130. Language Heroism

Here's a real hero for you. Brendan Riley, who covered the state of Nevada for the Associated Press for 37 years refused to use the casino industry's word "gaming" except with reference to electronic games and in titles like Nevada Gaming Commission. He called it a "soft word," meaning a word that gently covers a hard fact. The hard word here, the correct word, the word he insisted on, was "gambling."

Here's an imagined hero, though her character is real, drawn from known students.  Sarah is an 18-year-old, hired for her sweet voice, being prepped to sell things to people randomly called during the dinner hour.  She's told to begin her pitch by saying she's conducting "research."

"But it's not really research, is it?" she says.

"No, but research is something people respect and will talk to you about. The word 'research' gets them into a conversation with you."

"But isn't it just a cover for what I'm really doing, selling stuff?  I'm deceiving them with it, right?  I'm not telling the truth." After seeing the look on the marketing director's face she says, "I don't think I can do this."  And so, though she needs the job (her father has been downsized out of his) and, with her town hard hit by the recession, knows that she, lacking skills, is not likely to find another, she takes off her nametag, gives it to the marketing director, thanks him very much, and walks out.  She, making that kind of sacrifice, is as great a hero as Brendan Riley.

Think what's she's preserved in America. How about our courtesy, our civilized forms?  Here's this company taking advantage of that, using our unwillingness to be rude to strangers to get its huckster foot in the door.  How about our privacy?  Coming right into the house at its own chosen time because we share this device, this telephone, this instrument of so much warm communication.  Get enough calls from the poor, lesser Sarahs and we not only bark at them we bark at the next friend who calls.  There goes American courtesy.

How about our morality? We plaster the walls of our schools with exhortations ("Don't be a Just Me" "Take your turn" "Speak softly") and furnish graduating classes with mottos ("Aim High" "Dare to Dream") that say be good, be true, be nice so effectively that we fill the land each year with Sarahs, fresh, aspiring Sarahs.  Heroic Sarah has, in her case, preserved that morality, our morality.  Against what? An industry forcing her sisters into prostitution.

And then there's our language, the language our English teachers teach us to use correctly and properly. She has kept it clean for use.  Words should have referents, and reveal the world.  They should not obscure it, they should make it clear.  Oh what a defender of words she's been!

Of course the fight for the English language can't be won by just a few. We need a band of heroes.  Well, we've got a start.  Brendan and Sarah, shoulder to shoulder.  Keep producing them, teachers and editors, and we'll win this thing yet, English teachers.

[Oh my fellow teachers, oh how I am thinking of you now, in 2018, after Donald Trump has so displayed his way of using the English language.  How are you responding to his success?  Is it, "All is lost," or is it, "Once more into the breach, dear friends"?  Once more off to school with our briefcases, once more a load of essays, once more those margins waiting for "Are you sure of this?"  I can't see any high hearts.  The best I can see are firmer jaws. "This is a tougher battle than I thought.  One breach after another.  Well into this one.']

89. Spooks and Virtues

Good American boy goes to college. Good American parents are afraid he'll lose his morals. Good American boy comes home and sure enough, he's lost his morals. Painful parent-son conversations.

That was the story in many families in the days before parents themselves had been to college, or daughters went there. In the United States, where masses of uneducated immigrants were rapidly enabled, by wealth or the GI bill, to polish their children, it's heard as a peculiarly American story. That may be, but the pain in it, I think, is simply Christian. It's peculiar to the Christian vocabulary.

Take that word "spirit." It started out as Latin spiritus referring to what went in and out of your throat when you breathe. Keep it there and you're alive. Lose it and you're dead. Where does it go? (It's a thing; it has to go someplace.) The ancients were pretty vague about that but the Christians who came along weren't. It (as Anglo-Saxon "soul") went to Heaven or Hell, depending on whether the dead person had been good or not.

But besides referring to a thing the word also, from a very early time, referred to an abstraction. The soul wasn't just something that went along with you and left you; it was you. Not the everyday, apparent you, though, and not even a summation of that apparent you. It was the essence of the apparent you, and all your values were bundled into it. The Greeks made sure this reference stuck.

So, just by the way the language developed, Christians entered the 20th century with this one word that made two very different references, one to a thing and the other to an essence. There is a connection, of course (a good essence gets the thing into heaven), but you need a God to make that connection. It's not necessary.

Now, those parent-son conversations. The son says that because of what he has learned in his science courses he's lost his belief in spirits — like God and human souls. His parents hear that he's lost his belief in values. Naturally. Values are "spiritual" things. They misunderstand his situation and are in pain.

You can't entirely blame the parents for their misunderstanding. Spirits and values have a lot in common. They're both invisible, they're both insubstantial, and neither dies. It's easy to see how thoughtful people of any education might slide from "spiritual" into "transcendent" and "otherworldly" and finally into "supernatural," tying goodness to a heaven.

I'd put some of the blame on the language the parents inherited. It's Halloween today. There are a lot of spirits out there, on front porches and roaming the streets. Are they spiritual? Not those things. But how can you be a "spirit" and not be "spiritual"? What kind of language has one word for both spooks and virtues?

87. Uncertainty About the Word "Moral"

"Quietly but decisively Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system," said David Brooks yesterday on the Op-Ed page (NYT, 10-18-11). "Quietly" meant "not like the Wall Street occupiers" but what did "moral" mean?

I think I know what it means. All good people think they do. But then some good people, like Brooks, give you an example that makes you wonder. His first "moral norm" states that "you shouldn't spend more than you take in." I thought moral advice had to do with right and wrong. You got it from your preacher. Where does this come from? In my experience it could have come from old Moneybags down the street, tipping us delivery boys: "Watch your nickels, sonny, they add up to dollars." He was the town materialist.

So what are we talking about, goodness or prudence? If you think it's good to be prudent then there's no difference and you and Moneybags can go to Heaven together. If you think there is a difference then Heaven is a place for idealists. — not pure, of course, but having something of the ideal, of the spiritual, in them. Moneybags is held up at the door.

Brooks's second moral norm states that "there should be a link between effort and reward." Moneybags is with him on that one, too. "Rise early, sonny. Get ahead of the next fellow." Yet I know what Brooks means here, and I can't help thinking his way. I see Greeks taking it easy, then being rewarded by the hardworking Germans, and I say "wrong." I see banks freely risking other people's money, then being rewarded with a bailout, and I say "bad." Prudence is, and yet is not, a moral virtue.

My instinct puts me firmly on the side of Brooks and his quiet majority, "focused on fundamentals," and my analysis tells me I don't know where I am. "Repairing the economic moral fabric is the essential national task right now," says (through Brooks) the majority. What would they and I lose if that task were restated with the word "moral" removed, and then accomplished? We've got a healthy economic fabric, a nation high in material well-being. What exactly do we expect to add? What's the difference between our nation and the one over there that has a moral economic fabric? I mean, if the GDP is the same.

66. Julian Assange and the Logic of Association

A good way to assure yourself and the world that you are good is to attack something evil. Another way, almost as good, is to attack something associated with that evil. If you want assurance that you're really good you can tear the hell out of it.

That's Julian Assange's way. Secrecy is associated with the KGB and the CIA and the Nixon plumbers. Assange starts WikiLeaks and tears the hell out of it. He's free of any need to think specifically of secrecy's actual operations, or ask how each operation might be logically connected to a good or an evil. The logic of association licenses him to be vague.

The students who burned down the ROTC building in the sixties. operated under the same license. The Army was associated with an evil war. Destroy its ability to produce officers. Ignore the specific need for an Army and its officers — as, say, in Arkansas when Governor Faubus tried to keep black students out of school.

That's the way of all the Americans railing against "Washington." Washington is associated with evil politics. Elect people who will repudiate it. Don't ask where you will put them. (Scatter them around the country? Install them on ships? Send them to the moon?)

Can anything be said for this poor "logic" of association? Sure. It's the only way lazy thinkers can think themselves good.

60. Memories of the Newport Jazz Festival Riots of 1960

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When will we ever have a riot like the one that closed down the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960? I mean a riot like, when it's over things are clear. At Newport you had students just drunk, just partying, throwing rocks at the police just to make trouble. Rich kids' trouble. They'd come into town in MGs and BMWs (you saw dozens of them down by the beach — I was there) and their clothes (when they kept them on) were the latest Bermuda fashion. Moralists like me could express pure disapproval.

And what support we had! The music community was right with us, mad as hell about losing their festival. And to whom? Not to people worked up by the music. Not to people so eager for it that they'd fight to get tickets. No. To people who didn't know crap about the music. Or anything. I believe it was Whitney Balliett, jazz critic of the New Yorker, who called them "Yahoos." Yes, Swift's name for unregenerate mankind. Gulliver found them in trees, throwing excrement. Perfect.

And the intellectual community? Oh, they were with us. They had to be. The whole thing started in downtown Newport when a fight broke out between two fraternities. Intellectuals can't be seen close to fraternities. They run with the music community. Whitney Balliett.

So we were at the center of a solid moral, esthetic, and intellectual front with a clear view of the opponents we faced. They were the uneducated; we were the educated. They were the immature; we were the mature.

That was 1960. In a few years nothing was clear. What looked like the same youth, throwing the same rock at the same policeman, could not really be the same youth, the one we disapproved of. He had a cause. First civil rights, then ending the war in Viet Nam. We approved of those causes. We were, by and large, doing nothing to further them. How could we disapprove of this youth who was, at least, doing something? Who was "more moral"? Could you call somebody less mature and educated than you were when he was more moral?

Then there was the view of policemen. In 1960 the young people were looking at officials with no history. A few years later they were looking at officials with a history of "brutality," variously earned but surely named. That let the young refocus our attention, and quickly. The issue after a riot (or an act of "civil disobedience"; it all came under "lawbreaking") became the performance of the authorities. "Yes, we broke the law but you didn't punish us right." Well, sometimes the police punished right and sometimes they didn't. Oi. There were enough complications without adding that one.

The recent riots in England roused my memory of these sixties' complications. The riots' origin in a protest over police action against a minority immediately raised a banner like one I honored in the sixties. The subsequent mindless behavior raised the same doubts. The authorities' reaction raised the same question about punishment.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am, in a sad sort of old-age way. The chances of life seem to have put me far closer to significant riots (or acts of disobedience) than a moralist has any right to expect. After the Newport riots I was in the student march on the Pentagon in 1967 and I was on the campus of Ohio University in 1968. I knew all about the bombing of the ROTC building and the storming of the President's house and the coming of the National Guard and the closing of the University. And I was in Seoul, South Korea, close enough to the fall of Syngman Rhee to be inspired — no, thrilled — by an account of the march that brought him down.

At the same time I was lucky to be assigned to teach two authors not often found in one professor's course assignments, Herman Melville and John Milton. Nowhere else could I have stumbled on such well-timed wisdom about the riotous human being. In the next post or two I will, as I recall the riots and street actions I have witnessed, try to make something of my luck.