Politics and Teaching: Writing the English Language

Once upon a time, in the last third or so of the 20th c., I had a conference with a student who had started an informal essay, "Since the beginning of time, Man ...." Now, a line like that had been used in TV deodorant commercials a bit earlier, so I found the line funny — but the student wouldn't know that.

I asked the student "Do you count 'the beginning of time' from the Big Bang, or the Biblical Creation, or, locally, for the rise of human consciousness? And does 'Man' include Woman and our entire species?"

A couple questions later, the student clarified that what his topic involved was, "Me and my friends back in high school." So I asked, "Then why not begin, 'Me and my friends back in high school,' if that would be decorous — appropriate for Speaker, target audience, and subject matter — or, 'Back when we were in high school, my friends and I ...'?" He asked, "You mean it's okay to write about *that*?" And I responded, "Well, if that's what you want to write about, and you can fulfill the assignment, and you can make it interesting and maybe useful to a likely audience — yeah."
And then I put more delicately than this, "'Cause otherwise you're just bullshitting. (When I said it can be a good idea to start with a general introduction and get more specific, I didn't mean *cosmic*, and in a short essay, skip the Intro. and just spit out your thesis or its equivalent. Anyway, skip the pretentious horse-pucky)."

He had been trained to write like that.
He had been invited to bullshit.

And such training, along with huckster hyperbole, misplaced tolerance for b.s., fashionable relativism on — let's call it — the nakedness of emperors, and failure to listen closely not just to others but to ourselves: *that* is part of the reason English in 2018 is contributing to bad politics as much as it did in 1946, when George Orwell complained about "Politics and the English Language."

Defending US Gun Policies

"The claim that gun massacres are mysterious or 

difficult or bewildering or resistant to legislation is a lie." 

— Adam Gropnik, "Four Truths About the Florida School Shooting," 

The New Yorker 15 Feb. 2018

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely 

the defense of the indefensible. 

Things like the continuance of British rule in India, 

the Russian purges and deportations, 

the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, 

can indeed be defended, but only by arguments 

which are too brutal for most people to face, 

and which do not square with 

the professed aims of the political parties."

— George Orwell, 

"Politics and the English Language" (1946).

Allowing gun massacres can be defended — e.g., if one argues as allowed by the New Yorker essay that the economic and cultural advantages of widespread ownership of a variety of guns justifies the loss of life. Alternatively, people have argued that the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights undergirds all our other rights by helping guarantee The Right of Revolution, the final bastion against tyranny and oppression by the Federal government (and State and local governments as well). Thomas Jefferson said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure" (1787), to which, in this argument, we would add the blood of a few thousand innocent Americans a year.

So of course the NRA should be defending sale of Kevlar-piercing bullets: the police and military personnel defending the State might well be wearing Kevlar armor. And of course US citizens should have semi-automatic weapons — and some access to kits to make them full(y) automatic — with large magazines: to counter those of the SWAT teams and military. Etc. Q.E.D.

Like, if you want a coherent and rational argument, go to the greed-heads of the weapons biz (or the crazies arming for the coming race war or apocalypse) or those who fear the black helicopters coming in from the Deep State. They'll be bringing AR-15s to a drone fight: the State always outguns the People. The turning point of revolutions is when the troops turn their guns away from the People and toward an oppressive government.

On the other hand, "Post-Truth is pre-Fascist," and in a Post-Truth USA, there is much to be said for recalling the Right of (Mostly NonViolent) Revolution.

Guns, Rights, and the Deaths of Children

Rhetorical question raised on my Facebook page: 

Is your 2nd Amendment right more important than your child or grandchild’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

This question should be taken literally as well as "rhetorically." 
From George Orwell's, "Politics and the English Language" (1946): "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face [...]."
If willing to make a brutal argument, people could argue logically — and some on the radical fringe do — that the 2nd Amendment is central to Liberty and the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing the firepower that underlies the Right of Revolution and the threat in the Right of Revolution to overthrow any government that threatens American rights. The 2nd Amendment in this view, and its protection of a civilian population armed and potentially dangerous is the final guard against government tyranny.
So the blood of children is to be added to the literal "blood of patriots and tyrants" that figuratively waters and feeds the Tree of Liberty. And, of course, the American Nation does not lack people and can afford the sacrifice: given our current birthrates and immigration, given the relatively small investment the Nation has made in young children, and given the death rates Americans routinely tolerate in such areas as alcohol consumption (some eighty-eight thousand Americans per year) and automobile fatalities (37,461 in 2016, which could easily be reduced by returning to a 55 mile-per-hour speed limit).
So, the distressingly high rate of US gun deaths, including children, "can indeed be defended, but," again, "only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language" defending wide-open gun ownership, as with wars and purges, «ethnic cleansing» and other horrors, "has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."
To start a legitimate debate, politically-active Americans need to deal with those arguments on the anti-government fringe, and, as Jamelle Bouie has suggested, and some of my Facebook colleagues have endorsed, show widely visuals that can drive home the carnage produced when high-energy bullets impact human bodies, especially the bodies of children.