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Wishes have always had childlike quality to them, as if sung by an impeccably-dressed cricket with the otherworldly voice of Ukelele Ike. Unlike Santa Claus, wishes do not go away when we grow up, in some ways they seem to grow stronger, maybe because the stakes rise accordingly until those last wishes we all make when we can see the end.
Even as children we knew there were good wishes and bad wishes because we wished them about each other and we heard our parents say them, too. Still, we learned as we grew up that the “bad wishes” were often condemned as childlike, especially the unspeakable ones.
In many cultures, wishes–both bad and good–have power, even as our culture views them as powerless or even cartoonish. Hence the phrase, “Wishful thinking.” Even with the one form of transcendental wishing granted any meaning in our culture, prayer, we are taught that using a prayer for a personal wish–“asking God a favor”–as one minister where I grew up once said, was verboten.
Wishing, of course, is intimately bound up in words and language, for all language is the vehicle for wishes. In those cultures who still believe in the power of wishes, language becomes the incense on which hopes float skyward. The words used, the order, the tone of voice, even the place are all proscribed to increase the power of the wish. In some cultures, only certain people have the ability to grant the most powerful wishes. Much of their power lies in the words, which sometimes only they are permitted to know or utter.
Even as children we knew all about the relationship of language and wishes. To get into a playground tussle and utter “I wish you were dead,” happened fairly often. Yet something about the tone and the time made these taunts forgivable even as adult authority figures told us never to use them again as if we had used a four-letter word.
In childhood there existed a rough hierarchy of good and bad wishes which we acknowledged with language and tone of voice. There were angry wishes, pleading wishes, and “just give me this one wish.” Somehow what in childhood had a fluid, in-the-moment quality, hardened in adulthood. Wishes became both more and less serious. For someone in a public debate to say, “I wish you were dead,” no longer held the innocence of a playground taunt. Like asking God for a favor it just wasn’t done.
What do wishes mean in a culture that does not really value them and has dismissed the language and ritual that give them power in other cultures? Have bad wishes become merely bad manners like flipping someone the bird or mooning them?
We seem just as ambiguous about words themselves, which we use as imprecisely and offhandedly as wishes. The decline of language is as generational a rant as the decline of mores. Linguistic relativism may inspire even more arguments than moral relativism.
For all our arguments about free speech and bad grammar, history tells us that language really derives its legitimacy from only two sources–power and truth. We all know about the first. Governments, institutions, and groups can give meaning to words and they can ban them. A professor I once had used to say, “Those who control the definitions control the culture.” Those in control of language can even kill those who use verboten words. You did not speak ill of the Fuhrer to his face and even in private you guarded every phrase as if your life depended on it, because it did.
The real ability of language to move people, though, lies in truth. Those of us who write do so ultimately out of a quest for that Holy Grail of truth. We seek the right words that so precisely nail an issue that those who read them are not only moved by them but transformed. Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” moved an entire nation.
So language exists for us as a fascinating dichotomy–those with power seek to control language; those with language seek to control power. Perhaps that remains why satire is one of the more demanding forms to master and the chosen tool for those who would use language against dictatorial or totalitarian powers.
For those of us who seek the truth, words also hold the quality of wishing. For to seek the truth represents perhaps the ultimate wish. Maybe that is why writers who are truth seekers wish a lot. You wish for inspiration, for the right subject, and, most of all, for the right words, the right tone. If you are a good writer, you wish for those days you are “on” the way a basketball player wishes for that game when the hoop is as big as a Ferris wheel and the entire game a carnival.
Here is where wars and conflicts come in. In the wake of any crisis, language, like life, can become especially emotionally-charged. Any American historian worth her or his PhD can cite many examples of times and places where certain words and phrases could earn you a jail sentence, a beating, a tar-and-feathering, a lynching.
In such an atmosphere the dualities of language as power and language as truth also heighten. For both sides in a deadly conflict, words become bullets. Hence that deadly serious phrase uttered by this nation during WWII, “Loose lips sink ships.” In this climate those who see language as truth more often than not come in conflict with those who see language as power. The Nazis sentenced my grandfather to death for what he SAID about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Since 9/11 a crisis situation has dominated this country. We should not have expected otherwise. The War in Iraq has ratcheted up the tension tenfold. In many ways Iraq IS about language. We have at its heart an administration that seems to almost purposely demean language as a way of asserting its power. The Bush Administration’s for disdain for language seems to echo their disdain for truth infuriating those for whom language is truth.
This volatile combination explodes as surely as gasoline thrown on a fire. For those who work to precisely nail the truth by agonizing over each word, the demeaning of language by the Republican Counterrevolution until only power remains can make any writing seem futile. In how many ways have so many people who have spoken and written the truth about Iraq and other issues been ignored or callously dismissed?
The Bush Administration’s contempt for language and truth has provided the script for the Raucous Right for over a decade. Potty-mouth language and nasty name-calling started on the Far Right where the likes of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly decided to simultaneously ignore manners, truth and well-crafted language. One of the intents of this strategy lay in the GOP’s attempt to portray Democrats and their favorite target, “liberals” as effete snobs who didn’t talk like folks down at the corner bar.
This turned language and truth upside down. The poorer the grammar, the more four letter words and name-calling you could get in, the “more true” something was. In furthering this distortion, the Raucous Right conveniently forgot two centuries of American history. Our Constitutional Convention essentially spent all its time on language–on finding exactly the right words to convey the meaning of democracy.
The universal respect for this document by people all over the world–people who do not even speak our language–testifies to the importance of the care they took with that document that begins, “We the people.” And what of other great speeches and documents? What would the Gettysburg Address sound like if written by Coulter? How would Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural sound if delivered by Limbaugh? And what would Wilson’s 14 points represent if conceived by O’Reilly?
For some this has taken us past the point of no return. There is no point in trying to talk with this administration. For others the way you talk back to an Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh is to use their language and manners. Limbaugh wanna-bes seem as prevalent on the left as on the right. What I do know is that again we are back to wishes, words and wars. And at the center, as always is the old dichotomy of language and power.
In the past, in the face of language as power, Liberal America has always found a new voice to express its truths. Think of Tom Paine or Ben Franklin, who, in a way invented a language for the American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln found a language to frame the great moral issue of his times as Garry Wills so adroitly shows us in his book on the Gettysburg Address.
So today we seek yet another way to express truth. I certainly don’t have the answer, but I do have the belief that blogging at its heart is a search for that language. If that is true, then it behooves us to allow as broad a leeway as possible to those seeking ways to express the truths of our times. Otherwise we are back to language as power and with it the end of wishes and the continuation of wars.
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