Coming to terms with the doublespeak of war
When I first heard the term WMD I thought it was a new car model, like a BMW 1200Z. I wanted a bright red one with twin pipes. It wasn’t until things were getting cranked up in Iraq that I learned it was a reference to Weapons of Mass Destruction, which, at the time, we were searching for underground, aboveground, under sinks, in the dog’s bowl and behind Grandma’s picture. It turned out that there were no WsMD, as it should be written, or NWsMD. So we shrugged and began bombing.
Abbreviations employed as euphemisms are rooted in ancient tribal taboos that forbade the use of words that might offend whatever god was popular. It brings to mind shifts in the language that also arise with every war and every major political election. They fall generally into the category of neologisms, which basically is the new use of old words. I have expanded upon that to include word combinations. For instance, “Catastrophic success.”
It was used, you might recall, by our president pro tem of the U.S. to describe the situation we’re facing in Iraq, which we liberated some time ago, except for those who don’t seem to want to be liberated and are conducting “asymmetric warfare” against us. Millions of Americans, reading the president’s peculiar phrase in Time magazine, said “Huh?” almost in unison, except for those in the more sophisticated coastal cities, who said, “I beg your pardon?” Bewilderment abounded.
I knew exactly what the president meant. It was scary. When one begins understanding political doublespeak, one faces the realization that important synaptic connections in the brain have begun to deteriorate. The only cure is to instantly cancel your newspaper subscription, smash your radio, sell your television set and move to an area of Texas where they have not yet discovered news. Otherwise, you’ll begin understanding at some point that what the president was attempting to convey was that while a lot of people have been killed, a lot of buildings destroyed and a lot of hatred engendered, the people of those decimated areas have electricity again.
Terms like “collateral damage,” meaning civilians inadvertently but unavoidably blown to confetti, and military “assets,” meaning the bombs and missiles that did it, collaterally, have crept into the American lexicon, along with more established words such as “neutralization” and “destabilization.” Efforts employed to “soften up” prisoners to assure future interrogative cooperation might cause a little discomfort or possibly even conditions of total disanimation, but that’s an acceptable mischance.
“Servicing a target” is also what we have done, and are still doing, in various uncooperative areas of Iraq. Not to be mistaken for a periodic servicing of one’s car or one’s mate, servicing a target encompasses “decapitation strikes” necessary to acquire a more passive attitude by its disobliging inhabitants. We service targets through air support missions delivering “aerial ordnance” as a form of demonstrable persuasion.
Doublespeak has been, and I suppose always will be, an effort to soften reality or to mask less acceptable terms. Funeral directors have become “grief therapists” in the “death care industry,” and “downsizing” has come to represent larger bonuses for corporate CEOs in appreciation for their firing or laying off or buying out or relocating to the streets those on the lower spectrum of one’s industry.
Researching various websites, I’ve discovered that an “involuntary conversion” of an airline company’s commercial jet means that it has, you’ll pardon the term, crashed, possibly because there was a “spontaneous energetic disassembly” in midair. Right, an explosion that caused the involuntary conversion and resulted in a good many disjointed and cauterized anthropomorphic units aboard the aircraft, I mean the equipment.
Politicians are eternally spinning words and phrases to wiggle out of unpleasant situations. For instance, our temporary president suggested just before the Republican National Convention that the war on terrorism could not be won, contrary to his earlier assertions that we were winning it. The Democrats jumped on the quote like lions on a dik-dik.
While the president mumbled that “I probably need to be a little more articulate,” his vice president, his chief of staff, his campaign advisor and even his wife sought to clarify the unfortunate verbal lapse by suggesting, more or less, that the president misspoke, and what he meant was that the war will be won but there won’t be a formal peace treaty, as there usually is in more civilized conflicts. Earlier statements are, therefore, inoperative.
During the war in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson was always seeing “a light at the end of the tunnel,” but he never said at which point in the tunnel we were traveling. In reality, the Viet Cong came rushing in the front end of the tunnel while we ran out the back end, later declaring we had won the war in principle by showing, as our president pro tem likes to say, that we won’t back down.
I think it’s time to move on from that, and from him.
