Going Nucular Page 9
It would take quite a while for any new name to establish itself and for a story line to cohere around it, particularly if the screenplay has to be written from scratch. But it’s looking as if there will be time for that.
Politics as Usual
So Sorry
The sociologist Erving Goffman used to talk about apologizing as a kind of “face-work,” the maneuvers that help people get through their interactions with everybody’s self-image intact. That sense of face comes from a translation of the Chinese expression for “lose face,” tio lien. The phrase entered English in the 1860s, at a time when the Western powers were carving up China into zones of influence. The British had made some new demands, and when the Chinese resisted, the British sent a force headed by Lord Elgin to press their case. They burned the Summer Palace outside Beijing, but Elgin decided to spare the Forbidden City itself, fearing that its destruction would result in such a loss of face for the Manchus that the dynasty might fall—an unsettling prospect for Western trade. In the end, the British came out of the affair with some economic concessions, the Kowloon territory, and a useful new phrase. And while nowadays we talk about “losing face” in all sorts of contexts, the words still have a slightly orientalist ring.
So it wasn’t surprising that journalists and politicians kept talking about the importance of saving face in connection with the incident last week when a U.S. spy plane was forced down in China. Some people argued that the Administration had to make some sort of verbal concession so that the Chinese could get out of the impasse in a face-saving way. But others claimed that any apology would cause the U.S. to lose face in Chinese eyes and weaken us in our further dealings with them. And when Bush’s letter to the Chinese was released, those critics were quick to describe it using another expression borrowed from Chinese. As an editorial in National Review put it, “to apologize for a landing forced by Chinese recklessness . . . veers near kowtow territory.”
Fresh Air Commentary, April 14, 2001
Kowtow came into English after an earlier diplomatic confrontation between China and the West. In 1793, Great Britain sent Lord George Macartney to China as a trade envoy. The Chinese insisted that Macartney kowtow to the emperor, touching his forehead to the ground in a sign of submission. Macartney refused to do any more than bend his knee, as he would to an English sovereign. In his report he said that the Chinese had acceded to his conditions, though according to Chinese accounts he actually did touch his forehead. Probably Macartney’s version was right—at least that would explain why he had to leave without the agreement he was after. But one way or the other, critics have been using the word ever since when anyone seems to be too deferential to China—people accused Bush’s father of kowtowing when he refused to take a hard line towards the Chinese government after the Tiananmen massacres.
“Lose face,” “kowtow”—when we borrow expressions like those, there’s always the implication that we’re in exotic cultural territory, and that these things matter more to the Chinese than they do to us. That perception was heightened last week when the Chinese versions of the American statement were released, and the newspapers called in language specialists to explain the subtleties of the translations. You came away with the impression that Chinese was a language with as many words for sorry as Eskimos are supposed to have for snow.
The American coverage made the whole affair sound like one of those familiar cross-cultural confrontations: a simple plain-spoken people with little patience for social rituals up against an Eastern culture that insists on elaborate shows of deference. But the fact is that when it comes to a belief in the ritual potency of apologies, Americans bow to no one. American public life has become a theater of contrition. Politicians ask forgiveness for their sexual and financial peccadilloes, athletes apologize for making racially insensitive remarks, journalists flagellate themselves when they’re caught fabricating stories. And not a week goes by without some group calling for an official apology for some wrong that the government visited on them in the past.
In response, English has developed a vocabulary of penitence that can go verb-to-verb and adjective-to-adjective with any other language on earth. We have expressions for every gradation of responsibility and remorse. “Regrettable,” “inexcusable,” “an unfortunate error of judgment,” “I acknowledge my personal responsibility,” “We apologize for any inconvenience.” The hard disks of corporate publicists are full of boilerplate mea culpas and nostra culpas to cover everything from oil spills to accounting irregularities. “Unacceptable” is a recent favorite here—“Our last quarter’s revenues were unacceptable.” It’s an elegant way of appropriating the indignation without accepting the blame.
So when some suitably placating noises were called for last week, the State Department was up to the challenge. The only question is whether the Chinese were as adept at interpreting the U.S. response as Americans would be. After the U.S. statement was released, the Chinese media were announcing that the U.S. really had apologized for the collision. A lot of Americans were put out by that—there’s nothing more irritating than to have somebody think you apologized when you know you damn well didn’t.
Of course it’s likely that those Chinese reports were just face-saving propaganda, like their claims about Lord Macartney’s alleged kowtow to the emperor two hundred years ago. But you never know—maybe the Chinese really did miss some of the nuances of the American response. They may have a longer tradition of face-work than we do, but they’ve always gone about it in a very demonstrative way. They measure degrees of contrition by how deeply you prostrate your body; with us it can be simply a question of how sincerely you bite your lip.
Some of My Best Friends
In their serial cluelessness, Senator Trent Lott’s apologies for his nostalgic remarks about Senator Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign in 1948 brought to mind a scene from Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, which reimagines the domestic melodramas of the 1950s. At a Hartford art exhibition, the upper-middle-class housewife, Cathy Whitaker, runs into her black gardener. “I’m not prejudiced,” she tells him. “Mr. Whitaker and I support equal rights for the Negro.”
The line makes audiences titter. Whether or not we have put the mentalities of the 1950s behind us, the language of the period is as dated as pedal pushers and tailfins. It isn’t just the reference to “the Negro,” with that definite article that reduced a group to an exotic museum specimen (nobody ever talked about “the white” or “the Methodist”). Mrs. Whitaker’s “I’m not prejudiced” is just as telling. It’s hard to know which betrays its decade more, the word prejudiced or the character’s ingenuous disavowal of it.
Prejudice wasn’t a new word back then, of course, but it enjoyed a vogue in the ’50s, particularly in the form of the bare adjective prejudiced, with no need to specify the object of dislike. The fashion owed a lot to the influential 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, by the Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport. Back then, in fact, prejudice had the flavor of other terms from social science that were flooding the language, like juvenile delinquent, peer pressure, and status symbol.
The New York Times Week in Review, December 22, 2002
The postwar concern with prejudice signaled an acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of racial and religious antipathies. Before then, people tended to refer to those animosities with terms that didn’t so much stigmatize the attitudes themselves as the vulgarity of taking them to excess. Bigot, for example, was a word of obscure origin that originally referred to a religious zealot, but which by the 1920s could be applied to someone with a narrow-minded animus against other races or religions. Still, it was a word that people associated more with Alabama sheriffs than with the demure country-club bias of the Connecticut suburbs.
In its way, the concern with prejudice signaled the optimism of a society that had just licked fascism and was looking hopefully toward the final triumph of tolerance. As Allport described it, prejudice was a superficial personality trait, ro
oted in the cognitive error of “faulty generalization.” As such, prejudice was something you could learn to recognize in yourself and root out by assiduous mental housecleaning—a view that helped shape the faith in the remedial effects of integration.
Within a few years, though, that began to seem simplistic. Prejudice seemed to reduce all unwarranted animosities to a single pattern, whether they were directed against Jews, blacks, women, homosexuals, or the blind—or, for that matter, against Communists or Republicans. By the 1960s, those aversions all seemed to have had distinct etiologies and to merit different names, and over the coming decades prejudice was replaced by a whole lexicon of social pathologies: anti-Semitism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism—and still counting.
Apart from older terms like anti-Semitism and xenophobia, racism was the earliest and most potent of those terms. The word had actually been coined in the 1930s as a variant of racialism, to describe the racial doctrines of the fascists. By 1960, however, people were using the term to describe a personal or collective disposition that ran too deep to be accessible to cursory introspection. That was the Catch—22 of racism: If you denied it, you could be suspected of not really understanding what it was about. All of a sudden you could be held responsible for feelings you didn’t know you had. “I’m not a racist” came to sound a bit like “I don’t have any homosexual anxiety.”
Racism and the other terms of the ’60s blurred the distinction between thoughts and deeds. The social scientists of the 1950s had insisted that prejudice and discrimination were different things: Allport gave the example of an employer who dislikes Jews but treats them the same as anyone else. But racism suggested an unconscious attitude that invariably spilled over into behavior. And as if in sympathy, the word bias acquired the same ambiguity around this time, as people began to use it not just for a mental predilection but for the actions that followed from it, as in “housing bias.”
Whatever the fortunes of the ’60s social movements, their linguistic success was immediate and total. Negro was abandoned so rapidly that there were probably some Southerners who never used the word at all—they went straight from colored to blacks. And while prejudice has survived, its use in racial contexts has been declining. In a database of eighteen major newspapers, the relative frequency of phrases like “race prejudice” has declined by 60 percent since 1980, while the frequency of racism has doubled.
But those figures can be misleading. While the unreconstructed right was quick to adopt the new language, in their mouths the words were less the marks of new concepts than the relabelings of old ones—not the discredited notions of the days of Jim Crow, but the notions that 1950s liberals had discarded when they left words like prejudice behind.
Listen to Senator Lott defending himself on the Black Entertainment Network (BET): “In order to be a racist, you have to feel superior. . . . I don’t believe any man or any woman is superior to any other man or woman.” That’s pretty much the way someone like Allport would have defined prejudice in the ’50s—as a simple matter of mistaken beliefs, and ones you can confidently reassure someone you don’t harbor. Along with Lott’s pointing to the blacks he had hired, his explanation suggested exactly the sort of comfortable assumptions people were rejecting when they abandoned prejudice for racism forty years ago—around the same time Americans were learning to smile at protestations of tolerance that began with “Some of my best friends . . . ”
Consider the manner in which the right defends the vision of a “color-blind society,” for example, in tones that echo the earnest speech the good-guy lieutenant or hospital administrator or baseball manager was always making in those “problem films” of the 1950s. As Sidney Poitier’s medical supervisor put it in Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 No Way Out: “I’m just pro good doctor—black, white, or polka-dot”—except that back then the point was to justify holding on to the doctor, not refusing to hire him. It’s an odd code that the rear-guard right has been speaking in for the past forty years—using the words of the 1960s with the meanings of the ’50s to convey the message of the ’40s.
Interested Parties
Arnold Schwarzenegger may be a newcomer to California politics, but he has clearly been swatting up on the state’s traditional rhetorical themes. He launched his campaign by pledging to become “the people’s governor,” vowing that he would accept no money from “the special interests who have a stranglehold on Sacramento.” When it transpired that he had accepted contributions from developers and other wealthy individuals, he explained that those weren’t special interests but merely “powerful interests who control things.” What he had meant, he said, was only that he would refuse contributions from public employee unions or other groups he might have to negotiate with as governor. He apologized for the confusion about his fund-raising policy by saying, “I was not articulate enough to explain that.”
In fairness to Schwarzenegger, he isn’t the first politician to try to extricate himself from an apparent inconsistency by pleading linguistic ineptitude. And unlike others, he has the excuse of having come late to the English language and later still to the subtleties of its political patois. “Special interest” is a phrase that everyone uses selectively, after all. Schwarzenegger is merely guilty of having acknowledged explicitly what everyone else finds it prudent to leave unsaid.
The New York Times Week in Review, September 14, 2003
But the words that everyone takes for granted are usually the ones that work the most mischief in political life. The British politician Aneurin Bevan once noted that the student of politics “must always be on his guard against the old words, for the words persist when the reality behind them has changed.”
As it happens, Schwarzenegger’s campaign language, like the recall itself, is a legacy of the Progressive era. The recall process was adopted in 1911 under the governorship of the progressive reformer Hiram Johnson, who had been elected on the basis of a pledge much like Schwarzenegger’s, to “return the government of California to the people.” The difference was that in Johnson’s case the “stranglehold” was exercised not by the public employee unions but by the Southern Pacific railroad—“the Octopus,” as it was called, after the title of Frank Norris’s 1880 novel about the struggle between the railroad and California wheat farmers. Like many progressives, Johnson put his faith in electoral reforms like the recall and the referendum, which “place in the hands of the people the means by which they may protect themselves.”
The Progressive movement battened on that opposition between “the people” and “the interests,” as people then referred to the trusts, corporations, and financial combines whose hold on American politics had been dramatically exposed in a series of scandals over the first decade of the century. Writing in 1922, in fact, Walter Lippmann noted that that rhetoric had become an electoral cliché. “The question of a proper fare on a municipal subway is symbolized as an issue between the People and the Interests . . . so that finally in the heat of a campaign, an eight cent fare becomes unAmerican. The Revolutionary fathers died to prevent it. Lincoln suffered that it might not come to pass, resistance to it was implied in the death of those who sleep in France.”
Even so, the notion of “interest,” in all its complexity, was central in the age’s thinking about democracy. The word crops up over and over again in the writings of Henry Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Herbert Croly, Lippmann, and John Dewey. It oscillates among personal, economic, and political meanings, as writers struggled to define the paramount political virtue of disinterestedness.
Much of the Progressives’ language survived the era, along with their political reforms, but both were altered and denatured. By the time Robert LaFollette ran for president on the Progressive ticket in 1924, it was clear that “the interests” had adapted to the political and administrative reforms of the era. Money still talked, even if it had to speak a different dialect.
LaFollette was probably the last major politician to use the bald phrase “the interes
ts.” By the New Deal era, it had been replaced by “special interests,” and later by the spin-off “specialinterest groups.” In those phrases, though, the meaning of “interest” was no longer restricted to economically powerful groups like corporations and, later, labor unions. By 1948, a letter-writer to The New York Times could describe opera fans as a special-interest group who shouldn’t be subsidized by public funds. And in modern usage a special interest can be just about any group that favors a particular law or policy, invariably with the implication that its demands are at odds with the interests of “the people.”
The Weekly Standard inveighs against “special interest legislation” like the California law that gives workplace protection for cross-dressing employees. An Enviromental Protection Agency administrator talks about the special interests who tried unsuccessfully to get greenhouse-gas emissions classified as pollutants. A sample grant application from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety gives “anti-tobacco” as an example of a special interest group. And Hootie Johnson, the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club, insists that the club will not “capitulate to special interest groups” by agreeing to admit women.
Those uses of “special interest” neatly obscure the difference between having an interest and being one. We may talk about banking interests or labor interests, but phrases like “the opera-lovers interest,” “the women’s interest,” and “the cross-dressing interest” don’t come easily to the tongue. The way “special interest” is used nowadays, it blurs the distinction between the economic and political senses of interest that the Progressives struggled to reconcile. Now everyone is “interested,” in the old sense of the word—the environmentalists as much as the carmakers, the American Cancer Society as much as the tobacco companies.