DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Bush, Sheehan and how words
die By Tom Engelhardt
"See, in my line of work you got to
keep repeating things over and over and over again
for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the
propaganda." - George W Bush, "President
Participates in Social Security Conversation in
New York", May 24.
Forced from his
five-week vacation idyll in Crawford, Texas by the
mother of a dead boy he sent to war, the president
has recently given two major speeches defending
his war policies and, between biking and boating,
held a brief news conference at Tamarack Resort in
Donnelly, Idaho. On August 22, he addressed the
national convention of the Veterans of Foreign
Wars (VFW) in Salt Lake City for 30 minutes; on
August 24, he spoke for 43 minutes to families of
the Idaho National Guard in the farming community
of Nampa, Idaho.
As his poll figures
continue on a downward spiral, he has found it
necessary to put extra effort into "catapulting
the propaganda".
Though he struck a new note
or two in each speech, these were exceedingly
familiar, crush-the-terrorists, stay-the-course,
path-to-victory speeches. That's hardly
surprising, since his advisors and speechwriters
have been wizards of repetition.
No one
has been publicly less spontaneous or more -
effectively - repetitious than our president; but
sometimes, as he says, you "keep repeating things
over and over and over again" and what sinks in
really is the truth rather than the propaganda.
Sometimes, just that extra bit of repetition under
less than perfect circumstances, and words that
once struck fear or offered hope, that once
explained well enough for most the nature of the
world they faced, suddenly sound hollow. They
begin to sound ... well, repetitious, and so,
false. Your message, which worked like a dream for
so long, goes off-message, and then what do you
do?
This is, I suspect, exactly what
growing numbers of Americans are experiencing in
relation to our president. It's a mysterious
process really - like leaving a dream world or
perhaps deprogramming from a cult. Once you step
outside the bubble, statements that only yesterday
seemed heartfelt or powerful or fearful or
resolute truths suddenly look like themselves,
threadbare and impoverished. In due course,
because the repetitious worldview in the
president's speeches is clearly a believed one
(for him, if not all of his advisors) and because
it increasingly reads like a bad movie script for
a fictional planet, he himself is likely to look
no less threadbare and impoverished, no less - to
use a word not often associated with him -
pathetic and out of touch with reality to some of
those who not so long ago supported him or his
policies.
Under these circumstances, it's
worth taking a close look at his recent speeches
and comparing his linguistic landscape with that
of Cindy Sheehan, at the moment a stand-in for the
mute (and previously somewhat hidden) American
dead from his war as well as an encroaching Iraqi
catastrophe.
George's world of words
Bush's speech world remains anchored in
the defining moment of his life, the attacks of
September 11, 2001 (cited five times in his
VFW speech, four times in Idaho). It offers a
landscape of overwhelming threat, but also
of remarkable neatness. It paints a picture of a
world embroiled in the first war of the 21st
century, a war on a global scale, a war - a
word that peppers every statement he makes - with
multiple theaters ("from the streets of the
Western capitals to the mountains of Afghanistan,
to the tribal regions of Pakistan, to the islands
of Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa").
In his vision of our planet, a vast
struggle on the scale of the Cold War, if not
World War II, is underway, a Manichaean battle
between two clear-cut sides, one good, one evil,
in which you are either for or against. There can
be no other choices between our mega-enemy, the
terrorists, and us. As he put the matter in
Idaho in reference to Iraq, the central
theater in his global war, "The battle lines
... are now clearly drawn for the world to see,
and there is no middle ground."
The
problem is that what the president "sees" and what
Americans are now seeing seem to be diverging at a
rapid rate. For George, the details matter not at
all. You won't find any Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds
at each other's throats in the president's Iraq,
or unable to agree on a constitution, or at the
edge of internecine warfare, or living in a
country lacking electricity, oil and jobs, or
potentially installing an Islamic government in
Baghdad allied to the neighboring Iranian
fundamentalist regime, or any of the other obvious
features of the present situation, most of which
can finally be caught any night on the national
news.
In his Salt Lake City and Idaho
speeches, the only "Iraqi" George even mentioned
was a Jordanian, "the terrorist [Abu Musab
al-]Zarqawi," against whom, in at least the
president's fantasy life and in his recent radio
address, Sunni and Shi'ite Iraqis actually come
together in mutual defense in a touching show of
national unity.
In the president's world,
there is just them, the enemy, aka the
terrorists, and us, the people who (in a
nearly copyrighted phrase) spread freedom
to the rest of the world. When you look, for
instance, at his speech in Idaho, the word
terror (war on, sponsored, will be
defeated) is used 13 times; terrorist or
terrorists (threats, attack, murdered,
harbor a, cells, defeat the, converged on Iraq,
defiance of the, have sworn havoc, can kill the
innocent, victory over, were to win, will fail,
Zarqawi), 33 times; and terrorism (safe
haven for), once - for a total of 47 uses. (Now
that's repetition for you!)
However, in
the remarkably equally balanced linguistic
struggle between good and evil that weaves through
the president's speeches, freedom (they
despise our, spreading, spread the hope of,
advancing the cause of, the march of) appears 37
times and, when free is thrown in, a
triumphant total of 48 times. In addition, while
the terrorists skulk in the shadows,
freedom is no passive thing. It confronts,
defeats, prevails and conquers. No
wonder they despise it so. (In the shorter
VFW speech, the linguistic balance remains the
same: terror and its cognates: 33;
freedom with its fleet of frees,
36.) Add together the Idaho totals for the
struggle - 95 - and you're talking about 1 out of
every 48 words in that speech being either
terror or freedom, with us or
against us.
Admittedly, the president's
speeches do sometimes show small signs of change
at moments when reality forces its way onto the
premises. For obvious reasons, for instance,
weapons of mass destruction have disappeared from
his speeches when the focus is Iraq (though
mention Iran and ... ).
Recently, Cindy
Sheehan made herself such a thorn in the
presidential side that his speechwriters were
forced to let him acknowledge the actual numbers
of American dead. ("We have lost 1,864 members of
our Armed Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and
223 in Operation Enduring Freedom.") And the
growing debate about withdrawal from Iraq, which
began with unapproved statements from his own
military, has forced the president's speechwriters
to create a new jingle to describe our plan
for the Iraqi future: "As Iraqis stand up, we will
stand down."
In speaking off-the-cuff, as
to the reporters in Donnelly last week, he repeats
his usual words, phrases and lines, mix-and-match
style; still, it's easier in such a session (no
matter how weak the questions lobbed at him) to
sense an edge of confusion about how to make his
world stand in some relation to reality. For
instance, in the Donnelly exchange, which lasted
12 minutes including the
niceties: Question: Any fishing?
The president: I don't know yet.
I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm kind of hanging
loose, as they say. [laughter]"
In this
exchange he offered this strange, new explanation
for the development of terrorism in the Iraqi neck
of the woods:
We had a policy that just said, let
the dictator [Saddam Hussein] stay there, don't
worry about it. And as a result of dictatorship,
and as a result of tyranny, resentment,
hopelessness began to develop in that part of
the world, which became the - gave the
terrorists capacity to recruit.
However, in his speeches, those perfect
artifacts from another universe, delivered only
before the most receptive audiences, usually under
campaign-like conditions, everything is as the
president wants it to be. There, at present, he
inhabits a world that begins with the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787
- imagine how a Democrat might be pilloried for
comparing the making of the already tattered
"Islamic" constitution of Iraq (just hailed by
Iranian Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads that
country's ultra-conservative Guardians Council) to
ours - passes through World War II (where we
successfully occupied two countries, Japan and
Germany) and more or less ends in the glory days
of the Cold War. Missing, of course, is the one
"small" conflict that, right now, is on everyone's
mind all over Washington, not to say the US -
Vietnam. You won't find that name, nor words like
"quagmire" or "bogged down" either.
The
president's speech-world is a world of the
will in every sense. (The terrorists
typically try to break ours and get us to
retreat.) In Idaho, he used will, as
in "will of the majority," six times, but the
will of the willed act (we will not allow
the terrorists, America will not wait to be
attacked again, will confront emerging threats,
will stay on the offensive, will fight, will win,
will be on the hunt, will prevail) 34 times. There
may never have been political speeches that used
the word in all its senses (except as a document
of bequeathment) so often. In this tic, his
speeches catch perhaps the most striking aspect of
his administration since September 11, 2001 - its
driving urge to impose a worldview by force on the
rest of the planet.
In speeches like those
in Utah and Idaho, he offers up a warrior's world
of words. The word war itself appears in
his Idaho speech 26 times, along with
attack, attacks, attacked
(11), fight, fighters,
fighting (10) , battle lines,
battlefronts (two), struggle (two),
strike (two), and one of his absolute
favorites, the phrase on the hunt or
alternately hunt down (we will stay on the,
side by side with Iraqi forces, our common
enemies), used three times. Of course, no war
would be worth much if you didn't win (the
war on terror, in Iraq), used twice, for which you
need to defeat (the terrorists), wielded
nine times.
In the president's speeches,
the world of "the enemy" or "the terrorists" is
imposingly frightening, terrifying enough to fit
the bill for any evil empire. Here is just a
partial list of words associated with it from the
Idaho speech:
Enemy (fight the, in
our midst, across the globe, on many fronts): six
Threat, threatened: 8
Fail (what terrorists will do in the
end)/failed (as in, states - what
terrorists cause): seven Brutal,
brutality: five Violence
(brutal, and extremism): five Kill: five
Retreat (what they want us to do, back
into the shadows): five Murder,
murdered: murderous:
four Destroy/destruction (our way
of life, havoc and, death and):
four Hateful, hate-filled:
three Dangerous (times, enemies):
two Plotted, plotting:
two Crushing/crushes (blow, all
dissent): two Havoc:
two Death: two Assassination:
two Intimidation: one
Extremism: one Evil (seen
freedom conquer): one
Between the two
sides in this global war stand the innocent
and, as it happens, we do share one thing in
common with the terrorists in relation to the
innocent - a strategy (we've followed a
clear), four; (they have a, crushing blow to
their), two.
Fortunately, on our side of
the ledger in support of our strategy to spread
freedom and destroy the terrorists, can be
mustered a powerful set of words that are ours
alone:
Help, helped, helping: 10
Defend: 9 Protect,
protecting (your neighbors, all Americans,
the American homeland, our people, our cities and
borders and infrastructure, against every threat):
eight Security (of every American, false
sense of, to our own citizens, forces, for our
children and grandchildren, for the election, of
our country): seven Democracy (link to
any of the above as in "freedom and ... "):
six Hope (usually connected to freedom):
six Secure (democracy, their freedom,
the peace): three Mission:
three Victory: three Homeland
(American, the): two Progress:
one
On our side of the ledger, even
God makes a series of cameo appearances
(4).
You could yourself take the above
words and phrases and, as you might a deck of
cards, shuffle them into some of the countless
combinations that make up any Bush speech or
meeting with the media. And yet there is still a
study to be done of how words live and die in
given moments. After all, this president has
spoken the words terror, war, and
freedom literally hundreds of thousands of
times since September 11th, 2001, and yet now they
are visibly dying on the lips.
Cindy's
world of words For a long time, George had
a knack for speaking to audiences and seeming so
personal, no matter how large his crowds,
impersonal the setting or scripted his
performance. It was this sense of him that Cindy
Sheehan seems to have begun to crack open. Put her
words up against his - she's willing to be no less
repetitious, no less fierce in her view of the
world - and hers are the words that now feel
personal, that come from the heart and cut to the
bone, that connect. They seem like telegrams sent
directly from reality, and from an irrefutable
core of loss - of lives, of safety, of security,
of well-being - that ever more Americans are
beginning to fear is what George's world is all
about. That's undoubtedly why the normal set of
right-wing attacks and smears launched against
Sheehan, however successful against others in the
past, have simply not penetrated. Who, after all,
can deny the reality of the individual world of
the mother of a war-dead son?
And let's
remember, we're talking about a woman who most
distinctly does not live on a fantasy planet.
Here's how she describes Bush's newest reason to
stay in Iraq - to honor those who already died
there: "Since the freedom and democracy thing is
not going so well and the Iraqi parliament is
having such a hard time writing their
constitution, since violence is mounting against
Iraqis and Americans, and since [Bush's] poll
numbers are going down every day, he had to come
up with something." Put that up against the
president comparing the ethnic and religious
horse-trading inside Baghdad's Green Zone to the
American constitutional convention.
To
illustrate her language, I've taken two brief,
recent passages she wrote around the time the
president made his speeches in Utah and Idaho. The
first is a mere 225 words on "Coming Back to
Crawford"; the second, just over 1,000 words and
entitled "One Mother's Stand". I've treated them
as a single document. Place this set of words
against the president's above:
Son/sons (my, their, have been
killed): six Daughters: one [Her
son] Casey (Camp, love of): seven
Mother/mom (to feel the pain we feel,
Gold Star, regular):
eight Parent/parents:
two Children (lose their, my other):
two Country (our, my, an innocent): four
Grief (unbearable): one Pain
(as much as I am, feel the, and heartache, feel
their): four Heartache:
one Love/loved (of Casey, peace and,
ones): six War (senseless, George
Bush's, his, insane): four Invade (an innocent
country): one Monstrosity (of an
occupation): one Lies (his):
one Misuse and abuse (of power):
one Killed/killing (in George Bush's
war, Americans, continue the): six Died
(Americans have, my son, others who have):
five Death/deaths (sent him to,
meaningless): three Responsibility (the
president's): one Accountable (hold
George Bush): one Cojones (I do have
the ... to tell the world that our "emperor" has
no clothes): one
It seems that Bush was
right. "You got to keep repeating things over and
over and over again for the truth to sink in." He
(and his advisers and his speechwriters) simply
forgot that others might also do the
repeating.
The wordless dead offer their
own form of testimony Increasingly, the
American, if not Iraqi, dead are entering our
world and, after a fashion, making themselves
heard. Their eloquence lies in their very names,
which appear daily in our papers, as they have for
two years now. Here, for instance, are the names
of the American dead, all 13 from Arcand, Elden to
Seamans, Timothy, reported by the Pentagon for the
three days beginning with the president's VFW
speech and ending with his Idaho speech. These
were presented in a little box on an inside page
of the New York Times with the following
explanation: "The Department of Defense has
identified [number] American service members who
have died since the start of the Iraq war. It
confirmed the deaths of the following Americans
yesterday:"
August 23, 2005
BOUCHARD, Nathan K, 24, Sgt, Army;
Wildomar, Calif; Third Infantry Division. DOYLE,
Jeremy W, 24, Staff Sgt, Army; Chesterton, Md;
Third Infantry Division. FUHRMANN, Ray M II, 28,
Specialist, Army; Novato, Calif; Third Infantry
Division. SEAMANS, Timothy J, 20, Pfc, Army;
Jacksonville, Fla; Third Infantry Division.
August 24, 2005 ARCAND,
Elden D, 22, Pfc, Army; White Bear Lake, Minn;
360th Transportation Company, 68th Corps Support
Battalion, 43rd Area Support Group. CATHEY, James
J, 24, Second Lt, Marines; Reno, Nev; Second
Marine Division. MORRIS, Brian L, 38, Staff Sgt,
Army; Centreville, Mich; 360th Transportation
Company, 68th Corps Support Battalion, 43rd Area
Support Group. NURRE, Joseph C, 22, Specialist,
Army Reserve; Wilton, Calif; 463rd Engineer
Battalion. PARTRIDGE, Willard T, 35, Sgt, Army;
Ferriday, La; 170th Military Police Company, 504th
Military Police Battalion, 42nd Military Police
Brigade. ROMERO, Ramon, 19, Pfc, Marines;
Huntington Park, Calif; Second Marine Division.
August 25, 2005 DIAZ,
Carlos J, 27, First Lt, Army; Juana Diaz, P R,
Third Infantry Division. HUNT, Joseph D, 27, Sgt,
Army National Guard; Sweetwater, Tenn; Third
Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry. LIEURANCE,
Victoir P, 34, Staff Sgt, Army National Guard;
Seymour, Tenn; Third Squadron, 278th Armored
Cavalry.
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
