Words Matter

I’ve been thinking a lot about language lately. I’ve been around long enough to witness many new words emerge, drop out, and others take on new meanings in the American lexicon. In some cases these new meanings entirely displaced old ones. Take, for instance, the word "gay." Historically, the word meant merry, happy or carefree, like having a gay time with friends at a picnic in the park. That word cannot be used in this sense anymore. In the past, a gay man would have been mighty attractive to a woman who certainly didn’t want to be stuck with a stodgy and dull one, but should she discover he’s gay today, it’s probably time for a serious discussion about divorce.

The word "google" entered the language in the past ten years as a verb. Only recently have I been able to google information about someone or something. Before that I had to trudge down to the library or hire an investigator to find out what’s what. Now I don’t have to because I can google practically anything I can imagine. I found out that my dog is googleable because his picture was in the newspaper. Last year, my client’s dog, Jade, was shot and killed by an Oakland cop. Now Jade can be googled too.

In the realm of American politics, there’s a darker side to the dynamic change of our lexicon. It doesn't please the ears because it's, well, un-American. We now have a huge bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. When, before 2002, had you ever linked the word "homeland" with anything having to do with the United States of America? Before that, the word had associations with distant places and dark regimes. For one thing, it evokes a disturbing image of Nazi Germany which was then described alternatively as the fatherland and the homeland. During the apartheid period in South Africa, homelands were ghetto territories where the oppressed black population was kept. Similarly, during Stalin’s reign, minorities who were presumed subversive lived in segregated communities known as homelands. Is it a mere coincidence that the utterly alien-sounding name "Department of Homeland Security" came to fruition during the Bush administration which also deceived us into a war in Iraq, ignored the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention, redefined torture to excuse torture, and made its elite base even more appallingly rich than it already was? Too creepy. It's time for a name change.

Another word that bugs me is the word "czar" as in "drug czar." Whatever the czars in pre-revolutionary Russia were about, and some of them like Catherine the Great weren’t necessarily bad, they had nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with autocracy. So why call any government worker in America a czar if you don't mean to give that person plenary power to do whatever he wants even if most of us don't like it? Germany had its autocratic Kaiser before and during World War I and rotting ancient Rome had caesars, all of these titles being variants of the word "czar." America is not supposed to have czars. We’re supposed to have public servants.

Ok, then there's the "war on _______ [insert your favorite thing to declare war on here]." The last good one we had was the war on poverty but that got eclipsed over forty years ago by the war on Vietnam. Since then, we’ve had the war on crime, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. I think we may have had a few others too, but they were fleeting, more like skirmishes than wars.

To have an effective war on something, you first have to objectify the war's target to obscure the fact that you will be terrorizing, imprisoning, and killing people. That's why the war has to be waged against an abstraction like terror or objects with no nervous system like drugs. It’s also a good idea to set a lofty, unattainable goal so that the war persists for a very long time, like Palestine vs. Israel or the Hundred Years’ War. Next, you want to make sure that there’s a lot of money to be made from prosecution of the war. Otherwise, what's the point in waging it?

A while back, walking down the street, I discovered that my city government in Berkeley, California, has a place called the Customer Service Center. For me, the place was mainly where I would have gone to take care of parking tickets if I didn't have a computer to google my way to the website to pay on line. What disturbed me about the title was the word "customer." Through a devilish linguistic sleight of hand, I've been robbed of my citizenship with its attendant rights and obligations to shape the destiny of my city. Now I'm relegated to a passive consumer of city services who's supposed to shut up and pay. I don't remember a vote on this. And I've looked all over but I can't find any contract I ever signed with these people. Frankly I wish I had so I could look for loopholes. For now though, I'll play the contented customer as long as the City plays by the rule that the customer is always right. For some reason though, I don't see this working out.

So maybe you can google your homeland customer service center and find the right czar to inquire gayfully about getting a war started on something that's bothering you.