Though all attention is on Russia and Ukraine, there’s an unmistakable American echo in this invasion. Not rolling in on tanks or flying over in planes, but finessed with language.
When Donald Trump seconded Vladimir Putin’s description of his invading forces as “peacekeepers,” he was echoing the “alternative facts” offered by his faithful advisor, Kellyanne Conway, in the days following his inauguration.
Within days of Conway’s oxymoronic claim, bookstores sold out of 1984, George Orwell’s 73-year-old classic dystopian novel, and the publisher ran another edition. The rush had not so much to do with surveillance and a police state, or with conformity and loyalty oaths, as it had to do with Orwell’s theory of the distortion of words and revisionist history to achieve all of the above.
All those years we thought 1984 a warning against oppression, it never occurred to us that it might serve as a blueprint for oppression.
We like to think that we control language, but as Orwell reasoned, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Indeed, in 2017, many Americans began believing in “alternative facts.” In 2020, it turned into alternative science, and by 2021, who knows how many of COVID’s victims died of it?
We can thank those who parse Putin’s “bizarre” tirade at the start of the invasion for its distortions of history and language, but we need to start parsing equally bizarre language that is taken for granted–sometimes written as law–right here in the USA.
This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of the murder of Treyvon Martin in Florida.
We all know the story and still feel the racial fallout. Rather than rehash, let’s strip it of race and all other detail, and consider only its language:
One person, A, walks past another, B. With a gun, B follows A. A keeps moving away from B. B pursues A. B catches A, an altercation starts, the gun fires, A is dead. B does not deny shooting A. In court, B is acquitted when his lawyer invokes something called “Stand Your Ground.”
In a nutshell, B, who pursued A, is judged to have stood. Unless B left his home and went after A on a conveyor belt (which he himself would have to have owned since the defense was “standing his ground”), this is transparent bullshit.
In any other English-speaking country in the world and at any other time in history, this would be unthinkable. Here in 21st Century America, “Stand Your Ground” is law in many states.
Before long, as most observers tell us, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could determine the fate of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women full reproductive rights.
Anti-Choice activists–to use a far more accurate name for a movement that ignores the necessities of life after birth–have been waiting all these years for a shift in the Supreme Court. When Amy Coney Handmaid Tale Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they had it.
Whether we call them Anti-Choice or Pro-Life, and whether we prefer to avoid the word “abortion” (as I just did) with other terms such as “reproductive rights,” they have made a 49-year habit of using the phrase “abortion on demand.”
Again, strip this of the issue and all details:
A woman seeks medical treatment. Does she demand it? Is any clinic ever obligated to give it? If the clinic says no, is there a consequence? If the clinic says yes, does the woman have to pay? What kind of demand is it if there’s agreed-upon payment? Is the payment on demand?
Let’s apply Anti-Choice “logic” to other services whether we pay out of pocket or are covered by insurance: Do we have hernia repairs on demand? Cavities filled on demand? Oil changes on demand? Our driveways shoveled by the neighbor’s kid on demand?
The only other common use of those two words is a commercial pitch from a company that streams movies into your home. They want you to demand what they have.
Again, you smell the bullshit as soon as you open your nose.
In a courtroom, you’d think that “abortion on demand” would be ruled out of order as prejudicial language, but after 49 years of repetition, judges may no longer notice it.
Just as few notice the gratuitous prejudice in phrases frequently in the news, from “hardline feminists” and “environmental extremists” since the 1970s to “radical left” in recent years. Sometimes it’s done with a change of one word, as when the estate tax is called “death tax.” Or an obscure phrase with a menacing sound used repetitiously to make anything the speaker doesn’t like sound evil, such as “critical race theory.”
Those who do this do not want you to be aware of ills they’d rather live with, that may be to their benefit. But they can’t condemn something as undeniably positive as awareness, so they abbreviate the word into one menacing syllable. Hence, states such as Florida are now passing “anti-woke” legislation.
In the parlance of today, prejudicial language such as on demand has become “normalized.”
As has “stand your ground.” And “peacekeeper,” not in the short time since Putin and Trump used it, but since 1986 when the US developed “peacekeeper” missiles to counter an arms buildup by the USSR. Or since 1943 when the US Navy launched a patrol frigate named “Corpus Christie.”
That last was five years before Orwell wrote 1984. Maybe he took it as a blueprint for his warnings of debased language that flew off the shelves of bookstore weeks after Trump’s inauguration.
Given what has been said since, it’s too bad he’s not around to write a sequel.
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Mouth of the River 