Words and Bullets
There may be no better gauge of a society’s character than the way it uses language.
Is the language of its public discourse the language of communication, or of coercion?
What does Sarah Palin mean by her constant evocation of guns in her politics and on her television show? The answer, I think, is that she doesn’t mean anything at all. The former governor is expressing a wish to associate herself with what she believes to be a deep value of her constituency: not only the right to possess firearms, but the freedom to become immersed in the culture of guns as an expression of personal identity.
Yet, despite her use of the metaphor of riflescope crosshairs overlaid across targeted congressional districts, including that of Gabrielle Giffords, Palin doesn’t seem overtly to be threatening anybody with violence. Not true of Sharron Angle, whose Nevada Senate campaign failed by the breadth of a hair, and who implied that there might be “Second Amendment remedies” if her side didn’t get its way.
The notion that Gabrielle Giffords’ attacker was influenced by extreme polemics has been rejected by those who engage in those polemics. The point is not provable either way. But it is the case that the public corruption of language in America did not start with the recent ascendance of gun talk, race talk, and hate talk. In the years before the debt crisis, the language that prevailed was the language of money. Wealth became a symbol of intelligence. If you were smart enough to get a lot of it, your status as an authority on how the world worked was taken as self-evident. (In fact, hasn’t it always been the case in America that the answer to a loudmouth was: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”).
After the great financial collapse, the absence of accountability that had preceded it became clear to all. This gave way to a general acknowledgment that society’s acceptance of the language of money had brought it to financial ruin.
The Giffords shooting has frightened America’s language abusers. The civilized tone that has appeared in Congress in the few weeks since the Tucson tragedy reflects a new appreciation of how difficult it is to predict where accountability will land when something bad happens. The functioning of the political and social system depends not only on law, but on the intentions – the goodwill, God help us – of its participants. A wish to communicate is the optimum basis for civil dialogue. In its absence, fear will have to suffice.
