Look at his head noddin’
May 2, 2011 20 comments
Happy belated May Day, “Loyalty Day”, and Osama Bin Laden Is Definitely Probably Dead This Time Day, readers! Mmmm, doesn’t it smell like justice in here?
OBAMA: [...] We were also united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice. [...] I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. [...] Justice has been done. [...] they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice. [...] one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
It is worth pausing to admire Obama’s masterful rhetorical conflation here of two different conceptions of justice. One sense of “justice”, of course, has to do with courts, legal process, fair trials, and the rest. This has to be the sense invoked in Obama’s reference to the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice. In this spatial metaphor, justice is a place: implicitly, a courtroom, or at least a cell with the promise of process. (Or even, in extremis, Guantánamo Bay, still not closed, where indefinite “detention” or imprisonment is Unspeakily palliated with the expectation of some kind of tribunal.) To bring someone to justice is to put them in a place where they will be answerable for their alleged crimes. To be answerable in this sense, it helps to be alive.
But it is quite another sense of “justice” — meaning a fair result, regardless of the means by which it was achieved — that is functioning in Obama’s next use of the word: the quasi-legal judgment that justice was done. On what sorts of occasion do we actually say that justice was done? Not, I suppose, at the conclusion of a trial (when it might be claimed, instead, that justice was served); rather, after some other event, away from any courtroom, that we perceive as rightful punishment (or reward) for the sins (or virtues) of the individual under consideration. (Compare poetic justice.) The claim that justice was done appeals, then, to a kind of Old Testament or Wild West notion of just deserts. What, after all, happened between the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice and the claim that justice was done? Well, Bin Laden was killed. He was not, after all, brought to justice. Instead, justice (in its familiar guise as American bombs and bullets) was brought to him.
Even so, there is a curious interpolation of law-enforcement vocabulary in Obama’s description of the aftermath of the extra-judicial killing:
A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
Let us rapidly note that “They took care to avoid civilian casualties” is not the same as “no civilians were harmed”, but as ever it’s the caring that’s important, right? Stranger is the description of grabbing Bin Laden’s corpse: they took custody of his body. Custody (guarding, supervision, care) is normally something you take of a living person, perhaps a child or a person accused of crimes, having been granted that right by a court. To say that your soldiers took custody of a dead body seems quite a strained forensic framing, particularly if you’re just going to throw it in the sea afterwards.
Does Obama’s final invocation of justice for all (I imagine, as do you, Metallica playing at deafening volume in the background) carry a connotation of persistent threat (you cannot escape American “justice” anywhere in the world) as well as celebration?
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A message from the pathfinders general
April 15, 2011 5 comments
Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, and satiny-jowled mafflard David Cameron have allegedly collaborated to produce an article about the future of Libya, in which “they” admit that they do not have a mandate to “remove Qaddafi by force” but, um, because it’s unthinkable and unconscionable and impossible that he remain in power, they are going to continue bombing Libya until such time as he “go[es] and go[es] for good”, which is nothing like removing him by force, is it, readers?
More interesting, perhaps, than this shameless contradiction which gaily treats the citizens of the US, France and Britain, and let’s face it the rest of the world too, as meek-eared morons, is the inspiring metaphor of a pathway to peace:
Even as we continue our military operations today to protect civilians in Libya, we are determined to look to the future. We are convinced that better times lie ahead for the people of Libya, and a pathway can be forged to achieve just that. [...] There is a pathway to peace that promises new hope for the people of Libya [...]
Is a pathway to peace a bit like a stairway to heaven? It has more alliteration (like everyone’s favourite pipes of peace) and maybe involves fewer drugs. It makes, too, for an interesting comparison with the notorious roadmap in Israel/Palestine. Whereas a roadmap is an aerial view of the whole terrain, with lots of roads and other interesting features like concrete fences or rocket silos, a pathway is a single route. I’m really feeling it from a first-person perspective, like some morose arthouse videogame. A pathway is, of course, more reliable than a mere path (which might be a garden path up which some joker is leading you). It is authoritarian (because unidirectional) and yet smirks with a complacent pretence of friendliness (it is earthy and trodden rather than industrial and macadam’d). Nonetheless the message is clear: it’s our (path)way or the highway.
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Maybe it’s because it’s the New Yorker
April 13, 2011 12 comments
An irate yet devastatingly accurate text arrives from unspeak.net’s indefatigable New Yorker correspondent:
Worst New Yorkerese sentence I’ve read in a while: the great John Lahr ending his review of a play Daniel Radcliffe is doing on Broadway with these words: “As they say in the part of London where I live, ‘Nice one, mate.’”
Unspeak.net’s INYC did not explain why this sentence was so bad, but if pushed I would guess that it is the cringe-inducing, horrifyingly misfiring claim to expertise, attributing to merely one (coyly unidentified!) area of the metropolis where the writer evinces such pride in residing a phrase that can be heard not only all over London but probably all over England, at the very least?
Thus declares the New Yorker writer: “I do not just live in London; I have listened with brilliant and scholarly attention to the characteristic expressions of congratulation that are peculiar and unique to each traditional subdivision of that great city. Be assured that I know that, in contrast to the part of London where I live, where everyone says ‘Nice one, mate’, in East Fenchurch the local gentlemen will instead say ‘Jolly good show, my dear fellow!’, while in Croydon-on-Thames the salt-of-the-earth chappies will recite a stanza of George Formby while soberly stabbing you in the face. I am thus not only a great theatre reviewer, but a folk linguist of rare and precious discrimination?”
What do they say in the nearest part of the closest metropolis to where you live, readers?
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What to call the counter-revolution
April 8, 2011 7 comments
Once the protesters in Libya had become rebels, or rebel forces (a motley crew of loveable ingénus, royals and rogues — plus the odd Jedi, Wookiee, and Ewok — fighting the dark forces of an evil Empire), or rebel fighters (X-wings), an “intervention” (qv) was rendered more rhetorically palatable. (And the accidental bombing of rebel tanks — as though the tanks themselves had realized that they were on the wrong side — all the more “tragic”.) But then Malcolm Rifkind came on the radio last weekend saying that the rebels were no longer “rebels”: because Gaddafi’s government had lost all legitimacy, or so he argued, the “rebels” ought now to be described as insurgents. (Compare Iraq.) Meanwhile Gaddafi himself, in his delectably strange letter to Obama (or rather “Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu oumama”), makes no mention of rebels but rather “Terror conducted by AlQaueda gangs that have been armed in some cities”. So I ask you, dear readers of unspeak.net: are the rebels still “rebels” or not?
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War is peace
March 25, 2011 8 comments
If a teacher intervenes in a school playground fight, it is not normally so as to punch one of the children in the face.
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Ridding the world of bluebottles
March 24, 2011 7 comments
This is perhaps too obvious to be worth pointing out, but since that has never stopped me before: the use of no-fly zone to mean flying-and-bombing zone evidently Unspeaks the level of violence (and, inevitably, “collateral damage”) that is going to be involved, such that eminent commentators can blithely say that they would “enforce” one without fearing much scorn except for people whose only contribution to society is to sneer.
If those in favour of an “intervention” (which, puh-lease?) were instead required to say something like: “I am in favour of bombing tanks and people, and shooting down aircraft, in all likelihood injuring and killing other people, including noncombatants”, instead of just gibbering about the desirability of a no-fly zone while holding their mental noses about how it gets established, the “debate” might be a little more interesting, mightn’t it, readers?
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The pros and cons of war
March 23, 2011 14 comments
As we bomb some freedom into a foreign country again, it might be worth pointing out a quite subtle and insidious example of Unspeak in news accounts of the military attacks, whose targets are said to be “pro-Gaddafi forces”.
The people and matériel being attacked are those still operating within the chain of command at whose head is Gaddafi. No argument there. But to call them pro-Gaddafi forces introduces an extra implication: that each and every soldier is, you know, really pro-Gaddafi. Rather than being ordinary people who perhaps joined the military because it was a decent job and now find themselves on what the “international community” has deemed the wrong side and quite likely under various forms of duress not to stop fighting, they must be portrayed as rabid loyalists of an unhinged dictator, on Gaddafi’s side not merely by happenstance but by ideological commitment. They must be presented as thoroughly pro-Gaddafi. Why? So that we may kill them without too much discomfort.
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The sense of an ending
February 2, 2011 7 comments
Barack Obama yesterday described his telephone conversation with Hosni Mubarak thus:
[W]hat is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.
This is an interesting use of belief, which works both as a rhetorical softener (what is “clear” is not that Mubarak must go; what is clear is Obama’s “belief”), at the same time as it introduces a note of personal insistence into the demand of power. It also invokes an idea of clarity (clear belief), of implacable accuracy and truth.
More mysteriously, what about this requirement that “an orderly transition must be meaningful”? What exactly would count as a meaningless transition? And who is judging the meaning? The Egyptian anti-Mubarak demonstrators? The Egyptian arseholes pro-Mubarak demonstrators? Excited members, perhaps, of an aspirant military junta (to whose rule a transition would certainly be meaningful from their point of view)?
The demand for a “meaningful transition” resembles structurally (though you might consider it less purely vicious) the previous US régime’s call for a “sustainable ceasefire” in Lebanon. In both cases the adjective is simply code for “acceptable to me and my friends”. It is clear, after all, that the final arbiter of whether a transition in Egypt is going to be meaningful is, um, Barack Obama. I hereby call on members of the Unspeak™ Community™ to join me in a vigorous rearguard action against such metahermeneutic imperialism.
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