Going Nucular Read online

  The ambient war-speak strikes your consciousness as an odd jumble, patched together from the half-remembered motifs of old Chuck Norris movies and documentaries from the History Channel, and tweaked from hour to hour to accommodate the latest developments. It’s pastiche, the genre that the literary critic Fredric Jameson described as a statue with blind eyes; the language doesn’t so much relate as reverberate.

  With words as vague as these, truth is less a casualty than an irrelevancy. Is this really a liberation? Compared to what? It’s always a mug’s game trying to pin down the meanings of these labels. (“That depends on what the meaning of cakewalk is.”) And in any case, the language doesn’t really work at the level of meaning. Asking whether people believe the words is like asking whether they believe the drum tattoo that MSNBC plays as the screen fades to commercial breaks, under the names of soldiers who have made “the ultimate sacrifice.”

  There’s a paradox in the way we think about political language: The wiser we are to its tricks, the more we worry about its manipulative power—not over ourselves, but over the innocents who are still stirred by words like mighty. There aren’t many linguistic innocents left in America, of course; 1984 is probably the only novel that all of my students have read. But we tell ourselves that language still has power over those who haven’t had our advantages. The Bush administration dropped its references to “fedayeen” last week when it was reminded that the word has heroic connotations in the Arabic-speaking world, and began to refer to the militia fighters as “terrorists” or “thugs” instead. Not that Americans need those hints, an official explained, but “in other parts of the world, labeling helps to put it in perspective.”

  World War II contributed hundreds of words to our vocabulary. But the language of recent wars has faded very rapidly, like the memories of our reasons for fighting them. Within a short time, “shock and awe” will be a Trivial Pursuit item like “mother of all battles” from the 1991 Persian Gulf war. War language does a different kind of work now. What remains with us isn’t the words, but the tunes they’re meant to bring to mind. It’s like that corny tattoo on MSNBC: You see right through it, and it raises a shiver anyway.

  Naming of Foreign Parts

  To a lot of its critics, the Administration’s miscalculations in its Mideast policy are summed up in a single pronunciation: “Eyerack.” Nicholas Kristof wrote recently in The New York Times that “Arabs flinch each time American officials torture pronunciations of the names of Iraqi cities and, worse, the country itself. . . . The Bush administration might at least remind officials that we are not invading Eye-rack, but Ee-rack.”

  But if people in Amman, Cairo, and Riyadh are flinching as they watch the TV news nowadays, I doubt if it has much to do with the way American politicians and journalists are struggling with the intricacies of Arabic phonology—no more than the current wave of anti-French feeling owes anything to Jacques Chirac’s pronunciation of our president’s first name as “zhorrrzh.”

  Anyway, however hard Americans try to approximate the pronunciations of Arabic names, what comes out of our mouths is going to be pretty remote from the real thing to Arab ears. If you were really going to get the name of the country right, you’d say something like “EE-rawq,” with that guttural q that doesn’t have any English equivalent. And you’d start it with an “ayn,” an h-like sound that’s pronounced even farther back in the throat.

  “BAGGH-ded,” “KurbeLEH,” “BASS-rah.” That’s what Arabic speakers tell me, but it’s a fool’s errand for Americans to try to do those names justice. The prudent course is to make a yeoman effort at approximating foreign names with the limited phonetic resources that English makes available. Going further than that is almost always a sign of dubious ulterior motives. There are those Spanish pronunciations that are supposed to demonstrate solidarity with the locals, like “NeecaRAWWa” and “CoLOHMMbia.” Or there are the sprezzatura pronunciations of the classical music announcers, who linger on the double t of Pavarotti and the th-sound of PlaTHido Domingo.

  Fresh Air Commentary, March 28, 2003

  And then there are the trench-coat pronunciations that you hear from journalists who want to intimate that they’ve spent a long time, as they say, on the ground. I think of the way Daniel Schorr used to talk about MikhILE GorbaTCHOFF, with the easy familiarity of an old Kremlin hand. There’s a hint of this in the way journalists have taken up saying “gutter” for the country that the uninitiated refer to as “katt-AR.” Actually it isn’t at all clear that the locals would recognize the journalists’ “gutter” as a version of what they pronounce as something like “QAW-tar.” (The nation’s embassy answers the phone as “Embassy of katt-AR,” in any case.) But then these attempts at phonetic correctness are really intended for domestic consumption.

  There’s a domestic note in those criticisms of the pronunciation “eye-rack,” too. A lot of people see the pronunciation as a symptom of redneck ignorance—columnists have suggested that it’s somehow tied to Americans’ general fuzziness about geographical detail and our insensitivity to the complexities of world politics. As a columnist for the Baltimore Sun wrote not long ago, “If you can’t pronounce it, don’t try to invade it.”

  But the idea that “eye-rack” is incorrect is mostly a sign of our own linguistic prejudices. The pronunciation has two things working against it. The first syllable fits in with that pattern of saying certain foreign words with a long vowel—not just “eyerack” and “eye-ran,” but words like “ay-rab” and “eye-talian,” pronunciations that educated people tend to associate with red-state yahoos. And then there’s the flat-fronted vowel of the second syllable—“rack” instead of “rock.” That runs afoul of the principle that the letter a in foreign names should always be pronounced as “ah.” That has become an article of faith among well-traveled Americans, to the point where “milahn” or “milano” have replaced the time-honored “milann.”

  Hearing people ridicule ordinary Americans who say “eyerack” can be like listening to American expatriates sneering at the tourists in line at the Louvre or the Coliseum. But it’s something else again when you hear that pronunciation coming from Administration officials who don’t come by it natively. In their mouths, it smacks of calculated folksiness, as if to tweak all those fastidious internationalists��we can go it alone phonetically, too. It has gotten to the point where you can tell people’s position on the role the United Nations should play in the reconstruction of Iraq just by listening to the way they say the name.

  For the time being, “ee-rock” would seem to be the more judicious pronunciation, at least until we’re certain that when the dust clears, we won’t need any assistance in writing the gazetteers for this part of the world. But I’m not really bothered hearing journalists and politicians make a hash out of those other exotic Arabic placenames. I’ve been listening occasionally to French news broadcasts over the Internet, and their announcers do a much better job with Arabic names, no doubt because they have had a couple of hundred years of embedding in the Arabic-speaking world. It’s an impressive phonetic accomplishment, but you hope we don’t get to that point ourselves.

  The Syntax of Resistance

  Sometimes a social change can announce itself in the dropping of a preposition. It used to be that when you used the verb protest to mean “object to” you had to add against—“She protested against her mistreatment.” Then in the early years of the twentieth century, Americans began to say things like “He protested the government’s policy.”

  As it happens, it was around the time that people started using protest with a direct object that they also started to think of protest as a kind of direct political action aimed at mobilizing public opinion against a particular policy. That’s when phrases like “protest demonstration,” “protest strike,” and “protest movement” began to appear.

  Or take “protest march.” I had always assumed that the phrase originated with the ban-the-bomb movement of the 1950s—the Oxford Englis
h Dictionary gives the first citation of the word from 1959. But in fact it goes back much further than that; it was used in 1913 to describe a march that Gandhi organized to protest the restrictions that had been imposed on the Indian population of South Africa, in the first massive civil disobedience campaign. Over the following decades, protest would be intimately linked with those new techniques of political resistance. By the 1930s, people were using phrases like “the literature of protest” and “social protest” to suggest the whole range of progressive agitation.

  Fresh Air Commentary, March 11, 2003

  But it wasn’t until the sixties that the notion of protest entered the mainstream of the American vocabulary. That was the moment when songs with political messages began to make their way out of the coffee houses and hootenannies and onto the airwaves. For some people, “protest music” evokes the folk-inspired topical songs of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Country Joe McDonald, and the early Dylan. But by the mid-sixties people were using the phrase for songs like Blowin’ in the Wind and Barry McGuire’s 1965 Eve of Destruction, which was the first protest song to become a number one hit. Eve of Destruction’s lyrics were mostly a generic plea for peace and understanding, a pretty far cry from Phil Ochs’s The War Is Over or the Fugs’s Kill for Peace. Even so, a lot of AM stations refused to play the song, and conservatives complained to the FCC that the song violated the equal time provision, back before they learned they could live nicely without it.

  By then, people had begun to use the noun protest as shorthand for a clamorous rally. That gave rise to the word PROtester in place of the older form proTESTer, which was derived from the verb. The shift in stress corresponded to a difference in emphasis. ProTESTer suggests an individual with a specific beef in mind, whereas when you hear PROtester you think of a group of angry people kicking up a row. The new noun gave rise to a new way of pronouncing the verb, as well. By now, there’s a marked semantic difference between saying “The lady doth proTEST too much” and “The lady doth PROtest too much”—the latter sounds like Bill O’Reilly talking about Janeane Garofalo.

  By the time the Vietnam War ended, the notion of “protests” was losing its connection with the old tradition of social protest. There’s a revealing use of the word in the 1982 film First Blood, the first and by far the best of the Rambo movies. It comes when Rambo is describing his return from Vietnam: “And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby k iller. . . . Who are they to protest me?” Granted, Rambo was supposed to be a little unhinged, but by then a lot of people wouldn’t have seen anything odd in the notion of a “protest” aimed at individual soldiers—it was becoming just another name for a demonstration.

  That’s apparently all the word means to some people now, as protests are back in the streets. The other day I saw the influential libertarian-conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds referring to “the growing pro-war protest movement.” That took me aback, but when I hunted around, I found a number of other conservatives using the word that way. The Web site of the Young Americans for Freedom boasts about the pro-war protests that the group organized at the University of Michigan. Even the press is starting to pick this up—an article in the Seattle Times last week talked about the “protestors” at a pro-Bush demonstration who were waving signs saying “Support Our Troops.”

  There’s a certain disingenuousness in those uses of protest. I don’t mean that the word can only be used for manifestations by the left. There’s nothing odd in talking about a conservative campus group holding a protest over the university president’s support of affirmative action or staging a protest demonstration outside CNN headquarters to protest media bias. That may not exactly conjure up the old notion of Protest with a capital P, but it’s clearly a form of resistance to the established order.

  But it sounds a little odd to talk about a protest in support of a war that’s about to be initiated by the Administration in power. Maybe that’s just semantic sloppiness, as if “protesting” nowadays were just a question of getting together to yell slogans—why should the other side have all the fun? Or maybe it’s a strategic blurring of historical memory. It’s hard to keep this stuff straight in an age when the oldies stations are apt to play Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction back-to-back with Barry Sadler’s Ballad of the Green Berets, which was a number one hit a few months later.

  But you’d hope that protest would retain some of the sense of resistance that it acquired at the beginning of the last century. Up to now, after all, protest has been the only form of political action that power can’t engage in.

  A Couple of Words for Nothing Left to Lose

  What exactly are we fighting for? In his speech to the nation explaining America’s goals, President Bush said we were fighting to “defend our freedom” and “bring freedom to others.” Nowadays, Americans always go to war under the banner of freedom, ours or theirs: Operation Iraqi Freedom follows Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

  There was a time when the campaign would have been fought in the name of liberty. We had a reminder of that when the efforts to rebaptize french fries as “freedom fries” led commentators to recall the First World War renamings of sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage” and dachshunds as “liberty dogs,” in an earlier episode of jingoistic fatuity. The choice of “freedom fries” may have owed something to alliteration, but liberty was much more prominent in the early-twentieth-century patriotic lexicon than it is now. Americans wore liberty buttons, bought liberty bonds, and planted liberty gardens, while our factories turned out liberty trucks and the liberty engine, designed to power the DeHavilland bombers built in the U.S.

  If the War To End War were being refought today, it’s a safe bet that we would be talking about freedom bonds and freedom trucks. For that matter, a modern patriot who was writing the Pledge of Allegiance from scratch would probably conclude it “with freedom and justice for all.”

  The New York Times Week in Review, March 23, 2003

  This shift from liberty to freedom is a subtle one, which few other languages would even be able to express. The French national motto is usually translated as “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” but liberté could as easily be translated as “freedom.” And even in English, the words can sometimes seem to be equivalent. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin used them more or less interchangeably in his influential essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” and so did the historian Eric Foner in his The Story of American Freedom, which traces the evolution of the concept from Colonial times. Sometimes, in fact, the words are incanted in the same breath—“The issue is freedom and liberty,” President Bush said a few days before the war began. Or as the Grateful Dead put it, “Ooo, freedom/ Ooo, liberty/ Ooo, leave me alone.”

  But English hasn’t taken the trouble to retain all those pairs of Anglo-Saxon and Latin near-synonyms just so its thesauruses could be heftier. There’s a difference between friendship and amity, or a paternal manner and a fatherly one. And liberty and freedom have distinct meanings, too, even if it isn’t easy to pin them down. As the political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has observed, liberty implies a system of rules, a “network of restraint and order,” which is why the word is closely associated with political life. Freedom has a more general meaning, which ranges from an opposition to slavery to the absence of psychological or personal encumbrances—no one would describe liberty as another name for nothing left to lose.

  But the two words have been continually redefined over the centuries, as Americans contested the basic notion of what it means to be free. For the founders of the nation, liberty was the fundamental American value. That was a legacy of the conception of “English liberty,” with which Britons proudly distinguished themselves from the slavish peoples of the Continent who were unprotected from the arbitrary power of the state. Echoing John Locke, the Declaration of Independence speaks of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; the text doesn’t mention freedom at all. It was liberty
that Patrick Henry declared himself willing to die for, and liberty that the ringing bell in Philadelphia proclaimed on July 8, 1776.

  Liberty remained the dominant patriotic theme for the following 150 years. True, freedom played an important role, particularly in the debates over slavery. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address began by invoking a nation “conceived in liberty,” but went on to resolve that it should have a “new birth of freedom.” But freedom didn’t really come into its own until the New Deal period, when the defining American values were augmented to include the economic and social justice that permitted people free development as human beings. Of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms—of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear—only the first two might have been expressed using liberty.

  The civil rights movement made “freedom now” its rallying cry. Martin Luther King Jr. used freedom nineteen times in his “I Have a Dream” speech, and liberty only twice. Feminists extended freedom to cover reproductive rights, while Timothy Leary spoke of the “fifth freedom . . . the freedom to expand your own consciousness.”

  But as Eric Foner has observed, freedom is too central in the American consciousness to remain the property of one political side. The conservative reclaiming of the word began during the Cold War, when it was expanded to include the benefits of free markets and the consumer choices they provided. Then, too, freedom was a conveniently vague label used to describe free-world allies like Franco’s Spain, whose commitment to liberty was questionable.

  No one understood better than Ronald Reagan the power that freedom had acquired. His second Inaugural Address mentioned freedom fourteen times and liberty only once. But in the mouth of Reagan and other conservatives, freedom conveyed what Isaiah Berlin called its negative sense, an absence of constraints on markets and individual action. Reagan’s program of “economic freedom” included deregulation, tax cuts, and a weakening of unions, which earlier conservatives had championed in the name of the “liberty of employers.”