Take care for the spiritual quality, the holy
quality, the serious quality of language.

-- Barry Lopez

paintings by Masaaki Sato
Courtesy of O.K. Harris Works of Art, NYC

detail from Newsstand No. 44, 1988, oil on canvas

It is always the task of the artist to imagine experience, meaning not to blur it or make it up but to bring it into fresh focus. Good art, wrote Ezra Pound, is "art that bears true witness, the art that is the most precise." For the writer this entails a special responsibility. His medium is the ordinary one by which we address each other, by which news is known and history is recorded, by which a culture understands and misunderstands itself. Language is the medium of politics, and as such it is subject to debasement by those in government who shape interpretations of their acts and policies for public consumption.

Writers, then, perhaps uniquely among artists, must work against the corruption of their medium, and that responsibility, like it or not, has a political dimension. It is about preserving the health of public discourse in our culture, and ultimately it is about the health of our own art. George Orwell wrote, in his great essay, Politics and the English Language: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Orwell argues that the telltale sign of corrupt political language is the continual repetition of prefabricated phrases put forth reflexively in lieu of thought:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy... The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying... And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

But not all spokespersons are robotic dummies. Some official language is uttered or written quite consciously to obscure real facts. Orwell again: "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." Orwell published his essay 56 years ago, but it could just as aptly have been written yesterday. Only the phrases have changed.

Here is some of the ink squirted out since September 11, 2001, and one writer's view of what it obscures.

	detail from Newsstand No. 31, 1985, oil on canvas

It became voguish among certain academics and think-tankers soon after the attacks to characterize our situation as "a clash of civilizations." This is language not of history or political science but of science fiction. It assumes that a civilization is a uniform, intransigent, monolithic entity -- or that Islamic civilization is, because we don't view our own that way. All the phrase really accomplishes is to stipulate ignorance, because it subsumes under one homogenizing rubric the vast diversity and varied texture of the Muslim world. It says that we are incompetent or unwilling to distinguish Sunnis from Shi'ites, Farsi from Arabic, extreme fundamentalist Wahhabis from progressive, pious, and peace-loving mainstream Muslims. It sounds awfully like an intellectual euphemism for a low-life belief that all those serious brown faces with head-wraps look the same and we can't trust any of them.

"They hate us for our freedom and free enterprise" -- this from President Bush, in his first major speech after the attacks. Yes. And no. The Taliban, the Wahhabis, the al Qaeda medievalists do indeed see Western personal freedoms as a rot corrupting their cultures, and they do hate us for it, but those thuggish Puritans are, or were, a radical fringe. Most secular and mainstream Muslims, in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, respect or even revere American democratic values and American economic/technological vitality. And so it perplexes them mightily that the American government, as patron and chief financier of the state of Israel, enforces the prolonged drubbing of freedom and self-determination in Palestine, and that the same American government finances jackbooted regimes in their own countries, regimes whose answer to democratic movements is to put their leaders into jail for life.

(The phrase "American government" is a little cuttlefish ink of my own. Obscured behind it are you and me. The government props up those regimes so that we can drive, fly, and otherwise consume petroleum at affordable prices.)

So maybe they do hate us for our freedom -- because we hoard it like misers on our island continent, fueling it with their oil and paying them with repression. And the face of American freedom they mainly see, of course, through film and television, is rife with images of ostentatious wealth, obsessive sexuality, dumb and dumber humor, and gorgeous violence. The Taliban are not entirely wrong about cultural rot.

And then there's the most frequently repeated phrase of all, "War on Terrorism." As if we have defined what terrorism is, and as if, whatever it is, we can war it away. Of course what occurred on September 11th was terrorism. But if to commit terrorism is to kill noncombatants and thus terrify a general population, why is not our decade-long embargo of Iraq -- which, at a minimum, has cost hundreds of thousands of lives -- an ongoing act of terrorism? Why is it terrorism when innocent Israelis die in a suicide bombing, but a "defense" against terrorism when innocent Palestinians die? Why are the Chechens terrorists in the eyes of Russians, but separatist freedom-fighters in their own?

detail from Newsstand No. 60b, 1991-92, oil on canvas

It depends on who's slinging the cuttlefish ink, and that is why the Reuters news service, resisting great pressure in some of the 160 countries it reports from, sticks to this lonely standard: "As part of a policy to avoid the use of emotive words, we do not use terms like "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions, identity, and background so that readers can make their own decisions based on the facts." One small tonic for the integrity of English, and -- Reuter's is London-based -- one small posthumous triumph for George Orwell.

Terrorism is a tactic, a combative technique. To some extent it can be defended against, and we are appropriately taking measures to do just that, but making war on terrorism is like making war on cavalry charges, like trying to bomb bombing to smithereens. It can be no more successful than our other pseudo-wars -- the War on Drugs (line up the nickel bags and shoot 'em), the War on Poverty (the poor are poorer and the rich are richer), and even, sadly, President Nixon's War on Cancer, which after thirty years has made very limited progress.

Why is war our leaders' habitual metaphor, the one they grab reflexively? It's more apt in the case of terrorism, because of the warlike blow we suffered and the undeclared war we are waging in response, but it sets us up for the same thwarted outcome, since a war must either be won or lost, and these "wars" can't be won.

The list of rotten phrases goes on -- "smart missiles," which do the same stupid work bombs have always done; "daisy-cutter"; "Operation Infinite Justice"; "Operation Enduring Freedom"; "ridding the world of evil doers"; "national security," used to promote oil drilling in the Arctic and other environmental abuses; and my personal favorite, the PATRIOT Act, or "Proved Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act." Those tools include indefinite detention of anyone suspected of the least connection to terrorist activity, the definition of "terrorist activity" left pretty much up to the FBI and CIA, those agencies that conducted themselves with such restraint and discretion in the 1960s.

But not all cuttlefish ink is issued by the government. When the bombing began in Afghanistan, several younger friends told me that the government should instead use "peaceful means," some sort of "police action." None could tell me how such an action might have worked. We send a posse with a warrant for bin Laden's arrest and politely ask the Taliban to produce him?

	detail from Newsstand No. 63, 1992-93, oil on canvas

The families of the September 11 dead and the American people are entitled to justice, just as in Oklahoma City seven years ago. It is miserably unfortunate that justice in this instance has required making war in Afghanistan. We have injured the justice of our cause by our cavalier attitude toward civilian casualties, and we may ruin our cause entirely if we pursue the broader military crusade the administration seems set on in Iraq and elsewhere, but in my opinion we had to do what we have done in Afghanistan. It is not a bit unfortunate that the Taliban have been routed, and that women are showing their faces and music is sounding again in the streets of Kabul.

Does it make a difference, the words we choose, or the words we fail to choose and reach for unconsciously instead? Does it matter if we write in prefabricated phrases? I think it does. Each phrase, each image, each loaded word is an affirmation of a way of being in the world. Each voices a small lobby that may shape the reader or hearer, who is likely to be wholly unaware of the shaping, as the lobbyist may be unaware of the lobbying. And so I flinch when I see in mailings from conservation groups, as I do from time to time, the term "cutting-edge" as a modifier, meaning "the very latest." A cutting edge is a useful tool, but here in the Northwest, the land of sheared mountainsides, a cutting edge should not be brandished unconsciously by those who decry the shearing. Nor is it healthy for anyone to unconsciously confirm the dubious assumption that the very latest is the best or even an improvement on something older.

One last phrase, the three-word sentence that vexes and entices me the most: "Everything has changed." At one point last winter I was ready to disembowel the next person to say it or write it. What exactly has changed? All that's new in the rural region where I live is a proliferation of American flags -- on grocery bags, on fence posts, whipping themselves to shreds on pickup antennas -- but does that showing of colors signify anything new? Violent attack with loss of life and counterattack with more loss of life is the oldest story in human history. Little has changed.

And yet something has, or has begun to, or will. We say "Everything has changed," I think, because we sense that so horrific an experience must have transformed us, though we can't say how, and we are reaching, uncertainly, for our new condition. As we gathered and watched on television the hellish beauty of those fires, we knew, even in our numbness and the beginnings of grief, that possibility had in some way opened as never before. A forest fire may kill many creatures, but it freshens the forest. Floods too destroy, but they also renew the river's fertility. And it is when the body or psyche is wounded, in pain, that the human being is likeliest to grow.

There is a redemption immanent in the catastrophe of September 11th. I don't know what it will be, but I am very sure of one thing. It will not come from our political leaders. If we are true witnesses, if we have the freshness of imagination to find it, it will come from us.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-- Mahatma Gandhi

John Daniel lives and writes in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. His most recent book is Winter Creek: One Writer's Natural History, published in July 2002 by Milkweed Editions.
The paintings of Masaaki Sato can be seen at O.K. Harris Works of Art, 383 West Broadway, New York City. 212-431-3600

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