30. "Intervention"

What do we expect of an author who calls his essay an "intervention"? That he's stepping into something that's already going on, right? The Latin root of the word means "coming between" and, up to a few decades ago, we felt it in nearly every use. "Don't intervene" meant "stay out of this." "Let me intervene" asked permission to step in.

Now we have a collection of essays, two learned journals, a program for teaching, a television program, a convention on internet culture, a song by Madonna, and a host of essays, all called "Interventions," and anybody who sees the root meaning of that word inside any of them has a lot better eyesight than I have.

This wouldn't matter — you can always pick up meanings from the context and add them — except that, for people like me who did a lot of reading in the earlier decades, the root meaning keeps coming back. Tell us that your "interaction with a previously existing artwork" is an intervention and we see you stepping into an ongoing controversy. That would be OK (except for the question of when we've ever seen an artwork that wasn't previously existing) if we were shown what the controversy was, but we seldom are.

In some cases we're at first puzzled and then get the picture. Teaching reading in elementary school is an intervention? Yes, without it the flow of ignorance would continue. Depressing but understandable.

Other cases are more depressing. Tell us that you're intervening to further good health and we see all your patients, without you, sliding into bad health. If they're susceptible to AIDS they won't be able to stop themselves. It's the same with psychological counseling as intervention. Without psychologists the troubled can't avoid pathology. We picture the whole human race sliding naturally toward dysfunction. It's the "law of entropy," ugh. Every system defaults to disorder.

There's always a chance that we could make better sense of this if we knew more. Learning more about postmodern literary theory has, at least, helped me answer one question: How can each of those different essays, like the 44 op-ed pieces collected in Chomsky's "Interventions," be an intervention, a stepping into something already going on?

The narrow answer is that what's going on is discourse in a particular area and that, though it flows in various directions, one essay, inserted anyplace, can change it. When Chomsky paddles along in his canoe he will make swirls that will make some kind of difference.

The broad answer is that what's going on is the English language. Any essay is an intervention, a disturbance of the stream coming down to us and flowing past us.

That, beyond what it says about the language, has implications for the writer. Chomsky can get someplace in his canoe, and make what swirls he will, but he can't expect to go exactly where he wants to go. The language current is full of its own swirls, and can surprise a writer.

I see one of those surprises in the re-appearance of root meanings. Say you're a writer wanting to make clear to the world the beauty of beetles. You do so and you (or your agent) decide to call your piece "an intervention," counting on your readers to see you stepping into an ongoing controversy, maybe an exciting one. But there is no controversy. Nobody has disputed the beauty of beetles and few have thought about it. You knew that when you wrote the piece. All you wanted to do was make people overcome their indifference and see the beauty of beetles.

All right, most readers, after Chomsky and Madonna, will accept the contemporary meaning you counted on in your title. Maybe all will do so, at first. But then some will either believe there is a controversy and find you careless in not revealing it, or believe there is not a controversy and find you false in claiming that there is. These are readers feeling the force of a root meaning you can't keep out. The language is stronger than you are. Nobody, not even Noam Chomsky, can put his canoe just where he wants to put it.

29. "Progress"

In the early part of the 20th century we used the word "progress" pretty confidently. It wasn't just that we had not yet experienced the full horror of war between industrialized nations, it was also that we had, as historians more sophisticated than those we read in high school would soon show us, a naive view of history.

That view was called by these historians "the Whig view," and it was naive because it "presented the past as the inexorable march of progress toward enlightenment" (Wikipedia), a view the Whigs liked because their party's aims — constitutional government, personal freedoms, scientific discovery — fit right into it, and gained them credit.

Later historians, more thorough in their research, didn't like it because it left out too many of the complications, too much of the irrationality, in past life. Confident use of "progress," then, showed the more sophisticated that you, like a Whig, were ignoring historical complexity so you could hang on to a pleasing narrative.

Of course we churchgoers could never use "progress" with full confidence anyway because it suggested that material or political betterment, rather than spiritual betterment, was on our minds. When we got to college after the war we couldn't use it because it suggested that we were ignorant of what Emerson and Thoreau said about American materialism, and when we got to graduate school it showed that we were ignorant of what Heidegger said about American technology. We hadn't understood how much literature and philosophy had undermined faith in reason.

Wikipedia entries show where we would stand now if we used the word "progress" with confidence: squarely in the middle of the insufficiently educated public.

Despite their shortcomings as interpretations of the past, Whiggish histories continue to influence popular understandings of political and social development. This persistence reflects the power of dramatic narratives that detail epic struggles for enlightened ideals. Aspects of the Whig interpretation are apparent in films, television, political rhetoric, and even history textbooks."

Even in history of science textbooks, where so much corrective work has been done, "the grand celebratory and didactic narratives of scientific discovery and progress" still prevail.

I can't read that without thinking of the place where those narratives probably prevailed with the least embarrassment: at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933. Exhibit after exhibit proudly showed how far we had gone in improving industrial products. I remember one in particular, set up by the New Departure Ball Bearing Company. Inside a glass case one perfectly round, perfectly hardened ball bearing after another dropped onto a perfectly flat, perfectly hardened plate, slanted so as to bounce it onto another such plate, then onto another and another until it bounced into a hole to return for another trip. On and on the balls went, clink, clink, clink, throughout the Exhibition, never flattening on plates that never dented, hitting the same spot for days.

I think of all that filled the word "progress" with meaning for me then: the ball bearings better than any that had ever been produced, their counterparts displayed in nearly every hall I went into, the grand Exposition park before me when I came out, the skyscrapers of a city grown to three million behind me. (In 1833 the population had been 300.) "Progress" was the right word for what all that showed, as it was for what my family showed: immigrant grandparents who owned a brick house, a father who wore a white collar, an aunt (my guide at the Exposition) who was secretary to a high executive in the New Departure Company.

Did the expression "faith in reason" apply to what underlay the efforts of those around me? Southside Chicago was still choked with immigrants fighting, often against each other, to better themselves. If you failed to "use your head" (to reason) you fell behind. You weren't holding to a faith; you had recognized a necessity.

How hard it would have been to say to those Southsiders that their trust in reason was naive. What the hell else could you trust? It would have been naive not to trust it. Those who didn't just hadn't looked at the empirical evidence. The poorhouse was full of people who hadn't used their heads.

Oh, oh, memory is making use of the word "progress" more difficult. Reason keeps you out of the poorhouse. That's progress?

Making my use even more difficult is the reminder that this was 1933, three years into the Great Depression. Everything had been going down and I've pictured my people and the nation making progress and believing in it. Confident use of the word is no more justified than it ever was.

Still, I can't see how a demonstration of that to those Southsiders that would have made any difference to them. They would still have tried to use their heads in the same way, with the same justification.

This tells me that "progress" doesn't matter. "Reason" matters. "Progress" is just an admiration-word applied by spectators to a particular outcome. Those engaged in the action don't care whether the outcome is called "progress" or "minimum regress" as long as they produce it. If "reason" is undermined they lose what will produce the best outcome. If "progress" is undermined they lose little. The word is no more important to them than the word "art" is to those immediately engaged with a painting.

28. "Perp." "Perpetrator."

"Why should Dominique Strauss-Kahn be made to do the perp walk?'

"Because he's a perp."

That must be humiliating, to be called a perp. And by New York reporters, whose disrespectful terms are so quickly picked up. The French minister of culture called it "disgusting."

Can't you hear their response? "So, drop dead minister of culture."

Does a high French official ever have a chance of avoiding disrespect in New York? What can he do?

Well this one could have kept his hands off our hotel maids. Let him try some other crime. Maybe he can work his way up to perpetrator.

There's such a big difference in the flavor of those two words. And I don't think it all works in favor of the New York press. "Perp walk" is not just disrespectful of the French official; it's disrespectful of the NYPD for the show it puts on for the press's benefit. "Perpetrator display," though as inaccurate as "perp walk" (he's not a perpetrator yet), might fit an attempt to shame, and deter, and reform, but "perp walk" won't let you get away with that. It fits a cheap show, attempting to cheapen a man.

Which suggests that the culture minister has a point. The NYPD is catering to a public that wants it all hung out, both public and private, with less and less respect for the private. That may not be disgusting, but it's certainly disturbing.

27. "Rights." "Claims." "Marriage." Flavor.

Did Osama bin Laden have rights we should have observed? That's hard. "Rights" most familiarly refers to what people possess as part of a system — say legal — that includes responsibilities, contracts, reciprocity, penalties. The further we move from that kind of reference the harder it is to understand such questions.

Did he have a "claim" we should have honored? That's at least easy to understand. We've all heard that every human being has a claim on fellow human beings to spare him from suffering and death if they can. We know what Osama's sons are talking about (NYT, 5-10-11).

It's pretty clear why people substitute a word that makes an unclear reference, "rights," for one that makes a clear one: they believe strongly in their claim and want to enhance it. Here "rights" has the flavor of legality. Violate them and you've broken with a legal system, not just a value system. This is what believers in "animal rights" are moved to tell people, whether or not there are laws against cruelty to animals.

Flavoring is bound to attract word-inspectors, however faint some of it is. I've been buzzing around the word "marriage" for quite some time now and still don't know what is in the air. I got interested when I learned that some gays would not be satisfied with a "same-sex union" that was exactly equal, legally, to opposite-sex marriage. They wanted it called "marriage." There must have been something in the flavor of that word. I was sure of this when I heard people arguing against them, though they too admitted the legal equivalence.

What was the flavor they were fighting over? My guess comes from observation of wedding ceremonies which, you understand, joined members of a particular class at an earlier time. It was clear to me that the main interest of those attending was in seeing a freedom-loving, high-hormone American male persuaded by the ritual into becoming a responsible husband who would provide for his family, or at least not desert it. That he would be honored if he did so was evident early when the preacher referred to the "honorable state of matrimony." That he and his fellow males resisted was evident by what was written ("Help me!) on the soles of his shoes — or elsewhere — by groomsmen. Nobody worried much about the bride; she, the would-be victim of wild behavior, was sure to be for domestication.

So a male who, no matter how he longed for freedom, no matter how many children he had tying him down, held to his vows was going to feel some flavor of honor, no matter how slight, in the words "husband" and its correlative, "marriage." And that must be what gay males want, the flavor of honor that's denied them in so many other areas. Without the flavor there'd be no reason not to settle for "civil union."

But why do some heterosexual males object so? Why not share with homosexuals who commit themselves to the same burdens of family, the big one being children? "Because," say the grooms I saw, "they commit themselves with less risk. I vowed to stick by this woman no matter how many children came along by accident [an accident was the reason a lot of the grooms were there]. This fellow can't have children by accident. He gets them by adoption, choice. Well, the less risk you take the easier the vows are and since he's not taking my risks he can't have my word. Let him get his own word."

Sure, "civil union," and it's got the flattest flavor on the stove. Can he just borrow some flavor?

No, words get their flavor over time. "Civil union" could acquire the sweet flavor of "marriage" but it would take years of sweetening example.

So, let him use this one for a while. He's already showing so much of what husbands are supposed to show — love, long-term fidelity, care for the children, responsibility to society. Why make a big deal out of the risk he takes?

Because that's what those congregations were making a big deal out of, willingness to pay when the risk went wrong. That's what added the flavor of honor.

Well, there's your battle, over flavor, and though the flavor may be faint, both sides think it's important enough to fight over.

26. "War on terror"

"The death of Osama bin Laden is something we could have accomplished without getting involved in two no-win wars," said Terry Smith Thursday in the Athens News, suggesting an alternative future for a nation reacting to the 9-11 attack.

I'm eager to supply the details, starting with a West Wing conference the next week. "OK, who's the enemy?" President Bush asks his advisers.

"The people who attacked us, Al Qaeda. "

"Where are they?"

"We don't know. They're mixed up with civilians. We need intelligence and probably will have to act covertly."

"A job for the CIA then, with cooperation by our allies. I'll get started on that and you people give me some speeches making diplomats and spies the new heroes. The Secretary of State will be putting together what will have to be a new kind of alliance." I see the nation dedicating itself fully to the task and reducing Al Qaeda at the same time it stays alert to specific threats from other groups.

The future Smith has opened up for me is beautiful: no invasions, no regime-changes, no democracy-building, no use of guns except against the people identified as the enemy, no talk of a worldwide clash of religions, no setting of East against West. Just concentration on our security, the thing that had been violated.

How can President Bush have departed so radically from what Smith makes so obvious (in a small-town newspaper, and a throwaway at that)? I want to put a lot of blame on the words he chose. "War on terror." It's a conceptual mess. You can't make war on an abstraction, not with guns. If he'd listened to his English teacher ("Have something clearly in mind when you use a word") maybe he'd have realized that.

When our words don't refer to the cause-and-effect world we're trying to do something in we're very likely to make a mess. "Terror," to most people at that time, referred to the bad feeling they had when they saw a terrorist doing horrible things to other people on television. They wanted to get rid of that feeling, and would be grateful to a President who helped them. President Bush wanted to assure them of his help. But when he used the word "war" ("I'm really going to go all out for you") he moved himself into an unreal world. "War" is something you do with guns. The real world comes back and tells him (and maybe history) that he's trying to do the impossible. You can't shoot images off a TV screen.

I laugh (or cry) at Bush, but I do so forgetting that Presidents don't have to believe what they say in public. We can trust them because when they speak to themselves or to their advisers they speak the language of the real world — as those in my fantasy did. Was that the case with Bush and his advisers? We don't know but their actions suggest that they did not.

25. "Humane" "Inhumane"

Can I call the person who's against torturing terrorist prisoners "humane"?

It depends. If by that torture others could be saved from a worse torture, death, then if I use my compliment-word I'm saying that more torturing is better than less torturing.  The world won't let me talk that way.

Suppose that torture won't save anybody from death. If a person is for it is he "inhumane"? No, not if he thinks it will save lives. The right word for him is "mistaken" — or "uninformed" or "misguided," or, at a lower level, "stupid."

There are many vital questions here — whether the imprisoned terrorist's suffering will in fact save others, what the probabilities are, how high they have to be — that don't test for humanity or inhumanity. They test for knowledge and intelligence.

Thus as others are calling President Bush "cruel" and "bloodthirsty" for his support of water-boarding I can call him "humane." I am saying nothing about his knowledge and intelligence.

24. "War-making machine."

We know that Western officials can't speak frankly and literally about what they're doing in Libya but the literal meaning of the words they use does keep poking us. David Cameron said that the bombing of Qaddafi's compound was consistent with the Security Council mandate to stop a "loss of civilian life by targeting Qaddafi's war-making machine." What is his brain but a war-making machine? Target it, then.

I can hear the targeter defending himself in the inner circle. "What do you want me to do, collateral the bastard?" "Collateral damage" has already produced a verb, and it hasn't occurred to anybody yet that Qaddafi's brain is the big command and control center.

How refreshing it now must be to speak about Osama bin Laden, to say, in the inner circle, "We got him," and then say the same thing outside. A rare pleasure in political life.

23. The Realm of Possibility.

Yesterday a spokesman said that the State Department condemned the attacks on its embassy in Libya in "the strongest possible terms." What were the terms? We language geeks would like to know.