PC Speak

Lincoln was fond of asking people: “If you call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs does a sheep have?” And when they answered “Five,” he’d say, “No, four. Because calling it a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” What he was reflecting on was people’s belief that changing the name of a thing changes its nature. As if language had some magical power to transform reality.

I’m doing a graduate course in English Literature at Arizona State University on line, which is a fine, convenient, competent program. The work is demanding, the instructors are gracious and fair, but the farther I get into it, the more troubled I become. One professor announced that she would be using the pronoun “they,” even though she knew it was grammatically incorrect, but she feared offending people by having to choose between “he” and “she,” or the clumsy expression “he and/or she.” And so we get a sentence like: “One of my students said that they were sick.” I’m sorry, but that means that the student is talking about other people—other people are sick, not him or her. That’s what the pronoun was meant to convey. A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in gender and number; PC or not, that’s the rule. And God knows we have precious few of them in English.

Just today, one of my classmates referred to prostitution as “survival work,” a term I had never heard, at least not in that context. To me, survival work is any crummy job you have to take to pay the rent and feed yourself. My survival work was vacuuming carpets, and pumping gas, and wiping up the blood on the floor in the basement of a butcher shop. The idea is to avoid using the word "prostitute," since that might offend them. Forget that that’s what they are; we don’t dare offend them since doing so would not be politically correct. And that’s what lurks behind all this, after all: political correctness. It was quaint and kinda cute when it started back in the 90s, during the Clinton presidency—you remember Bill Clinton, who molested women and was accused of rape—but it’s gotten worse over the years, and now it’s out of control.

Now we have “triggers” and “safe rooms” in schools to protect our students from being made to feel uncomfortable. As if they were intellectual toddlers who have to be saved from banging their heads. Well, sometimes it’s a good idea to bang heads, sometimes it’s the only way to get people to wake up and grow up and think. Now we have protests to shut down speech with which we disagree, and riots to run speakers off of campuses. We have controversial thinkers bullied and intimidated and attacked, and classic books rewritten and even banned. My son had to read Huckleberry Finn over the summer, and I got a two-page letter from the school warning us about the language, and apologizing for Mark Twain. I couldn’t help but think how Twain would have loved that. It was exactly the kind of Letter from the Earth which he himself wrote a hundred years ago. He saw it coming; he just didn’t imagine that his own work would be a victim.

History teaches us that the first victim of tyrants is language: Change the way people speak and you can change the way they think. They all did it, the fascists, the communists, the racists and anti-Semites, the homophobes and misogynists, and now it’s the politically correct crowd. And they don’t even realize the company they’re so eager to join. Control language and you control thought, control thought and you control expression, control expression and you control dissent, control dissent and you can enslave people. They did it in the late, unlamented Soviet Union, where Jews were the “cosmopolitan element;” they’re doing it in Muslim countries where the murder of children is “honor killing;” they did it in Serbia where genocide was "ethnic cleansing;" we did it in Vietnam, where massacre was “pacification;” they’re doing it now in North Korea and Cuba and Iran, where anybody who dares to disagree is “an enemy of the revolution.” Language equals thought, which equals expression, which enables dissent, which leads to freedom. So control language, Mr. Tyrant, if you want to survive.

There is a growing glossary of words in our society which we are no longer allowed to use. Not allowed by whom? Government? Media? Peers? Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn; I am a writer, and nobody tells me what to think, and what I can and cannot say. That's in the nature of my profession, woven with words and blood into its history. Writers before me have been persecuted and prosecuted and imprisoned and killed to preserve the right to write what they pleased, and to tell anybody and everybody and sometimes even nobody what they believed to be true, in words of their own choosing. Their only tool was language, their only weapon was truth, and churches and governments and bullies of all kinds who feared the truth instinctively targeted language.

I love the English language; it’s the medium in which I live and think and speak, the language in which I dream and fantasize, mourn, celebrate, muse, and meditate. It’s a living, growing organism, vibrant and rich as spring, as much a part of me as blood and tissue, and I treasure it. So please don’t twist and torment it for political purposes; let it develop naturally, don’t try to force it into faddish shapes to slake your PC fetish. Leave the English language alone, let it breathe and be, respect the few rules it acknowledges; don’t try to make a sheep’s tail into a leg, because we’ve seen where that leads: George Orwell showed us seventy years ago in 1984. 

Night rain

Last night there was a rain, and it was lovely to lie awake and listen to its rhythm on the roof. A rare rain, living in a desert as I do, or near-desert as the clean-shavers of science would say. How reassuring was that roof-rhythm, neither exact nor arbitrary, but measured with the random vibrancy of Nature, connecting with the rhythms of the self – the beating of the heart, the bloodflow tides, the pulse of breath, the blink of eyes. A melody as soft and soothing as a nightsong or the touch of fingertips on flesh, the finest experience of which is harmony; the fullest expression of which is love. That rinsing rhythm reminds us we are not in Nature but of Nature, and that for all the evil in the world there is a will that wishes well, a vast benevolence which holds us in its palm, a clasp that is the span of space and the timelessness of time. We are not alone, will never be alone, so long as that consoling, cupped caress contains us, and bears us safely through this darkling universe until we reach at last the end of rainfall night.

Managerial Mystification

As I continue to follow, at some distance, the carnival sideshow parade of the Trump presidency, my perplex over the president's managerial style deepens. How could he possibly have run a multinational conglomerate the way he runs the White House? Anybody who has ever managed anything knows you don't contradict and humiliate your staff in public, you don't undercut their authority, you don't criticize and threaten to fire them openly -- in short, you don't wash your own dirty linen in full view of the very people you're trying to serve. Yet that is precisely how Donald Trump is behaving. Which causes me to wonder: How did this genius of the deal become so successful while being so hapless?

I might as well say it: Jack Kennedy was an incompetent president. If he had not been murdered when he was, his presidency would have dissolved in scandals that would have made Watergate look like a junior prom. Yet he had a personal style that was charming, dignified, and reassuring. Richard Nixon was competent, but his personality was so flawed that his abilites made no difference to his fate. Barack Obama was certainly incompetent, but at least he was amiable. Donald Trump is proving himself to be massively incompetent, without even the saving grace of an amenable personal style. He comes across as abrasive, arbitrary, and disrespectful even of his own closest advisers. As I have remarked before, more so than any recent president, his legacy will depend on what he is seen as having accomplished. And so far, he has accomplished precious little. His miserable failure to replace the disaster that is Obamacare was due largely, as far as I can tell, to his inability to deal even with members of his own ruling party. On this pivotal constitutional issue (and I see it as a constitutional and not a healthcare issue), he has managed to alienate just about everyone. 

And talk about messaging! He continues to send out a steady stream of inconsistent, mixed, contradictory, and tendentious tweets that make it virtually impossible either to take him seriously as a chief executive or to discern what his core beliefs and policies may be. This is not only annoying; given the current internal and foreign climate, it is downright dangerous. And yet he will not stop; he seems incapable of learning and of changing his behavior, which are two essential assets in a leader. Lincoln was cautious, careful in his judgments, but he lived by the principle: "I will adopt new views as quickly as they are proved to be true views." Trump appears not only unable to adopt new views, but even to recognize them. 

So far, he has stumbled through his presidency like a non-drinking alcoholic, unable to get out of his own fumbling way. And now he moves on to tax reform. Every president in my lifetime has attempted to fix the baroque, unfair, and irrational tax system in this country, and all have failed. So what makes Trump, or anyone else for that matter, think that he will succeed where his predecessors have not? It appears that he now believes that he can co-opt the Democrats into providing him with the majority which the voters gave him and which he has managed to squander away. That, to my mind, is a degree of naïveté of which this non-political president is perhaps uniquely capable. Does he really imagine, even in his wildest dreams, that the Democrats are going to help him establish a legacy of success, and in the process, contribute to his re-election chances? Schumer and Pelosi, those evil twins of rabid partisanship, as partners, as collegial comrades? What kind of fatuous fantasy is that?

Who is talking to Trump? Who is advising him? Why, the people around him must be as incompetent as he, since they clearly cannot persuade him to act even in his own self-interest. Next he will be trying to coax The New York Times and NBC on board his train to oblivion. And they will be only too happy to oblige, so that they can push the throttle to demolition speed. The Democrats are not going to let Trump have his tax reform, since that would serve only to enhance his prospects in the midterms and 2020. On the contrary, I fully expect that if they do pretend to collaborate with him, it will be only to sabotage any hope we may have of getting meaningful tax reform in this decade. 

Much as I hate to agree with the mainstream media, which no longer even affects the pretense of objectivity, the sooner Donald Trump goes, the better for all of us. And that he will be gone before his term is up I think is clear to anyone who is paying attention, not to the media, but to the Great Deal-maker himself, as he systematically negotiates the terms of his own demise.