How can you tell if a member of the Bush Administration is lying? His or her lips are moving.
This old joke has a perfectly translatable format. It can be used for any politicians, lawyers, auto mechanics, nightly news anchors, used car salesmen - in fact, anybody with lips. The Bush Administration, however, has indulged in more than just lying (a good example of which is Donald Rumsfeld's indignance that he never said where the WMDs were); there are numerous ways in which this administration has misled the public, intimidated its opponents, obfuscated the debates, broken its promises, and spun the news. More on the flip!
It is very important, though, that these different rhetorical strategies are not lumped together as "lies." Why? Because, simply put, they are not always lies, and to say that they are just lies appears whiny and is inaccurate; because the public then cannot see the difference between a lying administration and lying critics of that administration; and, most important, if you dismiss too much as "lies," then you fail to see what the "liar" is doing, what the "liar" is saying, and what the "liar" is hiding. So, what tools do we have for understanding what is going on in political speech?
Yesterday, Kos linked to a Cato Institute briefing paper, called "Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism" by Timothy Lynch. It's not a bad paper, aiming to expose what it calls "doublespeak," after Orwell. Lynch argues that we need to pay attention to the "half-truths and euphemisms" involved in political language, and so sets out to identify these in common recent political terms. He quotes William Lutz on "doublespeak":
Doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn't. It is language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable. Doublespeak is language that avoids or shifts responsibility, language that is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language that conceals or prevents thought; rather than extending thought, doublespeak limits it.
This has some problems, though. This "doublespeak" suggests, first, that politicians are not saying what they mean, when in fact, they usually are saying what they mean, in a manner perfectly audible to their supporters. Second, politicians often package their language in order not to conceal or prevent thought, but to provoke thinking - thinking that supports their own point of view and that derides their opposition . Third, while euphemism is important to political rhetoric, euphemism gives shade to meaning, rather than emptying something of meaning. In other words, when faced with "doublespeak" as defined above, the temptation is to reject it outright. And, of course, anybody interested in language will have some problems with claims that language can be at variance with its "real or purported meaning" (but that's a topic for a different discussion).
But there is an alternative, called Unspeak, and it is defined slightly differently. Unspeak
smuggles in a political opinion. And this is done in a remarkably efficient way: a whole partisan argument is packed into a sound bite. These precision-engineered packages of language are launched by politicians and campaigners, and targeted at newspaper headlines and snazzy television graphics, where they land and dispense their payload of persuasion into the public consciousness.
Unspeak does this by implying that there is one way to look at something, and that those who disagree with it are necessarily already wrong. That's different and slightly subtler than "doublespeak".
My favorite example is "common sense." In today's New York Post, there is an editorial that begins:
How bizarre that five years on from 9/11, President Bush feels compelled to go before the nation and justify his so-far-successful efforts to protect Americans from another terrorist attack.
But that's just what the president had to do yesterday, thanks to an appalling Supreme Court decision last June that gave terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay rights that simple common sense dictates they shouldn't have.
Now, think about this term "common sense": What does it speak? That whoever possesses this information and this way of thinking is in tune with the majority of people; that whoever possesses this "common sense" is already right, is logical, is thoughtful, down to earth, grounded. And what does this appeal to "common sense" say about those who disagree with this "common sense"? That they are out in the margins, maybe because they are elitist or maybe because they are stupid, and that they lack "sense," are ignorant or confused. There is a counter-argument to the Post's statement: that indeed these men and women should have rights because this is a nation of law and of due process; that they should have rights because if they are to be found guilty, we want to know that they really are guilty; because the foundation of law is protection of those whom we least want to protect. But this argument is dismissed as lacking "common sense" - as the product of ignorance, the spewings of a baffled mind.
Indeed, whenever somebody appeals to "common sense", it is worth remembering that it was common sense that the earth was flat, that women innocent of witchcraft would drown, that there were WMDs in Iraq, etc.
Think about the different terms used by Bush and the media and how much Unspeak permeates the news. One of the most important is the use of "abuse" when the word is "torture" (by saying "abuse", you are specifically saying that it is not torture even if it is, and at the same time, implying that that the perpetrators are acting on their own, abusing their power, that they weren't ordered to do it). Think about the various roles of doublespeak vs unspeak in many areas of public debate, including everybody's favorite, intelligent design
Why is this important?
1. When confronting rhetoric, it is important to be able to listen to the nuances, to see what is being spoken, and what is being unspoken. If you dismiss politicians simply as liars, not only are you not being completely accurate (of course, some politicians really are liars), but you promote apathy.
2. The media should be challenged not just on their factual errors, but on their unthinking use of these terms; bloggers should be aware as well. They should be asked why they are using "abuse" when the correct word is "torture"; journalists should questions words like asymmetric warfare.
3. The answer is not to worry about framing, which is little more than offering some combination of unspeak and doublespeak in response to unspeak and doublespeak; the answer is not to fall into the Republican trap of telling everybody how and why you are "framing" the debate (which tells everybody that what you are saying is a contrived message designed to attract voters, rather than what you think). The answer is to speak courageously, to listen closely, and to demand that terms be unpacked and explained instead of just passing through the media and into the common parlance.