February 02, 2003

A point that I feel I should make about one of yesterday's posts: it's not really the "Iraqis" per se that I meant to skewer, it was Reuters. Hence the publishing, rewriting, and redistribution of their editorial-disguised-as-news. As an organization--particularly as a "wire service"--Reuters is infuriatingly biased. They are as close to a pure propaganda source as you will find these days. Doubtless, there are in fact some Iraqis who feel just as the "sources" quoted by Reuters do, and in that case...well, they don't get to have any fun once their favorite regime has been toppled.

Which brings to mind something else that I've been chewing on the past few days, namely, this somewhat overwrought post over at the Agonist. Short summary: war is bad. You warmongering types make me sick. Long summary: war is bad. You warmongering types make me sick. I will publicly flay you so that everyone knows that the support I offer to the regrettable necessity of war is morally correct and suitably reluctant.

The assumption here seems to be that all those who support the war without making appropriate noises acknowledging its dreadful seriousness are inhuman monsters who will revel knee-deep in the blood of their vanquished foes, wear their livers for hats and make amusing wall hangings from their intestines. Additionally, these orc-like fiends are cowards, relying upon the sacrifices of others to obtain their hepatic chapeaus and duodenal macramé. What the author seems to have ignored is the distinct possibility that, among the pro-war community, the dreadful seriousness of war is a given, and does not require constant acknowledgment. I won't address the tired "chickenhawk" slur, which has been more than adequately dealt with elsewhere.

I draw attention to this particular bit of posturing because, while I found it to be unnecessarily judgmental and sweepingly moralistic, not to mention profane, it made me think about some of my own writings about the war. This doesn't mean that I'm allowing the rant credibility, any more than a laquered pile of dogshit under glass gains validity by making those who see it briefly consider whether it's art or not. What I think I finally found at the root of this particular bit of spume was a postmodernist conception of the power of words, and far beneath that, a Pharisee's faith in the efficacy of public prayer.

Now, what do I mean by that obscure bit of jargonism?

To begin with, I have found that there is a certain tendency along the leftward side of things (as it is defined today) to behave as though the words used to describe a thing can change the reality of the thing. Noam Chomsky--who is by no coincidence a linguist--is currently the foremost practitioner of this art. At the point of his capable pen, America is transformed from the world's best attempt at a free society into the greatest imperial oppressor history has ever known, intent only on exercising its own power upon the global stage. From that transformation, all of his arguments flow. He works deep within the root words of language, and from that work he builds imposing edifices that are very persuasive once you have accepted his terminology and the definitions of the words that he uses. It's a very powerful technique. Faith in this same technique has given us the terms "person of size," "[ethnic]-American," "differently-abled," and so on, all of which are intended to change the reality of a social situation simply by changing the terminology used to describe that situation.

However, to someone who does not share that faith, words in and of themselves do not hold the same, mystical power. This is why the insertion of academic parlance into public discourse hasn't appreciably changed the state of race relations in this country, or kept Jay Leno from making fat jokes. The problem in this particular culture is that such terminological manipulation often runs up against the finely-tuned American "bullshit detector." At some level, most of us know that it's not really the words that matter. It is usually the reality of the action taken, rather than any description of the action, that determines whether we'll swallow any given language-pill.

This works both ways: someone who has faith in the power of words in and of themselves to change the reality of a situation will read someone else's words, and lend to them a power that they may not posess. Thus, when a pro-war author pens words describing the prospect of war with something less than grave seriousness, the word-power believer finds within that ommission the total lack of grave seriousness. Which, in turn, leads to an age-old phenomenon.

When Jesus--or someone like him--was stirring up trouble, one of the groups he pointed fingers at was the Pharisees. As Rabbi Telushkin has pointed out [Jewish Literacy, p. 131], the term "Pharisee" has become a pejorative, but this does not change the underlying reality that the greatest teachers of talmudic Judaism were Pharisees, and that as a Jewish sect the Pharisees were no more objectionable than the Saducees or the Essenes. They represented an authority-class of Judaism, and were broadly condemned by the writers of the New Testament and eventually by Christianity as a whole. However, the behavior that Jesus--rightly or wrongly--attributed to that group concerns public righteousness and the power of words, as contrasted with the righteousness known to God and the power of the spirit.

In Matthew 23, we read Jesus' sweeping condemnation of certain practices attributed to the Pharisees. Among other things, he accuses them of obsession with the particulars of law, rather than the faith that drives observance of it; the valuation of the gold offered at the temple and upon the altar over the temple and the altar themselves; and the public show of lengthy prayers. All of these "woes" have to do with mistaking of outward trappings of a thing for the reality of a thing, and serve as parables for the true nature of faith and righteousness. As with many things found in Scripture, these passages also illustrate human behaviors which are as salient today as they were two thousand years ago.

Assigning undue power and influence to words can result in public displays of pious written condemnation, the purpose of which is twofold. First, it demonstrates the author's faith that words are the thing-in-itself, capable of powerful influence both by their presence and by their absence. Second, the author derives self-affirmation from the supposed power of the words. The specific condemnation of others' lack of written orthodoxy reinforces the presence of the author's written and personal orthodoxy. Thus, the presence of positive statements about war with Iraq coupled with the absence of explicitly negative statements adds up to "rooting for war," and occasions explicit statements of moral disgust on the part of the condemning author. This is, in essence, the making of "lengthy prayers for show" and the swearing of an oath by the "gold of the temple" rather than by the temple itself, which makes the gold sacred. It is the camel swallowed while the tiny gnat is strained out.

Today, we mostly do without gold offerings at temples or debates about the particulars of sacred law, and our public square is largely bereft of prayers, ostentatious or otherwise. But we do have our orthodoxies, and in this information age they are enforced with words. This enforcement can be subtle, such as the Agonist's public decrying of a written sin of ommission as a lack of moral seriousness. It can be overt, such as the continuing masquerade of the anti-American Reuters wire service as a news organization. But those of us who are serious about words as craft know that they are imperfect at best, and posess no power by themselves. What power they have is lent by the intentions of the author and of the reader.