Going Nucular Read online

  Of course, where one side sees deceptive packaging, the other is likely to see only effective branding. But there’s something troubling in the easy use of the label Orwellian, as if these phrases committed the same sorts of linguistic abuses that led to the gulags and the death camps. In fact the specters that Orwellian conjures aren’t really the ones we have to worry about. Newspeak may have been a plausible invention in 1948, when totalitarian thought control still seemed an imminent possibility. But the collapse of Communism revealed the bankruptcy not just of the Stalinist social experiment, but of its linguistic experiments as well. After seventy-five years of incessant propaganda, “socialist man” turned out to be a cynic who didn’t even believe the train schedules.

  Political language is still something to be wary of, but it doesn’t work as Orwell feared. In fact the modern language of control is more effective than Soviet Newspeak precisely because it’s less bleak and intimidating. Think of the way business has been re-engineering the language of ordinary interaction in the interest of creating “high-performance corporate cultures.” To a reanimated Winston Smith, there would be something wholly familiar in being told that he had to file an annual “vision statement” or that he should henceforth eliminate “problems” from his vocabulary in favor of “issues.” But the hero of 1984 would find the whole exercise much more convivial than the Two-Minute Hate at the Ministry of Truth. And he’d be astonished to see management condoning its employees’ playing buzzword bingo and posting Dilbert strips on the walls of their cubicles.

  For Orwell, the success of political jargon and euphemism required an uncritical or even unthinking audience: A “reduced state of consciousness,” as he put it, was “favorable to political conformity.” As things turned out, though, the political manipulation of language seems to thrive on the critical skepticism that Orwell encouraged. In fact, there has never been an age that was so well-schooled in the perils of deceptive language or in decoding political and commercial messages, as witness the official canonization of Orwell himself. Thanks to the schools, 1984 is probably the best-selling political novel of modern times (current Amazon sales rank: No. 93), and “Politics and the English Language” is the most widely read essay about the English language—and very likely in it as well.

  But as advertisers have known for a long time, no audience is easier to beguile than one that is smugly confident of its own sophistication. The word Orwellian contributes to that impression. Like propaganda, it implies an aesthetic judgment more than a moral one. Calling an expression Orwellian means not that it’s deceptive but that it’s crudely deceptive.

  Today, the real damage isn’t done by the euphemisms and circumlocutions that we’re likely to describe as Orwellian. Ethnic cleansing, revenue enhancement, voluntary regulation, tree-density reduction, faith-based initiatives, extra affirmative action—those terms may be oblique, but at least they wear their obliquity on their sleeves.

  Rather, the words that do the most political work are simple ones—jobs and growth, family values, and color-blind, not to mention life and choice. Concrete words like these are the hardest ones to see through—they’re opaque when you hold them up to the light. Orwell knew that, of course. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It’s not what you’d call an Orwellian sentiment, but it’s very like the man.

  Meetings of the Minds

  Like all difficult negotiations, the Mideast talks that began last week will require some careful delicate footwork—a point that became clear when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took the step of referring to the Israeli “occupation,” and then issued a statement “clarifying” the remark the following day.

  In that context, no word is more charged than compromise, a notion that’s easier to disavow than embrace. “There can be no compromise with terror,” Sharon said in his English-language speech at the Middle East summit in Jordan, and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas vowed to fight terrorism in words that were translated as “without compromise.” But neither leader seemed inclined to talk about compromise in a positive way. If the Israelis and Palestinians are willing to make compromises in the interest of a settlement, they’re not about to put it that way just now.

  According to some people, in fact, Arabs find compromise literally unspeakable. That was the conclusion of an article that appeared in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in September 2002. Its author was an Egyptian businessman and writer named Tarek Heggy, who claimed the Arabs have never developed a “culture of compromise”—in fact, he said, Arabic doesn’t even have a word for that notion. For the Arabs, he said, compromise is associated with submission, retreat, and weakness, whereas the Anglo-Saxon nations value the ideas of compromise and a respect for the opinions of others. Heggy’s article was widely circulated on the Web, and several writers were quick to attach a political significance to the absence of an Arabic word for compromise—as one put it, “No wonder there are problems negotiating peace.”

  San Jose Mercury News, June 8, 2003

  Heggy’s claim has a familiar ring. You’re always hearing people say, “The so-and-so people don’t have a word for such-and-such,” where the absence of the word is supposed to shed a telling light on a people’s culture. At one time or another, I’ve heard it said that French doesn’t have a word for “nice,” that German doesn’t have a word for “fair play,” and that Chinese doesn’t have a word for “privacy.” Back in 1985, President Reagan asserted that the Russian language didn’t have a word for freedom. (Of course it does—svoboda—but Reagan was never one to let details get in the way of a good story.)

  Of course it often happens that another language won’t have any easy way of referring to something that’s important to English speakers (and vice-versa, ça va sans dire). But that’s usually because the concept itself is one its speakers can live without. You’re not surprised to learn that Tibetan doesn’t have words for “squeeze play” or “happy hour.” But it’s hard to imagine how any people could conduct the commerce and politics of a major civilization without having a way of talking about compromise. What’s going on in all those souks—is everybody paying retail? And how would a people with no concept of compromise manage their domestic life? “She wanted to spend all our holidays with her family, and I wanted to spend them all with mine. So we divorced.”

  In fact, when I asked a couple of Arabic linguists about this, they confirmed for me that Arabic has several expressions that translate the English compromise, though none is a single word. (The phrase that Abbas’s translator rendered as “without compromise” actually contained a classical Arabic word that came closer to “relenting,” but then the English uncompromising really means something like “unrelenting,” too.)

  When speakers of colloquial Arabic want to talk about compromise, they use phrases like “we reached a middle ground.” But then English often expresses this notion with a phrase, too—we talk about reaching a meeting of the minds, striking a balance, finding a happy medium, or meeting someone halfway. Before Shakespeare’s time, in fact, English lacked a single verb for compromise, and was none the worse for it.

  The fact is that people have many more concepts than can be expressed in a single word in their languages. Take the German Schadenfreude, which denotes the pleasure we take in the misfortunes of others. It’s a nice item to have handy in a pre-packaged form. But Red Sox fans don’t have to learn German before they can enjoy watching the Yankees drop eight straight at home. And even if their language lacks a single word for “cozy,” Germans aren’t insensible to the pleasures of an armchair by a warm fire on a winter’s night.

  So why do people find these factoids about missing words so alluring? One reason, no doubt, is that they can serve to garb old-fashioned ethnic stereotypes in respectable linguistic attire. Westerners have always attributed an unwillingness to compromise to the Arabs and the other Semitic peoples. T. E. Lawrence claimed that the Semites “had no half-tones in their register of vision,” and
described them as “a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour.” And the English historian Elizabeth Monroe explained the failure of the British government’s 1937 partition plan for Palestine by saying that the British were “full of capacity for compromise” and couldn’t understand that they were dealing with “two peoples belonging to the most uncompromising race in the world.” The only difference is that back then, nobody felt the need to lay the obstinacy of the Jews or the Arabs to their lack of a word for compromise—people just assumed that obstinacy was bred in the Semitic bone.

  But every people has conflicting views of compromise, however they express the notion. The vaunted flexibility of the Anglo-Saxon peoples wasn’t much in evidence in the months before the Iraq war, when the United States was adamantly refusing to strike a deal that would allow the United Nations inspectors more time to seek out Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. At the time, the Administration was describing the Security Council’s position as “appeasement,” the word we English speakers use when we want to equate compromise with submission and weakness.

  One could even argue that the English language betrays a strain of ethnic stubbornness, as well. Take the way we use uncompromising as a morally complimentary term nowadays. “She’s an uncompromising perfectionist”—why is that necessarily a good thing? And why is it that the adjective compromised can only have a negative meaning—“The ambassador was too compromised to serve as an intermediary”?

  All that that shows is that languages provide their speakers with many ways to talk about compromise, depending on whether they’re in the mood to strike a deal. Someone who is seen as uncompromising on Monday can come to seem inflexible or stubborn by the end of the week, when the negotiations come down to the wire. If the players really want to reach a compromise in the Middle East, they’ll find the words for it.

  Lattes, Limousines, and Libs

  The announcement that two Chicago venture capitalists will finance a liberal talk radio network met with the skepticism that might greet the formation of a pro badminton circuit. Some conservatives said that liberal dogma couldn’t withstand the rough and tumble of talk radio (which is “ultimately about ideas,” as Thomas Sowell put it), the implication being that the left has no thinkers with the gravitas of a Limbaugh or a Liddy. Others said that liberals just can’t be funny—the left has no wits like Limbaugh and Liddy, either—while the blogger Antic Muse said there are funny liberals, but they’re working in Hollywood. Still others said liberals won’t engage in demagogy, that liberals are afraid of offending their constituencies, that liberals are boring policy wonks, or that liberals are too nuanced for the AM drive-time crowd.

  Well, but hold it right there. If we’re really looking to understand the success of right-wing talk radio, we needn’t go much further than people’s readiness to start sentences with “Liberals are . . .” and to go on to describe liberalism as something between a personality disorder and a market segment.

  That’s what the radio hosts batten on. They understand that their listeners respond more immediately to attacks on the phonies up the block than on more remote objects of indignation. Not that the hosts and callers don’t have a deep antipathy to Saddam Hussein, criminals, illegal immigrants, and the United Nations, but those miscreants tend to serve only as the pretext for denunciations of the people who coddle them—the libs, as Limbaugh calls them. The familiar tone of that epithet has more to do with creating an “us” than a “them”; it distinguishes the show’s audience from the political dimwits who haven’t cottoned to the menace in their midst.

  The New York Times Week in Review, March 2, 2003

  Talk radio didn’t invent the negative branding of liberals. It began to emerge about twenty-five years ago, around the time when words like lifestyle and yuppie first entered the general vocabulary, as marketers replaced sociologists as the cartographers of the American social landscape. Phrases like “Volvo liberal” and “the Chablis-and-brie set” were already well established when the liberal Republican John Anderson made his presidential bid in 1980.

  Those labels are different from older descriptions like “limousine liberal,” which evoke the image of liberals as wealthy hypocrites. The new vocabulary makes consumer preferences the most telling signs of personal values, so that it seems natural for Richard Lowry, editor of National Review, to talk about the “‘tall skim double-mocha latte, please’ culture of contemporary America.”

  Some conservatives have tried to take that connection seriously. David Brooks has tied urban liberals’ fondness for expensive coffee drinks to their predilection for inconspicuous consumption. They avoid the traditional luxuries of “vulgar Republicans,” preferring to spend extravagantly on items that used to be cheap, like coffee, bread, and water, or on products that seem to answer to practical needs, like Volvos or hiking boots. Yet you can find a Starbucks outlet and a Volvo dealership in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, the locale where Brooks has done his weekend ethnography of pro-Bush America, not to mention other red-state bastions like Lubbock, Texas, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Murfreesboro, Tennessee. However those retailers choose their locations, it isn’t by looking for concentrations of liberal guilt.

  Phrases like “latte liberal” and “Volvo liberals” have nothing to do with what anybody actually buys—they’re pure plays on brand aura. Liberals are the sort of people you would expect to drink an expensive, milky coffee concoction and to drive a safe, practical car from socialist Sweden, whatever the actual facts of the marketplace are. (Actually, an article in American Demographics reports that the great majority of brie consumers are moderate Republicans—not surprising, considering that brie is an upscale product. In the luxury marketplace, demographics always trumps ideology.)

  The success of that branding strategy extends well beyond opinion columns and talk radio. In major newspapers, the phrases “middle-class liberals” and “middle-class Democrats” are used with about the same frequency. But “working-class liberals” is almost nonexistent; it’s outnumbered by “working-class Democrats” by about 30 to 1. It’s as if you can’t count as a liberal until you can afford to indulge yourself.

  By contrast, the press talks about “working-class conservatives” and “working-class Republicans” with about the same frequency. In fact there are many more mentions of working-class conservatives than of working-class liberals, which creates a strange picture of American political attitudes.

  You see the same discrepancies when you substitute terms like “black,” “Hispanic,” or “minority” in those patterns. As the media tell the story, minorities and members of the working class can qualify only as Democrats; liberalism is a mind-set restricted to the white middle class.

  But branding is a game that two could play, if liberals cared to leaven substance with style themselves. In their efforts to bond with the working class, conservative pundits can be as risibly phony and pretentious as anything that Hollywood or the Upper West Side has to offer. You think of Bill O’Reilly describing himself as a “working-class guy”—this from an accountant’s son who grew up in Waterbury, Long Island. Or listen to Ann Coulter, who grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut, and her paean to New York’s other boroughs, as reported in The New York Times: “Queens, baseball games—those are my people. American people.”

  Then there’s Lowry, a University of Virginia grad, who admits to having no familiarity with motorcycles but nonetheless holds that he would rather be governed by 2,000 motorcyclists than all the Volvo drivers in the United States.

  That’s a plight that the privileged pundits of the right can’t escape: Their politics turns them into traitors to their demographic. You have to feel a certain sympathy for all those Yale and Dartmouth grads at National Review and The American Spectator who feel obliged to eschew Chardonnay and latte in favor of Budweiser and Maxwell House. One way or the other, modern politics makes fashion victims of us all.

  Where the Left Commences

/>   The left-right spectrum was born in revolutionary France, but Americans didn’t adopt it until the New Deal era. It seems to lay out the political topography in a conveniently symmetrical way, to the point where some have felt that you could determine the “balance” of the media simply by counting how often each of the labels appears.

  But the linguistic landscape is a lot more corrugated and uneven than it appears. Take leftist. As a pair with rightist, it had a long history as a purely descriptive term before the McCarthyites adopted it as a label for Communist sympathizers and subversive organizations. Just before the 1952 election, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused Adlai Stevenson of being unfit for the presidency because of his association with “leftists” like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had defended the right of Communists to teach in universities (provided, Schlesinger added, that “they do not disqualify themselves by intellectual distortions in the classroom”). And in the same year, Americans for Democratic Action indignantly denied charges that it was a leftist group, pointing out that it had worked at “purging the American liberal movement of individuals with loyalties to Communism.”