Iqra’i

The semi-annual vacation reading of all my parents’ periodicals brought me to an article by Yale’s own David Bromwich (with whom I will take a class eventually) on euphemism and torture. He describes the “nerve-deadening understatement” of our discourse — wars of unprovoked aggression become “regime change”; mercenaries become “contractors” and finally “employees”; escalation is a “surge” (which sounds as though it contains taurine); torture is “abuse” or simply “professional interrogation techniques.”

The word “professional” is telling, because though this shift numbs our visceral reaction to violence, it’s essentially because it’s an importation of the corporate/bureaucratic world into politics. It isn’t an accident that Bush 43 is the first president with an MBA, promising to run the government “more like a business.” Ever since “dialogue” became a verb, language has been methodically stripped of meaning, connotation, color. Words like “war” and “mercenary” and “torture” conjure up a wealth of images; words like “conflict” and “contractor” don’t.

This isn’t the stylishly gritty world of noir, which can be vivid without color; it isn’t even the helplessly washed-out, brown-tinged wasteland of Westerns. Our language has become bland and mechanical, and so have the ideas we express with it. We envision society as a machine: if we punch the right buttons, we’ll get the outcome we want.

Our favorite thought experiment about torture, the ticking time bomb, assumes that people work like machines, and hides the real point: torture isn’t just a thing we have to do sometimes to avoid a greater evil, an unpleasant job like cleaning the bathroom or flossing. It destroys what makes us human. The ticking time bomb isn’t a question of whether torture is justified, it’s a question of whether we can sacrifice not only our bodies but our souls. Any given thought experiment can’t cover every side of an issue, though they can be useful in forcing someone to address something they’ve ignored. The danger comes when we revert to the same old canards: we never see what they leave out.

Jargon or mindless repetition of canards — corporate, political, or academic — can absolve us of the responsibility for thought. Once, in a fit of disgust with a literature class, I decided to write the most ridiculous paper I could. It started:

…the poem’s rich language suggests passion and decay, lush vitality and decadent rot. The opposition of incongruous images…contains a wealth of semiotic detail that expands and refines the implications of the text itself. The dialectical structure created by the juxtaposition of contrasting elements is subordinated to the circularity of the image as a whole, indicating the cyclical nature of life, inevitability of death, and art’s unique role in revealing these.

Taken together, this does not mean anything, but even the most pretentious word here has a legitimate use elsewhere. Adam and the Reactionary Epicurean claim that jargon is only exclusionary, that the only point to using words like “epistemological” or “liminality” is to show how much smarter we are than anyone else. The RE goes so far as to claim that “anything that can be said can be said in small words of anglo-saxon origin.” This is generally true — “fire” is a better word than “conflagration,” and our urge to complicate our language smacks of préciosité — but complicated and obscure words serve a vital function: genre.

At another point, the RE explains that “Möbius transformations form a group under composition which is isomorphic to the automorphism group of a sphere.” Since I am a Humanities major, this means nothing to me, but if he says it in small words of Anglo-Saxon origin, it loses the indefinable tinge and magic of math.

Non-specific language turns the extraordinary mundane, as when mercenaries become “contractors” — and as when epistemology becomes “knowing stuff.”

If you don’t recognize the title, run, do not walk, to your nearest video rental facility and get Annie Hall. Alternatively, watch this.

(Note to Adam: I am in no sense a neoconservative, unless you mean “neo-” in the sense of “new”; in that case, far better to call me a baby conservative, which, while patronizing, is at least true.)