Saturday, June 07, 2008 - Posts
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Rick Hills has certainly read his Orwell more recently than I, and he is quite right to insist that Orwell attacked intellectuals frequently. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise—only that his main targets in his best and most prominent work were politicians and bureaucrats. It’s true, as Hills reminds me, that Politics and the English Language begins with examples of bad English written by professors.But its heart (at least in my opinion) is here:
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the same familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-strained tyranny, freepeoples of the world—one has the curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy. … A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. …In our time, political speech and writing are largely in defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan can indeed be defended, but only by arguments that are too brutal for most people to face. ... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven into the countryside, the cattle machine gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. …
I think it’s clear at this point that poor old Professor Laski, who Orwell deftly skewers at the beginning of the essay, is small potatoes: Orwell’s main gripe here is with political—not academic—writing. He ends with a powerful attack on “pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the Speeches of Under Secretaries.” Some of these are no doubt written by intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, but the worst abuses were and are from politicians, bureaucrats, and activists, both left and right, for whom Orwell expressed well-deserved contempt.
The type of obscurity Orwell condemns here is not the same as the type of obscurity we find in the work of, say, Judith Butler or Jacques Lacan or G.W.F. Hegel, for that matter (though Hills is right to insist Orwell expressed contempt for this kind of obscurity as well). Butler and Lacan are obviously and, in a sense, honestly obscure—even if their obscurity clothes some mundane insights in the garb of the profound, it’s obvious from the start that this is difficult writing that will require work to make heads or tails of—you know what you’re in for when you start in on Bodies That Matter* or Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis. What’s worse than even the most needlessly obscure pseudo-intellectualism (and before I get more hate mail than I’m due, I don’t say that Butler or Lacan fall into this category, but we all know of some work that does) is the type of jargon Orwell attacks at the end of Politics: dying metaphors, hackneyed phrases, wooden jargon, which seem to everyone to mean something but actually mean nothing.
The problem here isn’t that we’re being bamboozled by something that pretends to depth and profundity but is in fact shallow or banal. The evil here is jargon and political doublespeak that is so familiar that we think the speaker is saying something plain and straightforward when in fact they’re just bullshitting (or what they’re actually saying is monstrous). It’s not the phrases that are conspicuously obscure but instead the meaningless phrases that become rote, so the sentences seem to write themselves. It’s not writing that requires more effort than it’s worth; it’s writing that doesn’t require any effort to read, or to write, for that matter, because it’s just a bunch of canned phrases taped together with some punctuation and some conjunctions. This is worse than obscure intellectualism, which is conspicuous and unfamiliar; instead it’s insidious and ubiquitous. So when the citizens of the Empire demand to know what their army is doing in India and why it is doing it, they get very easily digestible but empty jargon and slogans—“We’re fighting to help the free peoples of the world shake off the iron heel of a blood-stained tyranny guilty of bestial atrocities”—rather than a straight answer. Now I ask you, does that sound more like Judith Butler on gender identity or more like the Bush administration on Iraq? (And I take Orwell’s main point to be that this kind of blather is remarkably widespread—almost everyone is guilty of it: to be fair, my preferred candidate for the presidency, Barack Obama, is, at his worst, full of a similar kind of hot air.)
* Correction, June 9, 2008: This post originally misstated the title of Bodies That Matter.
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I know I am not an American citizen in the eyes of the powers that be.
With these words the story of a historic New Orleans neighborhood comes full circle.
It was in this neighborhood that even before the Civil War hommes de couleur libré—free people of color—led lives of style and culture. It was in this neighborhood that fiery journalists published periodicals calling for equal citizenship. Prompted by their calls, a man of African and European ancestry, Homère Patris Plessy, dared on this day in 1892 to defy a new segregation law by sitting in a "white" car. As posted here, his test case ended when the Supreme Court held 8-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that the Constitution permitted state-mandated segregation as long as facilities were "'equal but separate." That decision held sway until Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Plessy's New Orleans home nonetheless continued to thrive as "the oldest black neighborhood in America, the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement in the South and the home of jazz."
Plessy's story is the story of this neighborhood, just as this neighborhood's story is Plessy's. Both are told beautifully in a just-released film that bears the neighborhood's name,Faubourg Tremé. I saw Tremé, subtitled The Untold Story of Black New Orleans at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it won a much-deserved Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Documentary. The film is screening in the same city again today and elsewhere in the United States in the next months and is available as well on DVD.
Producers Lucie Faulknor, Dawn Logsdon, and Lolis Eric Elie began Tremé well before August 29, 2005, the date when water surging in the wake of Hurricane Katrina broke levees and flooded much of New Orleans. The damage done to Tremé and its people thus forms an unsettling frame around the picture the producers initially set out to paint. In pre-Katrina footage neighbors are upbeat, proud of their home. After Katrina they are sapped of spirit. Some leave for good. The grief of those who stay is palpable. One is Louisiana Poet Laureate Brenda Marie Osbey. Another is Glen David Andrews, who speaks of how music saved him from a rough life on the street. He is jubilant as he plays his trombone for the neighborhood. But that is early on. An interview with Andrews soon after Katrina shows that the government's failure to protect him and those close to him left him utterly at a loss. It is he who says:
I know I am not an American citizen in the eyes of the powers that be.
In Andrews' words one hears an eerie echo of how Plessy must have felt on reading the Supreme Court's ruling 112 years ago.
(Cross-posted at IntLawGrrls blog, home today to a Presidential Puzzler)
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