On Sending Meaningful Messages

I think it was producer Sam Goldwyn who long ago said, in disparagement of films with a “message:” “If I want to send a message, I’ll call Western Union.” That isn’t the sort of line you’d expect to find in Bartlett’s Quotations, but I like it. It’s honest and unpretentious.

Currently, at least before President Reagan made a nifty move, sidestepped himself, and went into the Soviet end zone to wrap up the Cold War, the United States government has been preoccupied with sending messages, many of them neither particularly honest nor even vaguely unpretentious.

Our representatives in Washington are more powerful than mere movie moguls. They don’t call Western Union; they call the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and the Air Force. When one of our battleships lobbed explosive shells the size of automobiles into the Levantine hills, making kebabs of a lot of hill-dwellers, it was our way of sending a “message” to the ayatollahs and maybe Kadafi and probably the Soviets, as well. We sent similar messages by invading Grenada, bombing Libya, and, of course, by giving a lot of money and armaments to a group of disgruntled Nicaraguans.

I’ll bet I’m just one of many millions of Americans who get a creepy, unwholesome feeling when our leaders refer to blustering, threatening, and frequently killing as “sending a message.”

These messages are tough, like a spinoff from “The Godfather” or a Dirty Harry film: “Make him an offer he can’t refuse; “ “Make my day;” “Let’s send the Soviets a message;” “Let’s send Khomeini the only kind of message he understands.” It’s Uncle Sam, hunching his shoulders, clenching his fists, flexing his muscles, and saying, “Any time, any place, fella!” Makes Cagney and Bogart look like pussycats.

On those rare occasions when our message might be construed as conciliatory or otherwise soft on toughness, it is widely lamented by Washington’s more macho militants that “We’re sending the wrong message,” meaning, presumably, being that we’re too tender-hearted to bomb some upstart back to the Stone Age.

Obviously, many of these messages are not verbal but symbolic actions. They are like images, and, as we all know, images have replaced rational discourse as our principal tools of persuasion. I’d have little hope of sharing an intelligent philosophical discussion with anyone whose thoughts were stuck in the “Make my day” or “Make him an offer he can’t refuse” mode, or who referred to threatening rhetoric and violent attacks as “messages.”

Messages, of course, don’t have to be verbal. Smoke signals aren’t verbal. Nor are giggles, winks and nudges. Nor is a clenched fist. Nor is that most ubiquitous of all nonverbal messages, a middle finger thrust heavenward. The common denominator of all these non-verbalisms is their bedrock simplicity--their lack of sophistication.

Television takes a lot of blame for a lot of failings these days, deservedly so in my opinion. Not that I don’t enjoy television; nor do I think it’s a vast wasteland. But there is no question that it has, in subtle ways, altered our ways of perceiving the world around us. It is true, I think, that the vast majority of Americans learn most of what they know of the outside world from TV. So most of us get accustomed to images as the stuff of life. In television, it is almost a truism that if there’s no picture, there’s no story (“Film at 11”).

For an intelligent understanding of ideas and principles, words are infinitely superior to images, though images often have a power that words seldom achieve. The old Chinese saying, “One picture is worth a thousand words,” may well be true if the aim is to tell a simple story or describe a physical setting. But if the aim is to consider the relationship of the individual to society and of society to the individual, or if it is to examine how best to regulate the killing of whales or the spoliation of the natural environment, or to establish harmony among peoples, pictures are pathetically inadequate.

We are blessed with the one remarkable tool that makes us different from all other animals: language. Only human beings can go beyond the basic life functions and, through language, ponder such topics as the meaning, if any, of life, the existence of God, free will, determinism, and predestination, man’s predispositions to violence or nonviolence, peace--do we want it, and, if so, how do we achieve it? Questions some of which involve the intellect in baffling, fascinating, and usually fruitless speculation, and others of which are vital to the welfare of humanity as a whole.

Our government’s messages should address vital issues, but they’ll do so only if the messages are in words , clearly articulated and recorded, preferably in writing. Someone once asked, “How do I know what I think until I’ve seen it in writing?” Good question. It seems to me that we can best examine our thoughts and attitudes critically by seeing them on the page and going through the process of excising and revising until we see that they make sense. That way lies humanity’s highest function.

If that extraordinary collection of gentlemen we call our Founding Fathers had been reared on television and learned to think more in images than in words, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights could never have been written. We should thank God for holding TV back for a couple of hundred years.