Last autumn at a party in New York
City, a six-year-old girl named Lucia overheard two women praising
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The little girl, whose
mother was a supporter of Barack Obama, marched up to them and
declared, “No, Romney is a liar!” The women promptly told her
that little children should not use the word “liar” and, on the
verge of tears, Lucia told her mother what had happened.
The mother, a former newspapering
colleague of mine who now is an artist in New York, told her
daughter: “I’m very proud of you. Go tell those people, ‘liar’
is the word for Romney. It’s true, he lies all the time. And
it is your right to say whatever words.”
The incident was posted on Facebook,
prompting a long thread of comments, mostly supportive of the little
girl and her mother. But one man, a journalist with a pro-business
daily in New York, said: “Lucia, your mother is wrong. It is rude
to go up to someone and call someone they like a liar. Especially not
Mr Romney, who is a wonderful man and is going to make a wonderful
president!There are more civil ways to express your opinion. Your
mother was raised in a communist country, so she didn’t learn these
things, but you are growing up in a democratic country where we can
disagree and still be civil to each other.”
While it is true that this mother grew
up in China, she was in fact an advocate of democracy during that
period, risking her neck to support the student protesters in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and has been a fierce opponent
of censorship and eloquent backer of humanist causes since moving to
the West. But was she right to support her young daughter’s “right”
to use “unparliamentary” terms like “liar” when speaking to
her elders? Should one so young be allowed to criticize others’
political beliefs, or should she be seen and not heard? Indeed,
should we all be “civil to each other” when we disagree?
In 1946, George Orwell published an
essay called “Politics and the English Language”, in which he
famously slammed the political writing of his time as mere defence of
the indefensible with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness”. This year, on January 17, Steven Poole published in The
Guardian My problem with George Orwell, noting that while Orwell was broadly correct, “his more general
attacks in ‘Politics’ on what he perceives to be bad style are
often outright ridiculous, parading a comically arbitrary collection
of intolerances”.
These sorts of debates are interesting
but mostly pointless, especially in reference to English as it was
spoken and written nearly seven decades ago. Poole and others wring
their hands at Orwell’s preference for “plain English” based on
short, stark Anglo-Saxon words over longer, more flowery “foreign”
equivalents. But no good writer, including Orwell or Hemingway, would
advocate total rejection of, say, French- or Latin-derived terms when
they serve the purpose better than the Germanic, if only to add some
Romantic colour to the Teutonic greyness. The whole point is to see
what purpose is being served.
In our day as in Orwell’s,
politicians, marketers, bankers and charlatans continue to confuse us
with their choice of language. In the short term, they get what they
want – our vote, or our money, or some violation of our rights. In
the longer term, they impoverish the language itself, as definitions
become vague or perverted, including such critically important words
as “freedom” and “democracy”. The boundaries between lies and
truth become hazy; what should be intelligent debate is an exchange
of hot air.
In an era when storytelling consists of
televised dramas constantly interrupted by commercial “messages”,
when government policy consists of thirty-second soundbites, when the
most respected and trusted commentator in the United States is
apparently a comedian, the power of a true orator like Barack Obama is greatly enhanced. A
stark example of this power was seen in the run-up and aftermath of
his second inauguration, again in The Guardian.
On January 20, Michael Cohen noted: “Inaugural speeches, like their oratorically challenged cousins,
State of the Union addresses, are fundamental to the American
political system – a requirement of mandate and tradition. But both
tend to be rhetorical wastelands.” He predicted that in Obama’s
upcoming speech, therefore, “rather than being greeted by rousing
words, you [will] get mushy platitudes, vacuous banalities and trite
paeans to national unity”.
Indeed, Peace Prize laureate Obama has
been a crushing disappointment to many. Not only did he break his
first-day-in-office promise to close the Guantanamo concentration
camp, he has underwritten a campaign to silence dissent and crush
whistleblowers, an onslaught that would be the envy of Dick Cheney,
with the unconscionable jailing without charge of Bradley Manning,
the corporate-abetted muzzling of Julian Assange and the fatal
harassment of Aaron Swartz. The reach of the US military empire has
been extended to extrajudicial killings, violation of sovereign
airspace with a proliferation of drones, destabilizing “pivots”
into Africa and East Asia, provocation of Iran and cyber-warfare on
an unprecedented scale. Yet what did Michael Cohen say after Obama’s address on January 21?
Over the weekend, I wrote for The Guardian that inaugural addresses tend to be banal, platitudinous affairs with saccharine pieties to national unity – and [that] Barack Obama’s second inaugural was unlikely to be much different. Today, Barack Obama proved that argument quite wrong.
Rather than an empty call to national unity, Obama offered one of the most full-throated defences of liberalism that this or any other president has delivered – and he did so in the shadow of unquenchable internecine political conflict.
So, what is truth, and who will direct
us to it? If not The Three Princes of Serendip, perhaps
another famed orator, the Prince of Peace.
Long ago, that carpenter from the town
of Nazareth in northern Palestine, speaking on a lakeside hilltop to
a crowd of (we assume) rapt listeners, and (as was his wont) in good
seventeenth-century English, said: “Every tree that bringeth not
forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall
know them.”
