[First published:
January 2004]
Let's talk, eh? A contemporary response to
Orwell's 1984
In 1984, Winston and Julia
read from the secret book supposedly circulated by the rebels of
Oceania. The book is a lampoon of Marxist rhetoric; it is the equal
opposite of the Party's lies. Poorly written. Poorly argued. As much a
killer of thought as the Thought Police. In
"Politics and the English Language," Orwell sought to provide
a remedy -- better language, better politics, better world.
by Michael Bryson
It has been twenty years since I first
read 1984, and while much has changed with the world and me, the
book is still powerful. The first time I read it, I was fifteen
years old. The year was 1983. There was much talk in the popular press
about whether Orwell’s "vision" had come true. I wanted to
read the book before its calendar year arrived. I did, and it burned images into my brain.
How indelible those images were I’ve
only just discovered. Reading 1984 again, I experienced many
flashbacks. Most prominently remembered was an image of myself, Orwell’s
novel clutched between my fingers, my adolescent body laid out on a bed
in my grandmother’s house. She had died earlier in the year. It was
Christmas season; time was running out; I had to read this book, perhaps
my first "adult" book ever.
Other flashbacks came from the book
itself: the girl from the Fiction Department, O’Brien, the Golden
Country, telescreens, the diary with the speck of dust, rats, and, of
course, Room 101. Some of these provoked true flashbacks, others are
images that have never left me or have been absorbed by the culture at
large. Room 101, for example, plays a role in Martin Amis’s novel, Money.
However, the book also startled me.
First, I hadn’t expected to find a subtext about language. In the
world of 1984, the official language of the Party is Newspeak. I’d
forgotten this, though I remembered some of its ramifications; such as
the slogan WAR IS PEACE, which is classic "doublespeak,"
itself a Newspeak word.
The second fact that startled me stems
from the first; the tool of power in 1984 is language. The Party
is all powerful, and it uses all of the institutions of the state to
maintain its power, including violence on a global scale (war) and
violence on the personal scale (torture). But its primary means of
maintaining power is language, and Winston Smith, the novel’s
protagonist, is intimately involved in both constructing and
deconstructing the "how" of the Party’s dominance.
When I was fifteen, Orwell’s focus on
language in 1984 couldn’t have been more than a curiosity to
me; however, in the twenty years since I read the novel, my personal and
professional interests have circled around and around this subject so
many times that it is at the centre of my thoughts on many subjects. To
speak more plainly, I left high school, picked up two English degrees,
and now work as a communications professional for the Ontario
government.
In my post-secondary education I read
Orwell’s famous essay "Politics and the English
Language,"
which begins:
Most people who bother with the
matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way,
but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do
anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our
language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language
is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light
or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the
half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an
instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
This essay makes it clear that Orwell
assumes language is "an instrument we
shape for our own purposes." His rhetoric is optimistic. We
shape language, he argues, therefore, the hope for the English language
(and politics, and, by extension, the fate of humanity) lies in people
making good choices. What’s interesting here, I think, is that 1984
implies the opposite; 1984 is bleakly pessimistic. The citizens
of Oceania do not shape language; they are shaped by language.
Orwell published "Politics and the
English Language" a half-decade before 1984, which was first
published in 1949. Which raises the question: Did Orwell change his
mind? Did his optimism wither? I think not. I think he was arguing the
same position from opposite sides; that is, he choose separate, opposed
rhetorical strategies to argue the same point. What’s his point?
Language is the tool of power – and to avoid creeping totalitarianism
one must demand clarity and plain speaking.
By the late-1940s, Orwell had been
through innumerable ideological battles – and he knew only too well
the intellectual and physical costs of war and other forms of
power-mongering. One is tempted to say that his idealism had been
shattered; he had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War and was nearly
murdered by fighting between factions on his own side. During World War
II, he joined the battle against the Axis powers by taking a post at the
BBC, where he worked as a type of propagandist for the Empire his
earlier writings (such as his personal essay "Shooting an
Elephant") had worked so hard to undermine.
In his book on Orwell, The Crystal
Spirit,
Canadian essayist George Woodcock documents Orwell’s conflicted
influences, particularly how the Toryism of his private school days that
never left him, even during his days down and out in London and Paris.
(During WWII, Woodcock was in England, an anarchist and pacifist, and
the object of scorn in some of Orwell’s wartime journalism; though
when they met, Woodcock was surprised to find Orwell so pleasant,
non-adversarial, even charming.) Quintessentially British, Orwell was
ever the polite gentleman, though he was vigorous in his thoughts and
could be cold-blooded in his words.
And so, I do not believe he was ever as
optimistic as "Politics and the English Language" suggests,
nor as pessimistic as the tone of 1984 might lead one to believe.
And here I would like to add a point from Thomas Pynchon’s recent
introduction to a new edition of the novel. Pynchon pointed out that 1984
includes an appendix – The Principles of Newspeak – which is written
in the past tense: "Newspeak was the official language of
Oceania." The use of the past tense implies that either Newspeak is
no longer the official language of Oceania – or perhaps the nightmare
of Oceania has ended; the proles have revolted and won.
*
Since I started writing this essay some
months ago, I've been reading newspapers with an eye for examples of
reportage that link the world today to the world of 1984. There
are many, too many to cite in volume. I want to draw attention to only a
few, some that draw attention to the "language is power"
thesis outlined above.
On September 11, 2001, we began (or
were drawn into) a War on Terrorism. I say "we" to mean not
just Canadians, or Americans, or "the West," but all who wish
to continue the post-Enlightenment project: building a world based on
individual liberty, justice and rationality. This is, of
course, not how President Bush frames the question of the war, but it is
how I frame it. I also want to know that I have used the phrase War on
Terrorism without quotation marks - and have not called it the so-called
War on Terrorism. An international battle has been engaged and our best
interests are served by winning it.
However - I know you were waiting for
the however - the War on Terrorism is not a real war (yes, I know:
people have died, are dying, will die). The War on Terrorism is a
metaphor, like the War on Drugs (which has also killed people), or the
War on Poverty (which kills people, too). A real war is between states
or between groups of states. The War on Terrorism is a metaphor for a
global police action; it is necessary, tricky, and - like the War on
Drugs or the War on Poverty - it is likely to go on for a long time.
However - yes, another one - here we
enter the territory of 1984. I am not the first to say this, but
it bears repeating; the War on Terrorism as it has been framed by
President Bush draws a striking parallel to the perpetual war the people
of Oceania find themselves in. Hobbes, The New York Times
reported recently, is Vice-President Cheney's favorite philosopher (on
the campaign trail George Bush said his was Jesus Christ). Hobbes - who
is not a comic strip pet tiger - believed that society was in a state of
perpetual war. As the Merriam-Webster online dictionary states
it: "the Hobbesian theory
[was] that people have a fundamental right to self-preservation and to pursue selfish aims but will relinquish these rights to an absolute monarch in the interest of common safety and happiness."
If you're not with us, you're against us; the enemy is out there clamoring
to get you. Join us, and we will protect you; abandon us and we
guarantee nothing.
This is the world of the current
American administration; this is the world of Oceania, one Orwell
opposed, one Orwell analyzed in order to articulate how language helps
the powerful gain and maintain status and control. But let me state
again that I do not believe Orwell was pessimistic. In fact, in
re-reading 1984 I was surprised to find some lyrical passages
that owe a lot to Keats and nothing to Kafka. The Golden Country:
Orwell's Jerusalem (to borrow an image both from Blake and the Bible).
The place where Winston and Julia hide from the Party, make love, talk
freely, listen to birds sing, dream of a world where they don't have to
watch every word, censor every thought. Preston Manning was fond of
calling the Reform Party's politics "the common sense of the common
people." That phrase contains the danger of nativism, but it is
also the root of Orwell's optimism. As Woodcock argues in The Crystal
Spirit - Orwell's Toryism never left him; he never shook the belief
that individuals, if they trust themselves, contain a common sense that
cannot be obliterated. No matter what Big Brother says. No matter how
much professional jargon or other abstractions infect the English
language. Individuals can choose; individuals can make a difference -
perhaps only individuals can make a difference; everyone making good
choices, maintaining appropriate decorum.
What I want to reinforce here is this .
. . If there is hope, Winston Smith says more than once, it must lie in
the proles. Why? They never lost their humanity, and humanity is
naturally good (the kids are all right). The Party cannot defeat the
proles; it can only manipulate them (and in 1984, the Party is
very nearly perfect at doing that, though Pynchon's argument is
intriguing; perhaps the revolution has come and gone).
The point here, of course, is that
Hobbes was wrong. That is one of the pillars of Orwell's legacy. He
followed another 17th century philosopher: John Locke. Locke's views are
often contrasted with the views of Hobbes. I quote from the biographies
website:
In uncivilized times, in times before
government, Hobbes asserted there existed continual war with
"every man, against every man." A time of "no arts; no
letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and
danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short." On this point Locke and Hobbes were not
in agreement (emphasis added). Locke, consistent with his
philosophy, viewed man as naturally moral. The reason man would
willingly contract into civil society is not to shake his brutish
state, but rather that he may advance his ends (peace and security) in
a more efficient manner. To achieve his ends man gives up, in favour
of the state, a certain amount of his personal power and freedom.
Locke maintained that the original
state of nature was happy and characterized by reason and tolerance.
He further maintained that all human beings, in their natural state,
were equal and free to pursue life, health, liberty, and possessions;
and that these were inalienable rights. Pre-social man as a moral
being, and as an individual, contracted out "into civil society
by surrendering personal power to the ruler and magistrates," and
did so as "a method of securing natural morality more
efficiently." To Locke, natural justice exists and this is so
whether the state exists, or not, it is just that the state might
better guard natural justice.
* From
The New York Times (September 11, 2003):
Israelis' ability to adapt, and defy,
these bombings demonstrates the amazing strength of this society. When
bus bombings first started, for a week after an explosion few people
would ride the buses. Now they're right back on them after an hour.
The radios used to stop playing upbeat music after a bombing; now they
don't hesitate. I have an Israeli friend who constantly worries about
suicide bombers. But when I asked her to ask her teenage daughter,
Tali Weiss, whether she felt angry about them, her daughter snapped
back at her mom, "I'm angry that you don't let me go out"
after a bombing.
Continuous war. Fear. Control. If there
is hope, it lies in the proles: "let me go dancing." The
quotation is from an article by Thomas L. Friedman, which concludes:
Suicide bombing is becoming so
routine here [in Israel] that it risks becoming embedded in
contemporary culture. America must stop it. A credible peace deal here
is no longer a U.S. luxury - it is essential to our own homeland
security. Otherwise, this suicide madness will spread, and it will be
Americans who will have to learn to live with it.
The danger - Orwell tells us - isn't
that suicide bombings will spread (the continuous war will continue);
the danger lies in the way the war maintains the status and control of
the Party. The physical violence is a manifestation and expansion of the
violence against language. In "Politics and the English
Language" Orwell writes: "Now, it is clear that the decline of
language must ultimately have political and economic causes . . . and to
think clearly is a necessary first step toward political
regeneration." What is
"political regeneration"? One might more easily say what it is
not. For this point, I thank Doug Saunders and his December 13, 2003
column in The Globe and Mail. In his column, Saunders recounts
two recent encounters with people who told him they have decided to
"tune out" mainstream media: one because he believes
mainstream media are too right-wing, the other because she believes
mainstream media are too "liberal." Saunders concludes:
About seven years ago, a U.S.
professor names Joseph Turow warned that we are breaking up into
"image tribes," which see only the information that
advertisers present to their pre-selected group. He was almost right:
Instead of having this tribalization done to us, though, we are
increasingly deciding to do it to ourselves.
What is "political
regeneration"? Orwell would say it has something to do with small-s
socialism. Martin Luther King would say it has to do with civil rights.
Pierre Trudeau would say it would provide everyone with equal
opportunity. Gloria Steinem would say it would have to include the full
integration of women into all roles in society. I'm not going to attempt
a definition, except to say that Orwell obviously meant to generate
momentum for progressive causes, to give voice to the have-nots, to
fight against arbitrary power and inherited influence. And let's also
say that he was against stupidity on both the left and the right. Let's
be clear that no political platform is bereft of idiocy. "The
common sense of the common people": it's all we can depend on - and
it's ever shifting. My cousin
tells me her nine-year-old daughter rolls her eyes every time 9/11 is
mentioned on the news. When the Twin Towers fell, she was only seven.
She is already tired of all the 9/11 talk she hears. She reminds me of
the catch phrase from an ancient television commercial: "Where's
the beef?" Orwell would like that question; it's simple, direct, to
the point. "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" is the
question that may yet bring down the government of the United Kingdom's
Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Both the style and substance of George
Bush's administration is shaping up to be the "ballot
question" for 2004's presidential election. American democracy is
"self-correcting" wrote the American diplomat who quit is high
profile post in the months leading up to Iraq War II. A lot depends on
whether or not that statement is true. A lot depends on whether one
believes American democracy needs correcting. (A lot depends on a red
wheelbarrow, said William Carlos Williams - who knew what he was talking
about.) Political
regeneration is impossible if the trend outlined in Saunders column
expands. In a recent essay on book reviewing,
I wrote:
You'll never learn anything unless
you are open to the other; at the same time, you have a right to stake
out your ground and defend it. Some might say it's more than a right;
it's duty. Book reviewing confirms the paradox of relationship: How to
be open to the other and secure in the self at the same time? It's no
contradiction. It's the essence of the job.
What's good for book reviewing, is good
for democracy. What's good for democracy, is good for all of us. Being
"open to the other" is not rocket science; it is the necessary
component that turns debate to dialogue. It can make information
knowledge, can even make it wisdom. In
another article from the September 11, 2003 New York Times,
Robert Wright wrote:
Putting yourself in the shoes of
people who do things you find abhorrent may be the hardest moral
exercise there is. But it would be easier to excuse American who
refuse to try if they didn't spend so much time indicting Islamic
radicals for the same refusal. Somebody has to go first, and if nobody
does we're all in trouble.
Wright is author of Nonzero: The
Logic of Human Destiny. * George
W. Bush is the greatest threat to world peace. So said Margaret Atwood,
Canada's honourary camp counselor, according to Shelagh Rogers when she
hosted CBC Radio's "Morningside." Orwell might have agreed
with this, too, but I doubt it. In fact, if
British journalist and political commentator Christopher Hitchens is
right, Orwell may well have enlisted at Camp Dubya. (He worked for the
BBC during WWII, remember; Orwell was no friend of the British Empire,
but the Axis powers needed to be defeated.) I find Hitchens
argument hard to believe, however. He clearly hopes the military action
in Iraq, for example, will create Arab democracies, but he displays
little of his usual fierce skepticism for the motivations of Empire.
(Bush is the anti-democratic president; won office on
fewer votes than his opponent, locks up suspects without trial or access
to lawyers, invades countries by declaring "pre-emptive" war,
uses his State of the Union address to spread lies about Iraqi uranium .
. . and then there's his domestic policy agenda . . . . See, for
example, Bob Herbert's description of the Bush administration's
amendments to medicare [New York Times, Dec. 8/03]:
The drug benefit will be delivered
almost entirely through private insurance plans. It would have been
more efficient and cheaper to deliver it the same way other Medicare
benefits are delivered. But that's not the idea. The Bush
administration has mastered the art of legalized banditry, in which
tons of government money — the people's money — are hijacked and
handed over to the special interests.
The Newspeak spin on the Bush
administration's changes to medicare are, of course, that the
administration is selling the biggest changes to medicare since 1965
as "giving seniors peace of mind".)
The
challenge 1984 presents us with is the same challenge Orwell
confronted in 1939: How to do what's right without doing what's wrong?
In 1939 (and earlier), Orwell struggled with how to pursue progressive
politics in a highly polarized climate that presented no ideal options.
Fight the evil that must be fought, he concluded. Fight one battle at a
time. WWII won, he turned to saving the English language - and promoting
"political regeneration." Today, we face a similar crisis: How
to defeat the terrorists without turning our democracy into a lie?
without turning our democracies into Oceania? This
is no idle question. In the
months after 9/11 (cue rolling of eyes), the U.S. released a foreign
affairs policy paper that called for U.S. global dominance. Canada's
Prime Minister Paul Martin reiterated the week before he was sworn in on
December 12, 2003 that American authorities must honour Canadian
passports (contra to the experience of the Syrian-born Canadian whom
U.S. authorities shipped from New York to a Syrian torture chamber). The
U.S. ambassador to Canada responded by saying the U.S. would do whatever
it felt necessary to protect itself. Yes, but. Dear America: Do not kill
those things that make you great. The rule of law is the rule of law; it
cannot be reconstructed arbitrarily. Just ask Bill Clinton. It doesn't
matter what the definition of "is" is. One of the pillars of
your revolution was the fight against arbitrary power; do not accede to
it now. In 1984, Winston
Smith works for the Ministry of Truth. His job consists of re-writing
old news stories to ensure that the past matches the present. People who
have fallen out of favour are removed from official photographs.
Industrial quotas are revised. Old enemies are now allies - and have
always been allies. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan
Kundera writes about how this exact thing happened in Soviet-run Czechoslovakia.
My opinion is that Orwell was projecting his own thoughts and feelings
about the contemporary media of his day into his depiction of Winston's
job.
Closer to home, it has become common
practice for new government's coast to coast to revise the financial
statements of previous administrations. Clearly, the past is not
stable. The New York Times famously publishes "all the news
that's fit to print," but one does not need to be a Noam Chomsky acolyte
to see that the media -- and government's -- construct and defend their version of reality (Chomsky
calls this "manufacturing consent") in every detail of their
presentation.
[Seminar question: Is The
Danforth Review any different?]
Let's look at how we now view Syria, for example. Syria
was once described as a terrorist-sponsoring state. Now, U.S.
authorities are nonplussed about shipping a Canadian citizen to a Syrian
jail. Is Syrian now a democracy? No. What has changed? Bob Dylan asked
similar questions 40 years ago in his song "With
God On Our Side":
When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.
And then there is this quotation from Time:
The President claims not to follow the polls or even read the newspapers. On issues from tax cuts to Iraq, he refuses to flinch when the numbers
and sometimes the facts are against him. When he changes course creating a Department of Homeland Security after he dismissed the idea or speeding up his timetable for giving Iraq its sovereignty he is loath to concede there has been any correction at all.
Another columnist noted that Bush was
surprised to learn from moderate Muslim leaders during his recent trip
to Indonesia that the standing of the U.S.A. amongst Muslims
internationally had gone down since 9/11. The columnist noted that the
President doesn't read the newspapers - and has said he has only one
source of objective information: his staff. As the columnist noted:
"Two words: emperor, clothes." There
is not - never has been and never will be - an objective source of information. That's
why democracies encourage dialogue, debate, vigorous cross-fertilization
of views. The founders of our modern democracies created public
institutions in order to facilitate the integration of opinions - in
order to build strong public policy. The leader of the world's
self-proclaimed beacon of democratic light seems to have forgotten this. "I
am a unifier, not a divider," Bush said during campaign 2000. Yeah,
right. * George
W. Bush is the greatest threat to world peace, said Margaret Atwood. In
"Politics and the English Language," Orwell argued:
"People who write in this manner have a general emotional meaning
-- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another --
but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying."
Orwell is referring to sentences such as: "The Fascist octopus has
sung its swan song." Like W.H. Auden, who also came to the
conclusion that genuine communication cannot happen unless cooler heads
prevail, Orwell wanted writers to be "scrupulous" (attentive
to detail), something
Atwood's criticism lacks (it does not engage the world as a complex
phenomena; it presents a simplicity where a complexity is needed). Note that Orwell's argument is pointed at the
critics of the regime. In 1984,
Winston and Julia read from the secret book supposedly circulated by the
rebels of Oceania. The book is a lampoon of Marxist rhetoric; it is the
equal opposite of the Party's lies. Poorly written. Poorly argued. As
much a killer of thought as the Thought Police. In
"Politics and the English Language," Orwell sought to provide
a remedy -- better language, better politics, better world. Hitchens
recently released a book called Why Orwell Matters. Orwell
matters because he consistently argued both sides against the other. He
was a dreamer, but not a utopian. He was an empiricist, a lover and
tester of facts. He pressed above all for clarity, knowing it was a
precious commodity, knowing that it in itself struck fear into the heart
of the powerful, whatever their political leanings. In
"Politics and the English Language," Orwell wrote:
A scrupulous writer, in every
sentence he writes, will ask himself four questions, thus:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it
clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have
an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two
more:
- Could I have put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is
unavoidably ugly?
Atwood, and
others, enflame an argument that needs to be cooled. Yes, George W. Bush
has created the deepest bruise on the U.S.A.'s body politic since
Richard Nixon. On January 12, 2004, Paul O'Neill, Bush's initial
Treasury Secretary, was in the news saying Bush wanted to get rid of
Saddam Hussein right from the first moments of his administration; seven
months before 9/11 the administration was talking about "how to get
it done." (And, of course, the dangerous stockpiles of weapons of
mass destruction have yet to be found.)
(George Bush: "The problem with
the French is, they have no word for entrepreneur." I saw a
comedian on TV repeat this. His routine: "I got beat up in a
redneck bar for making fun of George Bush. I quoted him.")
Even as the U.S. administration scores some policy
successes, such as Libya's moves to accept nuclear inspectors and other
moves that inch that state away from pariah status, unilateralism
remains an unsustainable policy -- specifically a unilateralism too
often shrouded in secrecy and driven forward by lies. There are
significant threats in the world, yes, but they are threats that require carrots as well as sticks. The solution,
I suggest Orwell would argue, lies in stepping beyond tit-for-tat politics.
Let's give former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien the last word in this section. From The
Globe and Mail (December 9, 2003): “In this era of globalization, the strength and influence of a nation are no longer determined by the number of cannons or missiles in its possession,” Mr. Chrétien
said, echoing words Queen Elizabeth II during President Bush's recent visit to Buckingham Palace (she praised international
cooperation and multilateral institutions). Chrétien again: “They are measured by the civility and tolerance the nation demonstrates toward its international partners and its openness to dialogue with them.” Perfect
and plain spoken. Orwell
couldn't have said it better. * 2004
is an election year in the U.S.A. Hmmm, democracy in action. By all
accounts, the election will be the nastiest yet. Both the Republicans
the Democrats are building their campaigns around their core
constituencies, and there is little common ground between them. Bill
Clinton was famously a successful president because he
"triangulated" well. He could play both sides of an issue and
appealed to "swing voters" who would vote either Republican or
Democrat depending on the issue. Traditionally, the electorate is
considered to be 40 per cent Republican, 40 per cent Democrat, and 20
per cent undecided. However, in 2004, there are few undecided, and both
parties are gearing up for a brutal winner-take-all battle. This
essay suggests that polarized political debate is not the best way to
achieve strong public policy. Yes, stake out strong positions, but be
truly open to compromise, negotiation, collaborative problem-solving.
Perhaps it's just the Canadian Way? Perhaps the American electorate will
just be re-fighting Hobbes vs. Locke? Perhaps everyone should sit down
and re-read 1984 before they go vote? Free your mind instead,
John Lennon sang. If there's any
hope, any hope at all, it lies in the proles, if there's any hope at
all. * Finally,
I want to recognize the failures of this essay. Probably I'm too hard on
Atwood. Where's the context? What was she really saying? What about 1984
as a novel, not as a set-piece for criticizing the Bush regime?
What about the benefit to the world of getting rid of the Taliban and
Saddam? Let the questions multiply, let the criticisms pile up. I think
I have provided plenty of evidence, plenty of argument; I want to
present it with the understanding that it is not perfect. It is an
invitation to dialogue. It is a plea for collaboration based on common
interests. It is a plea to end "if you're not with us, you're
against us." It is a request for a new decorum. A plea for a new
decorum. A plea, yes, for peace in our time.
November 2004
Update: So George W. Bush has
been re-elected. Does that change anything I wrote a year ago? No, it
doesn't. First, the
election unfolded as I predicted. It was a brutal, polarizing,
winner-take-all affair. Second,
in his concession speech John Kerry called on all Americans to be
united. In his post-election news conference, the President said he was
"happy to work with anyone who shares my agenda"
[emphasis added]. (Bette Midler: "But enough about me, what do you
think about me?") Ain't this "my agenda" stuff just
"you're with me or you're against me," in different
words? (Bush also talked
about his "mandate" and his "political capital" ...
and, fair enough, he did win ... but he has never acknowledged the
validity of the opinions aligned against him ... nor chosen -- a la
Clinton or Chretien -- to steal the best ideas of his opponents, thus
absorbing their criticisms into his agenda and blunting attacks against
him. His approach -- "I'm the President of the United States; I
don't need to explain myself," as he told Bob Woodward -- is to
dominate, not co-opt. Strategies of domination can only lead to more
conflicts, not fewer.) Third, the New
York Times ran an article two weekends before the election that
quoted a former communications person in the White House. The former
White House staffer accused the Times' writer of being "one
of those reality-based people," and accused him of not
understanding the new state of the world: the USA sets the reality,
everyone else adjusts to it. Yes, this is the new reality: the Bush
Doctrine: the USA is the world's only super power -- and it has enacted
public policies to ensure that it maintains that position. What
the former White House staffer apparently doesn't understand, is that
the rest of the world well understands the White House's position: They
just don't like it. Some have chosen to violently fight against it.
Others, some seeing a precursor in Orwell, find the White House's
position morally repugnant. John Kerry just ran a campaign that
emphasized how poor the Bush Doctrine actually works in practice (that
inevitable base of reality that the White House apparently prefers to
avoid) -- and 49 per cent of the American electorate agreed with him. Orwell
was a reality-based person. 1984 was his version of what can
happen when language and reality become separated. Another
quotation in that NY Times article was from the President:
"Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify
things." The quotation was from a cabinet meeting where the
President outlined his approach to the Israel / Palestine conflict:
Hands off. Let Israel show the Palestinians who's got the power.
Interestingly, when I was in England in April 2004, there were numerous
articles in the press comparing the US military's approach in Iraq with
the lessons learned by the UK in Northern Ireland. Basically, if you
want to win the "hearts and minds" of a hostile population,
showing your power and your willingness to use it won't work: You will
only create more enemies, not friends. A more complicated strategy of
engagement, not domination, is necessary for victory. Sometimes a show
of force by one side can make things a helluva lot worse. Finally,
to those students of post-modernism who bristle at the notion that
language mimics a thing that can be called "reality," do not
dispense of your skepticism; instead, note the irony that it is the
absolutist George W. Bush, not the relativist Bill Clinton, who is the
first post-structuralist President. Yes, literary theory long ago
dispensed with the notion that language mimics reality -- the sign, says
semiotics, has an arbitrary relationship with the object. But the body
bags are piling up in sizeable numbers for the first time since the end
of the Vietnam War, and mothers of dead soldiers don't need Foucault to
tell them "what's real and what is not." As
Bob Dylan noted, what's real and what isn't doesn't
matter inside the Gates of Eden (where all is okay, after all), nor
are there "truths outside" Paradise (the expulsion of Adam and
Eve wasn't call "the Fall" for nuthin'). It's clear, on the
other hand, that George W. Bush has mixed far too much theocratic
idealism with his politics -- he's confused where he stands and where we
all live -- he's confused this world with the next one. "You can be
certain and still wrong," John Kerry told Dubya during the debates
-- but the President doesn't do ambiguity. Another
Dylan line: If the
Bible is right, the world will explode. Ah,
don't think twice, it's all right. This here's the story of the
hurricane ....
September 2006: MSNBC
on Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld
is still trying to force everyone into his own version of reality.
Fortunately, the media are now pointing out how little of what goes on
in Rumsfeld's head is also happening outside his window. How sad, sad,
sad all of this really and truly is.
Michael Bryson is the
editor of The Danforth Review.
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