of Africa face starvation. Even those figures only scrape the surface. According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed up by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, climate change is responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and affects 300 million people annually. By 2030, the annual death toll related to climate change is expected to rise to 500,000 and the economic cost to rocket to $600 billion.”

This coming year may see a dramatic increase in hunger due to rising food prices from crop failures, including this summer’s in the U.S. Midwest after a scorching drought in which the Mississippi River nearly ran dry and crops withered.

We need to talk about climate change as a war against nature, against the poor (especially the poor of Africa), and against the rest of us. There are casualties, there are deaths, and there is destruction, and it’s all mounting. Rectify the name, call it war. While we’re at it, take back the term “pro-life” to talk about those who are trying to save the lives of all the creatures suffering from the collapse of the complex systems on which plant and animal as well as human lives depend. The other side: “pro-death.”

The complex array of effects from climate change and their global distribution, as well as their scale and the science behind them makes it harder to talk about than almost anything else on Earth, but we should talk about it all the more because of that. And yes, the rest of us should do more, but what is the great obstacle those who have already tried to do so much invariably come up against? The oil corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, its staggering financial clout, its swarms of lobbyists, and the politicians in its clutches. Those who benefit most from the status quo, I learned in studying disasters, are always the least willing to change.

The Doublespeak on Taxes 

I’m a Californian so I faced the current version of American greed early. Proposition 13, the initiative that froze property taxes and made it nearly impossible to raise taxes in our state, went into effect in 1978, two years before California’s former governor Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in part by catering to greed. Prop 13, as it came to be known, went into effect when California was still an affluent state with the best educational system in the world, including some of the top universities around, nearly free to in-staters all the way through graduate school. Tax cuts have trashed the state and that education system, and they are now doing the same to our country. The public sphere is to society what the biosphere is to life on earth: the space we live in together, and the attacks on them have parallels.

What are taxes? They are that portion of your income that you contribute to the common good. Most of us are unhappy with how they’re allocated -- though few outside the left talk about the fact that more than half of federal discretionary expenditures go to our gargantuan military, more money than is spent on the next 14 militaries combined. Ever since Reagan, the right has complained unceasingly about fantasy expenditures -- from that president’s “welfare queens” to Mitt Romney’s attack on Big Bird and PBS (which consumes .001% of federal expenditures).

As part of its religion of greed, the right invented a series of myths about where those taxes went, how paying them was the ultimate form of oppression, and what boons tax cuts were to bring us.  They then delivered the biggest tax cuts of all to those who already had a superfluity of money and weren’t going to pump the extra they got back into the economy. What they really were saying was that they wanted to hang onto every nickel, no matter how the public sphere was devastated, and that they really served the ultra-rich, over and over again, not the suckers who voted them into office.

Despite decades of cutting to the bone, they continue to promote tax cuts as if they had yet to happen. Their constant refrain is that we are too poor to feed the poor or educate the young or heal the sick, but the poverty isn’t monetary: it’s moral and emotional. Let’s rectify some more language: even at this moment, the United States remains the richest nation the world has ever seen, and California -- with the richest agricultural regions on the planet and a colossal high-tech boom still ongoing in Silicon Valley -- is loaded, too. Whatever its problems, the U.S. is still swimming in abundance, even if that abundance is divided up ever more unequally.

Really, there’s more than enough to feed every child well, to treat every sick person, to educate everyone well without saddling them with hideous debt, to support the arts, to protect the environment -- to produce, in short, a glorious society. The obstacle is greed. We could still make the sorts of changes climate change requires of us and become a very different nation without overwhelming pain. We would then lead somewhat different lives -- richer, not poorer, for most of us (in meaning, community, power, and hope). Because this culture of greed impoverishes all of us, it is, to call it by its true name, destruction.

Occupy the Names  

One of the great accomplishments of Occupy Wall Street was this rectification of names. Those who came together under that rubric named the greed, inequality, and injustice in our system; they made the brutality of debt and the subjugation of the debtors visible; they called out Wall Street’s crimes; they labeled the wealthiest among us the “1%,” those who have made a profession out of pumping great sums of our wealth upwards (quite a different kind of tax).  It was a label that made instant sense across much of the political spectrum. It was a good beginning. But there’s so much more to do.

Naming is only part of the work, but it’s a crucial first step. A doctor initially diagnoses, then treats; an activist or citizen must begin by describing what is wrong before acting. To do that well is to call things by their true names. Merely calling out these names is a beam of light powerful enough to send the destroyers it shines upon scurrying for cover like roaches. After that, you still need to name your vision, your plan, your hope, your dream of something better.

Names matter; language matters; truth matters. In this era when the mainstream media serve obfuscation and evasion more than anything else (except distraction), alternative media, social media, demonstrations in the streets, and conversations between friends are the refuges of truth, the places where we can begin to rectify the names. So start talking.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books, a TomDispatch regular, and from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the California public education system in its heyday. She would like the Republican Party to be called the Pro-Rape Party until further notice.

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit

Circling the Wagons: Conservatives & Jared Loughner

It would be nice (but wholly unexpected) if a single prominent conservative politician or media mouthpiece would so much as countenance the possibility that right wing rhetoric is even occasionally a bit out of hand. And it would be even nicer if they would acknowledge that it might be possible that those who are mentally unbalanced might be influenced by extreme rhetoric in dangerous ways.

American conservatives are falling over themselves to insist that Jared Loughner is simply a mentally disturbed individual. They point out that his Internet ramblings were just that, ramblings, and so incoherent. Loughner was not a conservative ideologue.* So, on their account, there is no - literally zero - connection between right wing hyperbole, on the Internet or talk-radio or in electoral campaigns, and Loughner's attempt to shoot his "liberal" Congresswoman to death.

This is a sensitive issue. Loughner did something despicable and criminal. No other description will do. But we do need some sort of explanation. That hardly is the same thing. There is no doubt that Loughner is mentally ill. The question is whether that is a sufficient account. I do not think so. And I think that the willingness of conservative figures in the media, in politics, and among the citizenry to engage in de-humanizing violent rhetoric established a crucial context within which Loughner formulated his plans. It is, after all, simply OK these days to carry your weapon to a political event. Just ask conservatives to say otherwise.

Of course, neither the bigoted, reactionary talk radio jocks, nor lunatic web-page sponsors, nor opportunistic politicos on the right instructed Loughner to do anything. And, of course, it is well beyond the ability of social scientists to establish anything like a specific causal explanation in cases like this. Indeed, social science is not much use in establishing general patterns across apparently similar cases. (Which is not to say that they have not tried; for instance here and here.) But having conceded all that, it seems implausible to suggest, as conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to David Brooks are doing, that there is no connection - none - between conservative rhetoric and Loughner's shooting spree. The impulse is to simply chalk this up to the actions of an insane person, thereby individualizing and depoliticizing the event. While I may be wrong, I think this is unpersuasive. Here is why:

(1) Compare Loughner to Seung-Hui Cho, the mentally disturbed student who opened fire on students, staff and faculty at Virginia Tech in 2007. The differences are instructive. First, Cho reportedly was diagnosed from an early age with a set of specific mental disorders. Nothing I have read thus far - for instance this report in The Guardian - suggests that the same is true of Loughner. Second, Cho did not seek out a political figure to assassinate; he shot up a college campus, presumably because he felt aggrieved by fellow students or his academic environment. By contrast, Jared Loughner hunted his target down and shot her at a political event. Why did he not shoot up the Community College from which he'd been expelled? Why did he not go to the Army recruitment center where he'd been rejected? Why did he not track down any of the myriad right-wing politicians roaming across Arizona? He did none of those things, even though, in the case of the College and the Recruiters, the potential sources of alienation and resentment were clear and proximate.

(2) The right typically falls over itself to take credit when its "message" seems to have influenced people to do this or that - say elect Scott Brown over Martha Coakley. But in this instance they insist that there is simply no possible way that quite specific messages - like Sarah Palin's targeting of Gabrielle Giffords - could have any influence on the thinking or actions of anyone. Palin's advertisement was especially prominent and blatant, but not, I suspect, unique in attacking Giffords during the election last fall. Loughner would not have had to expend much effort (if any) to come into contact with the attacks. Indeed, if he were (as news reports suggest) already predisposed to dislike Giffords, he arguably would've been primed to notice them. Again, this is not to say that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy to induce Jard Loughner to do anything. It is simply to say that vicious attacks using violent language or imagery create a cultural ecology of permissiveness in which violence against ones political opponents might seem acceptable. In my view the right in the U.S. has done just that.**

Those on the right in America love to wax eloquently about the virtues of personal responsibility. In this instance, however, they are running as fast as they might from the notion that they - media types, politicos, street-corner screamers - might have contributed in any way whatsoever to creating an ecology in which violent language has become routinized.

My friend Susan makes the important point that, even if it were warranted, there is little that we might do collectively to rein in vitriolic political language. We can answer back, of course. But there is no call for legal penalties for engaging in political speech. (Although I do not think carrying your side arm to a political meeting or coffee shop or church is a speech act. As such that behavior can and should be regulated tightly.) Susan suggests that what we need is tighter regulation on the purchase and ownership of outrageous weaponry (like the 30 round magazines that turned Loughner's pistol into an assault weapon) that is useful only for shooting people. I agree. But, how many conservatives are lining up to back anything like that? (The lunacy of Arizona's lax gun laws is a topic for another time. Let's just say that an armed citizenry did nothing to prevent the Tuscon shootings, either as a deterrent or in the event.) And Susan prompted me to wonder about something else too. How many conservatives, having depicted the Tuscon shootings as the handiwork of a lunatic, are going to buy a plea of 'Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity" in this instance? Will they be happy if Jared Loughner, madman, ends up not in prison but in a mental institution?
__________
* Does the typical caller to Limbaugh or Beck (or Rachel Maddow, for that matter) have a coherent political ideology? Incoherence on that score hardly differentiates Loughner from most Americans.

** And it is not the case, I suspect, that one can simply say "Well, both sides engage in that sort of rhetoric ... blah, blah." I do not have quantitative data, but am willing to wager that the right engages in violent rhetoric and does so in more prominent venues than do "liberals." Any takers?

P.S.: Updated the next morning ~ You can find Brooks developing his rationalizations and evasions here.

Orwell's Shadow (2) ~ How "Torture" Disappeared From (or, Was Banished By) American Journalism

"Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute (sic) experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language." ~ Robert Fisk

In my last post (here) I recommended the essay by Robert Fisk on journalism and the language of power from which I've lifted this passage. The "we" and "our" he refers to are journalists. His complaint is that the press (print and broadcast) have embraced the language of the powerful. Sometimes this is because of the putative need to retain "access"; sometimes it reflects the convention of being "fair" or "neutral" or "objective." Either way, capitulating to the powerful and their claims leads, as Fisk indicates, to decidedly partial and political reporting.

As if on cue, yesterday Glenn Greenwald posted on a newly released report on the U.S. media entitled "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The study finds that the four largest circulation national print news outlets - The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today - capitulated more or less completely to the campaign by the Bush Administration to redefine interrogation techniques commonly recognized to be torture as something other than torture. They did so in a sharp break from their own historical practice, reaching back nearly a century, and from their own descriptions of practices in other countries. ("They" torture, "we" don't; we simply rely on "enhanced interrogation techniques.") These outlets, thereby, did not maintain "neutrality" or "objectivity" or "fairness" but actively connived in legitimating the torture policy that the Bush administration implemented.

This is a damning report. We are not talking about the clowns at FOX "News" here. We are talking about the purportedly "liberal" media. Fortunately, as Fisk notes, people are not stupid. They know torture when they see it and can call it by its name.
__________
P.S.: While I don't want top ring my own bell on this one (too loudly), this is a pattern that I have posted about repeatedly - see here and here and here, for instance.

P.S.(2): You might want to see Andrew Sullivan's post on this, and the reply issued by the lackeys at The New York Times. Why read Pravda, when you can read the American mainstream media.

P.S.(3): Update 7/6/2010 ~ See this follow-up by Glenn Greenwald on the vapid response of editorial higher-ups at The Times.

Orwell's Shadow: Fighting talk: The new propaganda ~ Robert Fisk

Fighting Talk: The New Propaganda
Robert Fisk

The Independent
21 June 2010

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. ... more ...

A reader, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, emailed the other day, calling my attention to this essay - both acute and astute - by Robert Fisk in The Independent. I thought I'd pass along his recommendation. Fisk argues, I think persuasively, that the news media - journalists, editors, publishers and producers, networks - are hostage to language and concepts that are peddled for political purposes and that they, the media, are relatively oblivious to the history and purposes of that language and those concepts. If we need always ask 'who is using this photograph and for what purpose,' the same is true too of words. Thanks Stanley!

Neologisms, Improvisation, and the Inauguration

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. re-administering the oath
of office to Barack Obama on Wednesday in the White House.
Photograpph ~ Pete Souza/The White House.

I have to admit that I find this story incredibly irritating. Did any one seriously doubt that Obama is President? Did anyone seriously doubt that he'd taken the oath of office? Does he have nothing better to do? Just who was raising worries about whether the inadvertent reversal of words in the initial ceremony cast doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome? When will we stop taking wingnuts seriously?

On the other hand, this raises an interesting set of issues about the ways ritual and language work, not just in politics, but generally. Things happen, inadvertently as in this instance, or by design, and we - participants in a ritual or conversation - depart from 'normal' practice. In language we call such departures neologisms. They are expressions that are not quite right but which relevant parties are able to understand well enough. And we talk about how they can be exploited - much poetry and a lot of politics involves intentional exploitation. But lots of everyday usage allows speakers to exploit neologisms to say something innovative or new, to make themselves clear or to simply go on - even though what was said was not 'normal' everyone understands well enough what the others mean. On the Mall Tuesday, and in all the rooms around the country where people watched the inauguration on TV, everyone - despite the inadvertent improvisation - knew well enough (by which I mean exactly) what Roberts and Obama meant.

"Believe Me, It's Torture"

"You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me." ~ Christopher Hitchens

I have posted here repeatedly (e.g., [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]) on the shameful reluctance of public, politicians and press in the U.S. to talk about torture as our official policy. Christopher Hitchens, stubbornly supportive of the BushCo fiasco in Iraq, was called out by critics for trying to split verbal hairs in a discussion about 'harsh interrogation techniques' like waterboarding. To his credit (I suppose), Hitchens went ahead and sampled the technique ~ of course, with the sort of prearranged 'safe signal' not available to prisoners that would immediately end his experiment. His conclusion is clear in the title to his report on the experience. Why do we need this sort of experiment to prove the obvious?

This Speech Makes me Sick

“The fact is, the challenges we face today — from saving our
planet to ending poverty — are simply too big for government
to solve alone,” ~ Barack Obama

From that banal premise Obama goes downhill and blathers on about relying on "faith-based initiatives" and establishing partnerships with "faith based groups." He is - following Clinton, Bush, Gore and other politicians - debasing our political language. He is talking about churches and religions and he should say so. The problem is that churches are largely conservative, if not reactionary, organizations. And it is impossible to implement a program of political-economic reform by relying on churches. Obama continues:

"Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea – so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work."

So, what about the Catholic Hospital in Rochester that will not dispense birth control. How does that contribute to ending poverty? It doesn't. And having babies too soon is a quick path toward economic hardship for mothers and children. How does it help fight AIDS? It doesn't. Condoms are birth control. And Catholic hospitals and service agencies will not dispense condoms for just that reason. This is not proselytizing or discriminating. It is simply religious dogma standing in the way of sane policy.

How about the "faith communities" in Rochester whom charitable organizations fall over themselves so as to avoid offending. What does that mean? It means that United Way cannot or will not fund Planned Parenthood because the latter performs abortions or dispenses birth control.

How about the Catholic Schools that won't even offer sex education to the pathetic levels of the public schools in town because, well, because the church thinks you should just say "no." I suspect the other "Christian" schools in the area are no better. (Let's leave to one side the fact that "faith based" institutions - schools and hospitals - pay poorly and insist that employees toe the religious line.) In all these ways, relying on partnerships with major "faith based groups" is plain stupid.

Charity will not end poverty. And all churches do is hand out charity. Poverty will be ended, if it ever is, by reforming large scale political-economic arrangements. And most "faith based groups" will stand smack dab in the way of such reforms. And speaking of programs that "work," churches have been around for millennia claiming to care for the poor and to alleviate poverty. Have they been successful? You could have fooled me!

Hey Barack, let's think back to the mid-20th century in the U.S.; Which did more to alleviate poverty - Church based charity or the Social Security system? Private philanthropy or the WPA? I know where I'll place my money. And it is not in the alms basket.

End of rant.

Men who explain things

"[. . .] the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me."

Today Rebecca Solnit ~ who regular readers will know is among my heroes ~ published this column in The Los Angeles Times. This time Solnit nicely connects too common, self-assured, ignorant, dismissive and, well, erroneous pronouncements over dinner table or cocktail party chatter with pervasive willingness to dismiss women and their claims and statements in broader contexts of culture and politics. The "longer version" of the essay that appears at TomDispatch.com under the terrific title "The Archipelago of Arrogance." As always, Solnit is right on the money.

Serial Offender

"On Friday, March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee resigned from his Office as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, to become a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The very next day -- a Saturday, mind you -- John Yoo, merely a Deputy AAG in the Office, issued his notorious memo to the Pentagon, on behalf of OLC, which effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees. This is the version of the 2002 Torture memo, which was addressed only to the CIA and the torture statute, as applied to the numerous statutes restricting the conduct of the armed forces. None of those statues, you see, limits the conduct of war if the President says so. It is, in effect, the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib and the other abuses within the armed forces in 2003 and early 2004." ~ Marty Lederman [here & here & here]

Meet John Yoo, serial offender, guilty of peddling flawed, politically motivated "legal" analysis aimed at justifying the BushCo policy of using torture. Yesterday the Pentagon released a recently de-classified memo in which Yoo had justified use of torture by military interrogators (his previously known handiwork applied only to the CIA). Even the Bush Justice Department eventually realized what a travesty Yoo was perpetrating and retracted his memos.

You can read the story in The New York Times here. Note that The Times still trades in euphemisms - speaking of 'harsh interrogations' instead of torture. Note too that The Times neglects to draw the connection between Yoo's legal fictions and the practices at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and elsewhere. I think the title to one of Lederman's posts is right on target - "Full Employment Memo for Bloggers (and Prosecutors?)" If there is any justice in the world, the answer to the final question is "Yes," and while Yoo will be in line, he will not be alone.
__________
Photograph © Elsa Arnet/New York Times

"Euphemism & American Violence"

I have written here repeatedly about the need to call things by their proper names; for example we need to call our hirelings at Blackwater and such firms mercenaries [1], we need to call "harsh interrogation techniques" torture [2], and so forth. And I have been especially concerned that we try to keep an eye on the consequences of hiring mercenaries and engaging in torture and so forth - such practices are ineffectual in achieving their stated aims and extremely good at generating long-term, largely foreseeable negative consequences.

This week the NYRB includes a very insightful article by David Bromwich on the ways our language has been debased by those prosecuting our current military and foreign policy fiasco. Here are some of the especially good bits:

"Before launching their response to Islamic jihadists in September 2001, members of the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney gave close consideration to the naming of that response. [. . .] The name must admit the tremendousness of the task and imply its eventual solubility, but also discourage any close inquiry into the means employed. They wanted to call it a war; but what sort of war? The phrase they agreed on, the global war on terrorism, was at once simple-sounding and elusive, and it has served its purpose as nothing more definite could have done.

The "global war on terrorism" promotes a mood of comprehension in the absence of perceived particulars, and that is a mood in which euphemisms may comfortably take shelter. There is (many commentators have pointed out) something nonsensical in the idea of waging war on a technique or method, and terrorism was a method employed by many groups over many centuries before al-Qaeda—the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, the Irgun, to stick to recent times. But the "war on crime" and "war on drugs" probably helped to render the initial absurdity of the name to some degree normal. This was an incidental weakness, in any case. The assurance and the unspecifying grandiosity of the global war on terrorism were the traits most desired in such a slogan."

~~~~~~~~~~

"A far more consequential euphemism, in the conduct of the Iraq war— and a usage adopted without demur until recently, by journalists, lawmakers, and army officers—speaks of mercenary soldiers as contractors or security (the last now a singular-plural like the basketball teams called Magic and Jazz). The Blackwater killings in Baghdad's Nissour Square on September 16, 2007, brought this euphemism, and the extraordinary innovation it hides, suddenly to public view. Yet the armed Blackwater guards who did the shooting, though now less often described as mere "contractors," are referred to as employees—a neutral designation that repels further attention. The point about mercenaries is that you employ them when your army is inadequate to the job assigned. This has been the case from the start in Iraq. But the fact that the mercenaries have been continuously augmented until they now outnumber American troops suggests a truth about the war that falls open to inspection only when we use the accurate word. It was always known to the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Defense that the conventional forces they deployed were smaller than would be required to maintain order in Iraq. That is why they hired the extracurricular forces."

~~~~~~~~~~

"This argument was always about two things: the truth of words and the reality of violence. The statements to House and Senate committees, in late January and early February 2008, by Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell oddly converged on the following set of propositions. A method of interrogation known as "waterboarding" would feel like torture if it was done to them (Mukasey and McConnell offered different but parallel versions of the same personal formula, pretty clearly in coordination). The method had been used by American interrogators after September 11, 2001, they said, but it was not in use at present. Whether it constituted torture was a matter under investigation—an investigation so serious that no result should be expected soon— but authorization of the practice was within the powers of the President, and he reserved the right to command interrogators to waterboard suspects again if he thought it useful. The attorney general added his assurance that, in the event that the practice was resumed, he would notify appropriate members of Congress, even though Congress had no legal authority to restrain the President.

It would be hard to find a precedent for the sophistical juggle of these explanations. The secret in plain view was not a judgment about present or future policy, but an imposed acceptance of something past. President Bush, in 2002 and later, sought and obtained legal justifications for ordering the torture of terrorism suspects, and it is known that American interrogators used methods on some suspects that constitute torture under international law. If these acts had been admitted by the attorney general to meet the definition of torture, those who conducted the interrogations and those who ordered them, including the President, would be liable to prosecution for war crimes. Because the legacy of the Nuremberg Trials remains vivid today, the very idea of a war crime has been treated as a thing worth steering clear of, no matter what the cost in overstretched ingenuity. Thought of a war crime does not lend itself to euphemistic reduction."

~~~~~~~~~~

"Indeed, the single greatest propaganda victory of the Bush administration may be the belief shared by most Americans that the rise of radical Islam—so-called Islamofascism— has nothing to do with any previous actions by the United States."

Not Speaking of Torture ~ A Warning from Toni Morrison on the Importance of "Unmolested Language"

Portrait of Toni Morrison © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

I have taken this passage from "The Bird is in Your Hands," the parable Toni Morrison offered when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature a decade and a half ago. This passage , indeed her lecture as a whole, come to mind whenever I encounter on npr, or in The New York Times or The Guardian, or in even less reliable outlets, euphemisms such as "enhanced interrogation techniques" or "harsh interrogation." The proper phrase, the truthful one, the one that accurately conveys what purveyors of euphemisms work so diligently to keep obscure - thereby abetting the outrageous criminal policies of our government - is torture.

If ever you wonder about the value of writers and artists, imagine the consequences of not having them around. Imagine where we might be without those who, like Morrison, warn us of the dangers of allowing our language to drink blood. Toni Morrison was born this day in 1931. That makes her 77 years old. Happy Birthday! And thanks for the warning.