A long, long time ago – it was the mid-seventies, when Disco was king and lapels were wide and Jaws met Young Frankenstein in the Towering Inferno and all the rest. It was an odd time to be an English teacher – obviously no one was thinking clearly. Pet rocks? And the course was an elective at that prep school in upstate New York – a course on language and linguistics, back in the days when people would say the medium is the message, then smile smugly.
Fine, so let’s talk about the medium of language, and of Korzybski and Whorf and S. I. Hayakawa and such folks. Heck, throw in Noam Chomsky too. It was basic sociolinguistics – what you are able to think is constrained by the language you must use. The words available to you chop up the world in a certain way – having only one word for snow isn’t like the Inuit who have twenty or thirty – and the structure of the language – the way verbs work, if there are verbs – determines how you think of time itself, and of what’s real. Hopi has no real future tense, and that makes you think differently. And we have no formal subjunctive – so when the French intellectuals use that to talk about what is quite real but hasn’t happened or isn’t happening, we tend to think they’re gay or something. And the case structure in Latin or Russian – what is with this dative business? And everyone knows the Germans think funny, what with leaving the verb to the very end of each sentence and sounding like Yoda. Damn – you always have to wait. And they use those compound agglutinated nouns – Farbfernsehgerät for the color television set and Funkfernbedienung for the remote. What’s with that? Are they always thinking about things as if those things are not what they are but an amalgamation of other discrete things and different processes, and they need to remind themselves of that? That makes you see the world differently. The minute details of everything are always in your face. But the Germans are an annoyingly detail-minded people. The compound agglutinated nouns might have something to do with that. Maybe that’s why BMW’s are such cool cars.
All this was all kind of fun, in an odd way. But the kids went off to Harvard and Brandeis and Yale and Princeton, and schools just as good but with lesser names, and probably forget it all. But some might remember a bit of what at one point, when they were seventeen, they found vaguely interesting for a time, amid everything else that is so pressing at that age. Somewhere out there, maybe, there’s someone who might recall, from time to time, that perhaps their thinking isn’t the only way of thinking. They’re kind of trapped by the syntax and grammar everyone around them has agreed to use. That’s a first step in clearing your head.
The problem is that clearing your head is hard to do these days, given our public discourse. We had eight years of George Bush telling us that things were simple, really – in Texan, which isn’t exactly English. There was a lot of that cowboy talk – that stuff about good guys and bad guys and getting the bad guys dead or alive. So of course he had his problems when he attempted Standard English – “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream” and that sort of thing. Cowboys don’t talk that way. And his Spanish was the Tex-Mex border Spanish you use in restaurants and with the hired help, and a bit of an embarrassment. And the syntax and grammar he used was that of the born-again evangelical crowd – fixed in place when he turned forty and gave up drinking for Jesus. He once referred to the Iraq War as a Crusade and had to walk that back. But those were the words he knew. And things weren’t simple, really.
But you might argue that George Bush was trapped by what he could think, not that he was bad at thinking – he was just trapped deep inside the syntax and grammar everyone around him had long ago agreed to use. There were limits that had little to do with him. The medium was the message after all. But of course that doesn’t speak to his choosing that particular crowd and sneering at everyone else, nor his pride in being a true Texan, even if the son of a famous patrician Connecticut family of great wealth and power and attending Yale and Harvard. Bush chose his limitations, and then embraced them. Obama is his mirror opposite – always trying to escape the language trap, the words that limit your thinking and the easy formulations that pass for wisdom and how things should be done. He doesn’t buy it, even if the Right distrusts him when he agrees with some of what they say and the Left is appalled. But perhaps those years in grade school in Indonesia, and how he bounced all over, play a part in that. Having to deal in another language day in and day out, to think in it, loosens you up a bit. Even if it was long ago and you’ve lost that language now, you do remember how other people saw things differently because that was how their language had them thinking. That sort of thing keeps you from getting too smug and arrogant. You’ve seen the cognition trap. You know that guy who just cannot figure it all out, and that guy might be you too.
But few think like that. We get our language from the culture around us – it’s the ocean in which we swim, with its agreed-upon syntax and grammar of course, but also with its slang and catchphrases and loaded words for what is good and what is bad. And we don’t think about that ocean. We just think we’re thinking. And we watch the news, and say, well, that’s how things are. Only a few of us have the leisure, or compulsion, to slowly and painstakingly slow down and try to work out who is saying what and what is being implied and what seems silly and what seems wise. Maybe if you write it all down and try to account for everything you can figure it all out, or at least some of it. It’s a way to escape the cognition trap, caused by the language people use. You write to discover what you think, what you actually can think. Yes, there’s a reason these daily columns are so long. You start with the news and try to wiggle out of the trap. Sometimes you do.
But it’s so easy to be trapped in the news – two good friends were part of the team that founded CNN back in 1980, and they say that there’s good reason that CNN calls itself the Most Trusted Name in News. CNN plays it straight – from the beginning there was no agenda and there’s none now. But one family member out here only watches Sean Hannity on Fox News, because Hannity tells it like it is, and another reads all the Glenn Beck books and says Beck is the only man in America who knows what is really happening. Those two say, in effect, that CNN is caught in a cognitive trap, only able to see things through the syntax and grammar of the liberal left and can’t see what is really happening. Tell them no, that’s MSNBC and they’ll say maybe so, but CNN is just as bad. Of course the whole premise of Fox News – Fair and Balanced and We Report, You Decide – was to claim they had escaped the cognitive trap of all other news organization and had no lens of any kind filtering anything – thus O’Reilly’s No Spin Zone. And of course that was brilliant marketing. But one’s man’s freedom from the traps everyone else has fallen into is just another man’s spin. And thus there are the flame wars where O’Reilly on Fox and Olbermann on MSNBC go at each other, and the poor guys at CNN wonder where all their ratings went. The poor guys at CNN thought they were just reporting the news.
All this leads to some odd places. See this video clip of Sean Hannity on Friday, May 7 – Hannity calls for Obama to step down now, as everyone knows he is irresponsible about everything and has ruined the country. Hannity claims that Obama is not “interested in the facts or the truth” and the White House was slow to react to the Nashville floods (not what Nashville’s mayor is saying by the way) and Obama obviously hasn’t read Arizona’s immigration law, and the oil spill is Obama’s Katrina, even if that talking point was abandoned by the Republicans the week before – and all of this shows this Administration is incompetent. And there is no spin here – “President Obama, is it time to step up? Or maybe step aside?”
You don’t see such things on CNN.
And see the anonymous person who posted the clip, Karoli:
Gosh, Hannity. Where was that question when you were so bent in 2007 you felt the need to rant about “Democrats emboldening our enemies” by criticizing President Bush?
Mr. Hannity, were YOU ready to step up or step aside when your good pal Hal Turner was rounded up by the FBI and carried away for threatening federal judges?
And while I’m at it, Mr. Hannity, did you call for President Bush to step up or step aside when it was clear for anyone with half a brain to see how the Cheney-Bush administration perverted the rule of law with the efforts to politicize the US Attorneys? No, no you didn’t. You APPLAUDED the erosion of our civil rights and constitution.
You know what I truly dislike, Mr. Hannity? I truly dislike people who stand up and thump their chests, puff up and call themselves “Christians” and “patriots” while using their taxpayer subsidized nonprofit organization to pay for private jets, nasty mailers, book-pimping and other activities unrelated to the purpose of said non-profit organization.
So here’s the deal, Mr. Hannity. YOU can sit down and shut up or you can step down. At this point, you’re a useless sack of words spewing onto the airwaves while MY taxpayer dollars subsidize your effort to dodge your own obligations to our country while you make a mockery of true patriots and Christians.
Karoli provides all the links if you want to verify any of that, but what you see is an argument over just who is in a cognitive trap. It’s a pissing contest. There’s no winning one of those – all you get is smelly wet shoes.
And David Neiwert offers this clip from later in the Hannity show – Hannity cuts through the crap and argues that Iraq owes the United States all the money we spent on invading and occupying it for the past seven years:
Hannity: I’ve actually had an idea — no one listens to little ol’ Sean Hannity. But I’m like — I think the Iraqis, with all their oil resources, need to pay us back for their liberation. Every single solitary penny. Because we really need –
Johnson: I really thought that from the beginning. I thought that that was kind of, part of the equation.
Hannity: It should have been part of the deal.
Johnson: Should have been part of the deal.
Hannity: I think it should be now. I think they owe us a lot for that.
Neiwert counters that:
Yeah, I bet the families of the estimated 100,000-plus innocent civilians who we “liberated” from their existence on the planet would be more than happy to “pay us back.”
Especially considering that no one in Iraq asked for us to liberate them – we just did it on our own, illegally and under false pretenses.
It’s true that Dick Cheney and Co. envisioned using the proceeds from the oil money they believed would soon be flowing through American auspices in Iraqi oil fields would cover the costs of the war — and of course, that money never materialized, leaving American taxpayers holding the bag.
Funny how Hannity developed a case of amnesia regarding those facts.
It’s another pissing contest. You’re trapped in a certain way of thinking that is not the only way to think of these things. No, YOU’RE trapped. No, YOU are. And so on and so forth.
So who is trapped in a certain way of thinking? Well, they can wait until Sunday. ABC News’ This Week will have two featured guests. Attorney General Eric Holder will sit down for his first Sunday morning interview since the attempted Times Square bombing the previous weekend. And given questions about the new Arizona immigration law and the upcoming trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, maybe a civilian trial in Manhattan and maybe not, having Holder makes sense, but this doesn’t:
In a This Week EXCLUSIVE interview, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani explains why he thinks the accused bomb suspect should be declared an enemy combatant. Should terror suspects lose their Miranda rights and be stripped of their citizenship? Is a criminal approach to terrorism making America less safe? The man who has been called America’s Mayor – the mayor of New York City on September 11, 2001 – Rudy Giuliani, only on This Week.
Steve Benen comments:
This seems to be pretty reflexive for the national media – if terrorism is in the news, it must be time to interview the former mayor of a city where terrorism struck nearly nine years ago. The assumption at news outlets is as common as it is bizarre – terrorists struck New York, so the former mayor of New York must be an expert on terrorism.
Yes, someone has fallen into a cognitive trap. Somehow all the words all lined up and it was let’s ask Rudy. That’s only natural. But Benen says it’s a mistake to present Giuliani to the public as a credible, reliable voice on national security issues:
He clearly is not. Giuliani’s remarks on national security policy tend to be, on their face, ridiculous. Worse, his commentary tends to include claims that are wrong, poorly thought out, or both.
Benen says Rudy Giuliani has repeatedly lied on national television about national security – about the response to the Abdulmutallab case (the response to the Christmas Day Underpants was immediate) and about the State of the Union address (Giuliani said Obama never mentioned the War on Terror even once, but the transcript shows otherwise) and Giuliani previously said this – “We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”
Benen adds this:
Newsweek’s Ben Adler recently noted that Giuliani’s frequent “factual errors raise a legitimate question as to whether Giuliani deserves to be invited back to discuss foreign policy.” And yet, Giuliani keeps getting invited back anyway.
Rewarding someone who deceives the public with more airtime does a disservice to the discourse – and encourages more public deception.
About a month ago, Greg Sargent noted, “Someone needs to tell the bookers at the networks that the fact that Rudy Giuliani happened to get photographed walking through the smoke and dust on 9/11 does not give him any authority or credibility on foreign policy and national security issues.”
But we seemed to be trapped into thinking he has that authority. And Sarah Palin can see Russia from her front door, thus she too has credibility on foreign policy and national security issues.
It’s so easy to fall into these kinds of traps. Words bump together. They must mean something. Fox News and ABC seem to operate on that principle. So who do you trust?
See Frank Rich:
CNN actually is regarded as the most trustworthy news source in America, according to a “60 Minutes”/Vanity Fair poll released last week. But no good deed goes unpunished. CNN’s stars … have lost almost half their viewers between the first quarter of 2009 and this year, and the network now generally comes in third among the cable news networks in prime-time ratings. …
At Fox, which was a close runner-up to CNN in that poll, public policy issues have long been routinely distorted to suit its political interests – as typified by its promotion of the “death panel” canards during the health care debate. But now that network is even politicizing the facts of nonpartisan existential threats to the country. After the oil spill, both Michael Brown, the “Brownie” of Katrina fame, and another Bush White House acolyte, the former press secretary Dana Perino, turned up to offer variations on Rush Limbaugh’s theory that the BP oil rig may have been deliberately sabotaged to bolster liberal arguments against offshore drilling.
But what troubles Rich is the Fox “innovation” used by Hannity in connection with the foiled New York attack:
For a “text voting” segment, he invited the audience to vote “if you think the Times Square bombing suspect acted alone” or with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda. The winner, he announced at the program’s end, was Al Qaeda. So what if the correct answer is the Pakistani Taliban? Fox viewers are officially entitled to decide their own facts. You’d think that if America is at war with terrorists, it might be helpful if we knew precisely which terrorists we are at war with. We’re still paying for having conflated Iraq with Al Qaeda after 9/11.
Now that’s interesting. If the words available to us chop up the world in a certain way and the structure of the language determines how we think of time itself, and of what’s real, we can get trapped by the syntax and grammar everyone around them has agreed to use – and not see a whole lot of what is going on. And now we vote to agree on just what we want to see and no more than that?
Maybe that sociolinguistics course way back when shouldn’t have been an elective at all, but a requirement.
Just Above Sunset 