The Language of Politics

Two language-related things are on my mind this morning, enough so to write about them here.

• I'm disenchanted at just how entrenched the "liberal/conservative" distinction has become in the United States, as if it's a distinction that comes from nature, such as "man/woman" or "day/night." It isn't. It's just a nearly useless distinction that inhibits creative thinking, impedes our ability to communicate, and oversimplifies everything. It reduces options at a time when we need flexibility, and divides us when we need cooperation. Thanks to win-at-all-cost blowhards on the right who have propagated this distinction for the past two decades, thus coarsening the nation's political dialogue for a generation, maybe more.


• I'm tired of hearing about "job creation" as the aim of government policy, as if the direct purpose of government is to create jobs. It isn't. Business creates jobs. Government oversees business to protect the people. Thinking that government itself can create jobs is like thinking that straw can be spun into gold. It can't. And thinking this shows a lack of understanding of how economic wealth is created. It is created by adding value. Government does not do this.

Talk of government "creating jobs" sounds especially silly coming from politicians who seek to reduce the role of government in the lives of citizens. Okay, I know such people actually mean they want government to get out of the way so businesses can grow and prosper. These days, however, businesses often seek growth not by hiring people, but by being more efficient, which means using fewer people, or outsourcing work to places where labor is cheaper. But I digress.

Back to the idea that government can create jobs. This reminds me of when my brother travelled to Norway in the 1980s as part of U.S. Army cold weather survival exercises with the Norwegian military. He and his squadron flew commercially, and had to change planes at London's Heathrow Airport. While there, he was amazed to see women standing at the bottom of escalators whose job was to stand in place and urge people to use caution when mounting the moving staircase.

Absurd, right? Even after a decade of Thatcherism (including, by then, privatization of British Airways), what my brother thought of as "the post World War II British welfare state" was still alive and kicking. However you feel about it, that's the result when government creates jobs.

So let's stop talking about government as if it can create jobs. We're giving it way more credit that it deserves. Businesses create jobs. And people create businesses. And government, ideally, has as much to do with the process as the referee in a hockey game.


• P.S. In reading new coverage about politics, I've noticed a verb that's suddenly being used everywhere. It's "to pivot," as in a candidate pivoting during a campaign. It's used like this, seen on www.politico.com last week: "The pivot to attacking Paul marks the first time Gingrich has launched an unprovoked broadside against another Republican candidate."

The implication, I guess, is that a candidate keeps his or her positions and efforts and overall operation intact, but now swings them in some new direction without the use of much additional energy or groundwork, rather like one of those machine guns mounted on the back of a pick-up truck often seen in ungoverned regions. Well, that's not the most encouraging illustration, but that's what comes to mind when I hear the word.

I suppose it's a useful expression, but I'm suspicious of any sudden increase in the use of any word or phrase in a new context. If it was that useful, it would have been out there more often all long, right? So to me, a sudden new buzzword smells of flavor-of-the-month intellectual laziness, a kind of mental shorthand that does not enhance our ability to communicate with precision. It's just one more brick in the wall of thoughtless thinking, another step on the road to the city where we don't have the ability to think for ourselves.

I hope civilization never pivots that way.

The virtues of being incomplete

I believe the best kind of art is that which engages one's imagination. This explains, I think, my interest in such archaic forms as silent film and network radio: each lacked an element, which had to be provided by its audience. And that, in turn, made the experience more personal and individual and real.

I've just breezed through 'A Man Without a Country,' the slim volume of musings issued by Kurt Vonnegut in 2005, and in it (among many recycled ideas from his earlier work) are thoughts on what Vonnegut calls "the imagination circuit." These below pertain to visual art such as paintings or drawings:

"If you go to an art gallery, here's just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven't moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it."

So I guess paintings or sculpture might fall into the same category — they require viewers to collaborate, though they're not usually trying to tell a story in the same way more narrative forms (film or radio) do.

A similar collaborative process happens with reading: we take these little marks (which I'm using right now) and run them through our minds to create pictures that appear to us, however fleetingly, in ways that only we could have imagined. They're private little epiphanies, though fueled by the shared experience of watching or listening or looking.

Regarding those "imagination circuits," Vonnegut writes that...

"...it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these imagination circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses."

Vonnegut leaves it at that, without making a judgment, though he doesn't seem to be too enthused by the situation. For me, I can't speak against today's movies and television shows, as I enjoy them as much as the next person. Rather, I wish to raise my hand and point out that older, incomplete forms did have their own unique power to communicate, and still do. That power is rooted in their very incompleteness, which requires people to use their imagination.

And I think those who have a certain kind of imagination can still get a lot from older forms. Once your imagination is engaged, it's possible to enter a meditation-like trance stage that is the launching pad for emotions that are bigger and intense and personal than if you are a mere spectator, which is what you are when everything's given to you on a silver platter, or screen.

Even when movies began being made with color and sound as a matter of course, the great directors understood the importance of not showing. Alfred Hitchcock was a master at the "less is more" school — he often did not show scenes of violence, instead leaving it up to the viewer's imagination, knowing full well that we would envision something many times more frightening that any image he could have put on the screen. Why? Because, left on our own, we can't help but fill in the blanks, so to speak, with images that resonate with us personally.

In an age of alienation, I think these kinds of collaborative art are good for the soul. They involve us and make us feel a part of something, and can tap into emotions that are more abstract and bigger. By giving up some elements, we can gain so much. Call it the new primitivism. There, I just did.

I suppose by this thinking, a "Mad Lib" qualifies as great art, as you choose words to fill in the text of a story. Could be. That's a ___________adjective idea if I ever heard one.

The human potential for unexpected randomness

This weekend I saw 'Hugo,' the big screen adaptation of the 'Hugo Cabret' book by Brian Selznick. It was the first time I'd never seen a film in 3D, which until now I had dismissed as just another Hollywood substitution for character or story. But it really added a lot to the visual experience of the film, and didn't give me a headache, either. So other than the $13 ticket price and slightly dark image, yay 3D!

As for the film: 'Hugo' had me from the opening shot, which starts high above Paris of the 1930s and then swoops down into the sprawling glass and steel shed of an idealized (and now long gone) Gare Montparnasse, once one of the city's great train stations. Of course anything with a big city European train shed and steam engines, plus lots of mechanical clock machinery and scenes of baked goods and then old film would have been more than enough for me. It could have been a documentary about the effect of the Great Depression on French post-Symbolist poetry; I would have been happy to just watch scenes of the station and eye the croissants for two hours.

Yes, the film did have a story—one involving the French film pioneer Georges Méliès, no less, and yay again for that. But the reason for this post is to examine a specific point made in the story, when the question of "Why We're Here" once again rears its unanswerable head. In this case, with clocks all about, it's only natural that the question is answered in terms of machinery. So here's what I wrote to an acquaintance who saw the film with me:

"At one point, Hugo says that clocks or machines have only just the parts they need—no more, no less. From this, he extrapolates a reason for each person's existence: everyone must have a purpose, or he or she wouldn't be here. And though it's not said explicitly in the film, it's an argument for our universe reflecting a master design of some higher power or another.

"It's a nice thought, but I find it doesn't sit well with me. To me, such a notion seems kind of limiting or dismissive of humanity—to think that we need to justify our existence and that we MUST have a reason for being here. To me, the essence of being human is our ability to transcend the absolutely necessary (very much unlike a watch part) and do things that are completely unnecessary, such as make art or do cartwheels.

I'm not saying the "we're all like parts in a wonderful clock" answer is wrong. But it's not the right one for me, as it seems at odds with the one thing about humans that sets us apart from so much else: our capacity for whimsy and creativity and imagination. We don't always do what's necessary. Heck, we sometimes do things that make no sense at all, often again and again.

Consider: insanity is commonly illustrated as a person doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, humans have been asking "Why are we here?" for ages, and not getting an answer, and yet we continue to do it. Given that we know in advance that we can't know an answer for sure (which is a scary thing to most people, hence the popularity of religious systems and beliefs), then it's a remarkably human thing for us to keep asking. It's like we're in a casino in front of the biggest slot machine of them all, and the chances of hitting the huge jackpot are infinitesimally small and might well be zero for all we know, and yet we keep pulling the handle again and again. Insane? Maybe. Human? Yes!

I like the idea of the human potential for unexpected randomness, and sense there may be something holy in it. I've long felt this way, even without thinking about it, and even while growing up marinated in the teachings of the Catholic church. When I attended Fordham University in New York City, I would annoy my new city friends while crossing streets in Manhattan by suddenly diving down to the pavement, somersaulting, and then standing back up again and continuing on as if nothing had happened. Asked why I did that, I'd reply along the lines that I was just making sure I still had free will, that's all. Oh, there's the hick from New Hampshire, at it again!

Yes, everyone wants to be needed. It's an important part of life. But equally important to our humanity, I think, is to preserve and exercise and celebrate our ability to do things that are totally unnecessary.

I think it would make a great basis for a church: that people all get together once a week and do something completely unexpected to celebrate their humanness. Plus, you could get a tax write-off.

And speaking of that: if the current U.S. tax code isn't a celebration of the human capacity for the unnecessary, then I don't know what is.