War of Words

Constant wisecracks about President Bush’s lack of eloquence belie how the President asserts power through his vocabulary. His seeming inattention to language is probably a symptom of contemporary society’s general disinterest in words. This is evident in the sloppy communications even of students at a University like ours. Yet words do influence the interlocutors who use them, in often imperceptible but significant ways. Concepts which, when explained explicitly, we would refuse, penetrate our consciousness through their repetition as popular expressions and grow to become categories of our thought. Dismayingly, even speakers with the privilege of education are deceived by these linguistic Trojan horses.

Some deployments of rhetoric are all too obvious. This year’s refusal by prominent US government officials to label the events at the Abu Ghraib prison as “torture” was terrible—yet all too predictable. The chosen alternative, “abuse,” dismisses what occurred between torturer and victim, aggressor and prey. The infamous National Security Strategy document of September 2002, which championed pre-emptive attacks, worked analogously. The text avoids mention of human rights but rather sanctions “human dignity,” which it loosely defines. This slippery concept lacks the half-century of experience and authority that has flowed into the doctrine of human rights, and indicates an escape, even on a conceptual level, from responsibilities formerly accepted by the Unites States.

Thus far, the rhetorical devices are easy to diagnose, simply canny use of language by a government disinterested in engaging problematic issues. Other strategies are rapidly becoming less obvious, and thus more troubling, as they gain widespread use. The expression “war on terror” should in theory surprise many: it describes war against an abstraction, against a feeling. It is utter nonsense. A war on terror cannot be won; it implies endless opponents and a population in a constant state of alert. Bush himself said as much in an Aug. 30 NBC interview.

After criticism from the Democrats, the president was forced to backtrack, restating his earlier opinion that the US will win the war on terror. Instead of alarming many for its implicit agenda, the phrase has forcefully asserted itself to become part of our normal way of reading the world. Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry protest that Bush will never win the war on terror with his current policies, or that Kerry would be better in the war on terror. Yet the President must have already won something, if his “war”—more reminiscent of the permanent war in Orwell’s 1984 than any non-fictional conflict—has become a universally accepted term for describing the current international situation.

Perhaps Americans were open to the “war on terror” because of their conversance with the war metaphor. Recent years have borne such concepts as the “war on drugs,” the “science wars” and the “Freud wars,” numbing us all to the strength and literal meaning of the word “war.” Referring to this problem, philosopher of science Ian Hacking wrote a few years ago, “Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable, more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.”

The “war on terror” was just another step in this development, but with a difference: Unlike other metaphors, the “war on terror” engenders real conflicts in which real American citizens die. Yet to most, it is impossible to conceive of the present without the concept.

Part of this feeling of inevitability stems from the way in which that disparate collective we call “the media” picks up on these expressions and repeats them endlessly, circumscribing our understanding of world events in narrow ways. The word “media” itself is a pervasive expression that cheats us of a better conceptualization of its object, particularly important as our source of information about the world. Originally the plural of medium, Latin simply for middle, mean, “media” in its current usage is specifically derived from the expression mass medium, to define phenomena such as radio, television and newspapers. A sentence beginning with “the media,” then, is a sloppy generalization about a motley assortment of corporations, individuals and institutions and their journalistic activity.

What is more, the word is inappropriately and significantly treated as a singular form, such as in the statement that “the media has a liberal bias.” The idea that “the media” is a single entity is borne to us through the vector of language. If we were concentrating, would we really choose to refer to the totality of mass communication as if it were guided by a single will? Perhaps current usage of “the media” (sing.) is a symptom of the trend towards nation-wide uniformity spearheaded by Michael Powell’s rampant FCC deregulation, which has stunted local programming and brought even the likes of Ted Turner to public protest.

When we give up caring about the words we utter, we forsake our conceptual accuracy as well as the capacity to successfully resist a rising tide of equivocal expressions. John Kerry is clearly a victim of this phenomenon, so far failing to develop a language of his own. Without a way of cogently expressing his worldview, Kerry is forced to unconvincingly convey his plans through terminology coined by the current administration. Little wonder that he ends up sounding confused, or rather just vague and lacking substance. Next time the media reports on abuse in the war on terror, stop to ponder the “war” of words.

Alexander Bevilacqua ’07, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Leverett House.