Going Nucular Read online

  But as various commentators have observed, an absolute term like evil can be hard to square with the gradations and relativities that foreign policy is built around. That might not be much of an issue in the case of bin Laden himself, but it’s already pushing things for Bush to talk about al Qaeda’s “evil weapons,” which begs the question of which weapons would be the virtuous ones. And once you try to extend the term, you get into a situation where Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright are having public disagreements over whether the North Koreans should be classified as evil as opposed to merely reprehensible, in which case it’s all right to break bread with them. In the end, Bush would have done better to stick with the more familiar label “rogue states.” It’s hard to imagine a million Iranians taking to the streets in protest because someone has called them rogues.

  Even so, the Administration seems bent on pursuing a strategy of evil-creep. Bush used the word five times in the State of the Union message and ten times in a speech the following day. And speaking recently in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he expanded the forces arrayed against the war on evil to include parts of his domestic program, like the AmeriCorps volunteer initiatives. “If you want to fight evil,” he said, “we’ve figured out a way to do so militarily. But at home, you fight evil . . . by doing something to help somebody.”

  Nobody’s about to question the moral value of home-building and literacy tutoring, but that isn’t what we generally have in mind when we talk about fighting evil—illiteracy may be deplorable, but it’s a stretch to pin it on Satan. It all has the effect of turning “the war on evil” into routine political rhetoric, and in the course of things that phrase will go the way of other slogans, like “a kinder, gentler nation” and “compassionate conservatism.” At that point we can hand the word back to the theologians, only slightly the worse for wear.

  Going Nucular

  There are two kinds of linguistic missteps, the typos and the thinkos. Typos are the processing glitches that intercede between a thought and its expression. They can make you look foolish, but they aren’t really the signs of an intellectual or ethical deficiency, the way thinkos are. It’s the difference between a sentence that expresses an idea badly and a sentence that expresses a bad idea.

  People don’t pay much attention to that distinction when they take after the missteps and malaprops of presidents and other political figures. Maybe it’s just because I’m not much of a speller myself, but I’ve always felt that Dan Quayle got a bum rap over his inability to spell potatoes—I mean, there are people who can spell and people who can’t, and God doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to other cognitive capacities in spreading that gift around. And while critics were always making fun of Eisenhower’s woolly language, it wasn’t really a sign of woolly thinking—most people realized that he was an astute politician, and he could write lucid prose when he felt like it. Ditto former President Bush: He may have had difficulty speaking complete sentences, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t thinking complete thoughts.

  Fresh Air Commentary, October 2, 2002

  No president has taken more flak over his language than George W. Bush—not Eisenhower, not even Harding. That’s understandable enough; Bush’s malaprops can make him sound like someone who learned the language over a bad cell-phone connection. “My education message will resignate among all parents”; “A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.”

  The columnists and late-night talk-show monologists usually take those errors as the occasions for mirth, rather than concern, the linguistic equivalents of Gerald Ford’s pratfalls. Bush himself encouraged that interpretation with those Letterman and Saturday Night Live appearances during the campaign, when he made fun of his inability to pronounce subliminal and said he was “ambilavant” about appearing on the show. It was a shrewd maneuver, as Mark Crispin Miller pointed out in his recent book The Bush Dyslexicon, a penetrating look at Bush and his language. The self-mockery took the edge off the criticisms by painting Bush as just another irrepressible word-mangler, sort of a Yalie Casey Stengel.

  But it isn’t always easy to tell whether an error is a typo or a thinko. Take the pronunciation of nuclear as “nucular.” That one has been getting on people’s nerves ever since Eisenhower made the mispronunciation famous in the 1950s. In Woody Allen’s 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Mia Farrow character says she could never fall for any man who says “nucular.” That would have ruled out not just Dubya, but Bill Clinton, who said the word right only about half the time. (President Carter had his own way of saying the word, as “newkeeuh,” but that probably had more to do with his Georgia accent than his ignorance of English spelling.)

  On the face of things, “nucular” is a typo par excellence. People sometimes talk about Bush “stumbling�� over the word, as if this were the same kind of articulatory problem that turns February into “febyooary.” But nuclear isn’t a hard word to pronounce the way February is—try saying each of them three times fast. Phonetically, in fact, nuclear is pretty much the same as likelier, and nobody ever says “The first outcome was likular than the second.” That “nucular” pronunciation is really what linguists call a folk etymology, where the unfamiliar word nuclear is treated as if it had the same suffix as words like molecular and particular. It’s the same process that turns lackadaisical into “laxadaisical” and chaise longue into chaise lounge.

  That accounts for Eisenhower’s mispronunciation of nuclear, back in a time when the word was a new addition to ordinary people’s vocabularies. And it’s why Homer Simpson says it as “nucular” even today. But it doesn’t explain why you still hear “nucular” from people like politicians, military people, and weapons specialists, most of whom obviously know better and have been reminded repeatedly what the correct pronunciation is. I have an old college friend who says the word that way, someone who works as an atomic weapons wallah at a federal agency. I asked him once if anybody ever corrected him on it, and he said, “Well, sometimes the physicists I talk to get shirty about it. But they know what I’m talking about.” Then out of curiosity I asked him if he ever talked about “nucular families.” “Of course not,” he said, “I only say ‘nucular’ when I’m talking about nukes.”

  In the mouths of those people, “nucular” is a choice, not an inadvertent mistake—a thinko, not a typo. Maybe it appeals to them to refer to the weapons in what seems like a folksy and familiar way, or maybe it’s a question of asserting their authority— “We’re the ones with our fingers on the button, and we’ll pronounce the word however we damn well please.”

  But which of these stories explains why Bush says “nucular”? Most people seem to assume he’s just one of those people who don’t know any better. But that’s hard to credit. After all, Bush didn’t have to learn the word nuclear in middle age, the way Eisenhower did. He must have heard it said correctly thousands of times when he was growing up—not just at Andover, Yale, and Harvard, but from his own father, who never seems to have had any trouble with the word. But if Bush’s “nucular” is a deliberate choice, is it something he picked up from the Pentagon wise guys? Or is it a faux-bubba pronunciation, the sort of thing he might have started doing at Andover or Yale, by way of playing the Texan to all those earnest Eastern dweebs?

  Actually, there would be an easy way to tell—just see how Bush pronounces nuclear in phrases like nuclear family and nuclear medicine. If he says “nucular” all the time, then it’s most likely a faux-bubba thing. But if he only says “nucular” for weapons, it’s probably a bit of borrowed Pentagon swagger. I’ll be keeping my ears peeled.

  Appease Porridge Hot

  The English philosopher Peter Strawson talked about expressions that had “grown capital letters”—descriptions like The Cold War, The Flood, or The Sultan of Swat, which have turned into quasi-proper names. But sometimes an expression gets attached to a particular event without actually becoming a name for it—it’s more like picking up a piece of dirt tha
t it can’t scrape off its shoes. Stonewalling for example—it isn’t a proper name, but it always evokes the Nixon administration’s response to Watergate. Ditto isolationism or death squad or partition—they’re each linked to a particular historical moment.

  Or take appeasement. Whenever it’s pronounced, the word conjures up the memory of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street on his return from the Munich conference in September 1938, after he had handed over the Czech Sudetenland to Hitler. “It is peace for our time,” he told the press. “Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

  That moment had a number of far-reaching consequences—I mean, over and above bringing the world a step closer to a catastrophic war. It sealed the political downfall of Chamberlain, and it revived the faded fortunes of Winston Churchill, who had opposed the Munich decision as “complete surrender . . . to the Nazi threat of force.” And it permanently changed the meaning of the word appeasement itself.

  Fresh Air Commentary, February 19, 2003

  Before Munich, appeasement didn’t have the dishonorable connotations it does for us. Appease still carried the echoes of the root sense of peace, and its meaning was simply “conciliate” or “pacify”—this was before pacification got its feet muddy, too. That’s the sense the word has in the verse from the Book of Proverbs: “He that is slow to anger appeaseth strife.” In fact Churchill himself recommended a policy of “prudence and appeasement” towards the Turks when they went to war with the Greeks in 1919. And Roosevelt described Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 as an “integral measure for world appeasement.” That’s the meaning that Chamberlain had in mind when he talked about a policy of appeasement—the idea was not to capitulate to dictators but to ensure the peace while Britan had time to re-arm, after the defense cuts that Churchill presided over when he was the defence minister in the 1920s. In retrospect, the appeasement policy may have been disastrously short-sighted, but it wasn’t intended to be pusillanimous—and in fact Chamberlain had few illusions about Hitler’s intentions.

  But no politician since then has been able to talk about appeasement in an approving way. After Munich, the word could only suggest a cowardly capitulation to the demands of tyrants in the hope that they’ll refrain from further aggression. That’s why the word is so inflammatory when it’s used to describe opponents of the Administration’s Iraq policy. I’ve been hearing more and more of this—I counted over eighty uses of “appeasement” in the press last month in stories about Iraq in major papers in January 2003, three times as many as in the month before. And the other day Condoleezza Rice gave official sanction to the label on Meet the Press, when she likened the Security Council’s actions to the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.

  That comparison obviously isn’t designed to bring any allies around; it’s strictly for the benefit of the Administration’s own troops. It’s part of a blitzkrieg aimed at seizing the moral high ground, even if you have to roll over history and etymology in the process. Whatever your view of the French and German position on Saddam Hussein, after all, it isn’t remotely comparable to the attitude that Chamberlain is supposed to have taken towards Hitler—“Let’s give him what he wants and maybe he’ll leave us alone.”

  In fact, neither Churchill nor any other critic of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy ever argued for a pre-emptive strike on Germany. They simply supported what people would now describe as deterrence and containment, pretty much as the French and Germans are doing now. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, you could argue that even that would have been an inadequate response to the threat of Hitler—if we were rewriting history, we’d have had Britain and France make an alliance with Stalin to go after Germany then and there. And if you were of a mind to, you could say that the Security Council is making the same mistake now that Churchill made in 1938—that is, if you’re willing to argue that Saddam Hussein represents the same threat to world security that Hitler did back then.

  But one way or the other, that isn’t a conversation that anybody’s about to launch, at least outside of history department common rooms. It’s hard to imagine the Administration comparing the Security Council to Churchill, not when the adjective Churchillian has become an epithet that is as uncritically laudatory as appeasement is derogatory.

  The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once said that every important event lives two lives, one as history and one as myth. Political language plays a big part in that transformation—it turns the lessons of history into a set of Cliffs Notes. All that complicated historical footage reduces to a couple of stills—Churchill as the resolute foe of bullies, glaring over his cigar; Chamberlain as the archetypal Euroweenie, with his striped pants, high collar, umbrella, and drooping moustache. And Munich itself has become one of those words like Waterloo, Verdun, and Pearl Harbor—names that have seceded from the flesh-and-blood past and taken up a life of their own as moral fables in the popular imagination. If some words have grown capital letters and become proper names, Munich and the rest are proper names that politics has turned into common nouns.

  The Second Casualty

  “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” With due respect to Hiram Johnson, the Progressive senator who made that famous remark in 1917, the first casualty of war is less often the truth itself than the way we tell it. Coloring the facts is usually more convenient than falsifying them.

  The modern language of war emerged in the Victorian age, when military planners first became concerned about public opinion. One linguistic casualty of that period was casualty itself, a word for an accidental loss that became a euphemism for dead and wounded around the time of the Crimean War, the conflict that gave birth to the war correspondent.

  By World War I, the modern language of warfare was in its full euphemistic glory. The mutinies among French troops in 1917 were described in dispatches as “acts of collective indiscipline,” and the writers of the daily communiqués from the Western Front were instructed to use the phrase “brisk fighting” to describe any action in which more than 50 percent of a company was killed or wounded.

  What’s notable about the latest war isn’t the toll it has taken on language—all wars do that—but the obsessive attention we’ve paid to the matter. There has never been an age that was so self-conscious about the way it talked about war. Barely two weeks into the Iraq conflict, more than a dozen articles had appeared in major newspapers speculating about what its effects on the language would be, as if that would reveal to us what story we would wind up telling about it.

  The New York Times Week in Review, April 6, 2003

  In part, that is simply a reaction to the jumble of images and reports we’ve been subjected to, and of the need to make sense of them. Last week, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld complained that the abruptly shifting impressions of the war’s progress were due to viewers seeing “every second another slice of what’s actually happening over there.” He waxed nostalgic for World War II newsreels that wrapped the week’s war highlights in a stirring narrative.

  Rumsfeld’s wistfulness is understandable. True, domestic support for World War II was never as solid or uncritical as we like to imagine—as late as 1944, almost 40 percent of Americans said they favored a negotiated peace with the Germans. But there’s no trace of those doubts in the language the war left us with, or in the artless enthusiasm of those newsreels: “Then, by light of the moon, a thousand mighty bombing planes take off, flying to their marks and releasing their fatal loads.”

  That was the tail end of a purple thread that ran back to those Crimean dispatches about gallant British troops pouring fire on the terrible enemy. The effusive metaphors of the newsreels were already shopworn in 1969, when Rumsfeld joined Nixon’s cabinet, and war reports from Vietnam had to be tailored to an increasingly skeptical and knowing public.

  Today, no journalist would hazard a reference to mighty bombers dropping fatal loads. Embedded reporters produce embedded language, the metallic clatter of modern mi
litary lingo: acronyms like TLAMs, RPGs and MREs; catchphrases like “asymmetric warfare,” “emerging targets” and “catastrophic success”—the last not an oxymoron, but an irresistibly perverse phrase for a sudden acceleration of good fortune.

  I prefer that jargon to the mighty bombers. It’s truer to the nature of modern warfare, and it sometimes rises to a kind of brutalist poetry, as in, “Their units have been significantly degraded or attrited.” (Milton would have recognized attrited as the past tense of attrite, meaning “grind away”; the verb has merely been lying low for 300 years.)

  When it comes to penetrating the fog of battle, though, the words are rarely new. They’re recycled phrases drawn from earlier wars and conflicts, trailing vague clouds of glory or obloquy, and smoothed by the selectivity of historical memory. “Liberation” evokes the image of the soldiers on American tanks sweeping up pretty demoiselles in their arms as they rolled through Normandy, not the guerrilla wars of national liberation that troubled American foreign policy for much of the Cold War.

  President Bush’s father would probably have thought twice before talking about Saddam Hussein’s “death squads,” lest the phrase recall the Guatemalan and Salvadorean regimes that the Reagan administration supported when he was vice president. His son can use the words in the confidence that time has attrited their historical resonances. And a decade or so ago, Ari Fleischer’s assurance that “slowly but surely the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people are being won” would still have evoked disconcerting memories. But Fleischer was barely fifteen years old when Peter Davis’s anti-Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds won an Oscar in 1975. Even “shock and awe” sounds vaguely familiar, like the name of some heavy-metal tour from the early ’90s.