"Everybody," "Nobody," and Other Absolutes in The Age of Ads and Trump (repeat post)

CAUTION: Repeat rant from recovering English Teacher trying to get people to cut back the BS of everyday semi-communication.

What's on my mind is the click-invitation Link title (different from the article title) in the e-mail to me from THE NATION for current stories: "All Eyes Are Now on Robert Mueller [...]" / [by] GEORGE ZORNICK

Uh, no; "All Eyes" are not. Not even all human eyes among American adults. This is part of the "EVERYBODY/NOBODY" problem where we habitually forget to mention the population of which EVERYBODY is or is not doing something (etc.) and how the hell we might be able to know.

This is not a good thing, and how not-good has become especially clear the last couple of years.

* Politically-involved people tend to think *everybody* is politically involved. That's patently untrue: check out the large number of Americans who don't even bother to vote.

* Politically-involved people of Leftish persuasion can come to think that *everybody* is ready to impeach Donald Trump or struggle to retain the Affordable Care Act, or whatever. Unfortunately, "whatever" can include such delusions as some activists in the late 1960s thinking the USA in a pre-revolutionary state. We were not, as the 1972 Presidential election convincingly demonstrated.

*Everybody* they knew was ready to "take it to the streets": (1) probably not, even among those they knew; (2) they didn't know enough people, or a statistically useful sample.

* Donald J. Trump is on an extreme of the continuum, but there is a continuum of everyday, hyperbolic bullshit that American speakers of English (and probably others) clearly tolerate way too much. Your kids tell you "But *everybody* in my class is getting tattooed," and you know to tell them, "Name two." Try similar challenges when adults (with less excuse than kids) hit you with AdSpeak, CoachSpeak, CampaignSpeak, AcademicSpeak — all those "disruptive interventions" by just a journal article — CorpSpeak, and similar fonts of hyperbole and other usually misused figures of speech. The road to Trump was paved with sloppy use of language (superlatives anyone?) and bullshit clichés like, "Since the beginning of time" — Really? Is that since the Big Bang or the rise of human consciousness (for highly local, subjective time), or even the last odd 6K years for a popular Mythic Time? "We want 110%?" — Uh, huh: You're saying you want a blank check on my time, right? "The worst/best _______ ever." (1) Again, probably not. (2) Something doesn't have to be THE WORST EVER!!! to be very, very bad. The pizza you're selling doesn't have to be the best in this arm of the galaxy to be a good buy: In a big city, as MAD Magazine pointed out long ago, best on the block is probably good enough.

People who (figuratively) bend over backwards not to offend their auditors on identity grounds should take at least a bit of care not to offend their auditors' intelligence.

WORDS MEAN (damn it): "Existential Threat"/"The United States"

A Congressional talking head on CNN or MSNBC this morning talked about a nuclear-armed North Korea as an existential threat to the United States. He needed to specify what he meant by "the United States." 

If he meant the American Republic, he definitely had a point: one enemy bomb going off in an American city — hell, one "friendly-fire" nuclear explosion — and many Americans and most of the US government would totally panic, and we'd be under some variety of martial law for the foreseeable future.

So, yeah, a North Korean nuclear capability and their willingness to use it against the US and what is in some ways admirable — an American horror of very large numbers of dead Americans: that combination is a threat to the existence of the American Republic.

North Korean military assets taken all together, including a fair number of nuclear warheads, is not, however, a threat to the United States in the sense of the American state or the American nation — not even if you define the American nation as only real Americans as in White, conservative, Christians (preferably Protestants in the Knox/Calvin/Puritan/Fundamentalist tradition). 

During World War II, the Germans under Hitler and Russians under Stalin did a fair job destroying states — Poland for a key example — but that was done as conscious policy and with a few lawyers and many serial killers on the ground, not by bombing cities. When the British and Americans air forces showed what aerial bombing can do and wiped cities off the Earth, that still in itself did not destroy the German state nor the Japanese. And for nations, World War II and its run-up was the time of large purges, massive manufactured starvation, and attempted genocide, but no nation — i.e., a cultural/ethnic people — was destroyed in spite of very ... let's say energetic attempts to do so: not the Jews, not the Roma, nor the Poles.

In a course I finally named just "Massacres," my students reported the disturbing fact that in spite of the casualties of World War II — Matthew White counts some 66 million dead — the human population rose during the period, including in every theater of war except Germany's Eastern Front, what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. The human population of the United States is over 325 million, and even with the most bigoted, racist, exclusionary definition of "the American nation," we have enough people to survive a million casualties in a limited atomic attack and its deadly aftermath (disease, hunger, survivor violence).

General "Buck" Turgidson in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE (1964) is a sociopath in suggesting a massive, first-strike attack on the USSR, but he has a point on American casualties : "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks." 

What is an existential threat to the United States as Republic, State, or nation; what is an existential threat to human civilization and perhaps the human species is full-scale thermonuclear war. And with full-scale (thermo)nuclear war we're not talking directly about North Korea but first and definitely foremost about the arsenals of Russia and the USA, plus France, China, and the United Kingdom.

To remove the existential threat to the United States et al. we need reductions down to the minimum for deterrence by the major nuclear powers.

Having said that, however, I'll add that I live next door to a deep-water port on the US Pacific coast, and I get to walk past very large container ships and don't have to wait for the North Koreans to develop full ICBM capacity to be concerned about delivery into my neighborhood of a nuclear warhead. That's not an existential threat or an immediate one or a likely one, but it bloody well is a threat, and it needs to be dealt with, as do the nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India, and Israel. 

It's long past time for negotiations of a peace treaty ending the Korean War, one that prohibits nuclear weapons on or near the Korean Peninsula. It is also time for ensuring a nonnuclear Arabian Peninsula with cutbacks on Israeli bombs, and scaling back of nukes on the Indian subcontinent — and a renewed dedication to nuclear nonproliferation planet-wide so that the increased safety of scale-backs isn't negated. 

Here's a couple Old Rules! for you. (1) From writing courses: Cut modifiers as much as possible; let nouns and verbs do the work. (2) Mass murder doesn't have to be genocide to be a horrible act; threats don't have to be existential to be serious. So let's say, North Korean development of nuclear warheads and missiles to deliver them is a threat to their neighbors and to the United State; the American government should lead the way dealing with that threat, and use it as an occasion to work on even more horrific threats.