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Say One Thing, Mean Another

This started out being a “classic” repost and by the time I got done fixing the twenty-year-old writing, it was a new article.  The original article has been reposted as originally written in late 2001/2002, at this link. Doublespeak (2001)

Doublespeak is the art and subterfuge of using language to misdirect, misinform, or flat-out lie.  It often involves logical fallacy, intentional appeals to emotion over fact, and other crimes against critical thought.  It can take the form of euphemism, “soft” language, the use of words and phrasing that have a high emotional valence but low informational content to appeal to the baser instincts rather than the intellect.

As a huge fan of artists like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, the use of language and euphemism is simultaneously fascinating, horrifying, and hilarious to me.  The contortions people will go through to avoid acknowledging a simple reality are just insane.

A great example of this came up in my personal life while this article was in draft:  apparently it’s now fashionable to refer to yourself as “sober” if you’ve used “hard” (physically addictive) drugs in the past (e.g. opioids, amphetamines and methamphetamines, cocaine) but now you only smoke pot.

This is, of course, absolutely silly; a self-serving, dishonest, manipulative, and disingenuous word game played by addicts (and I am one so please spare me the complaints about your value judgements relating to that word) so they can pretend their addiction is somehow “different” from the addiction that has social stigma attached.  You’re not sober if you’re high – that’s not even an observation, it’s a tautology.  No amount of self-serving wordplay will change that – and in the context of addiction, it’s potentially fatal bit of self-deceit, due to the nature of addiction and what it does to the thought processes of the addict.

This underscores just one of the reasons doublespeak is so insidious and harmful; it helps people maintain self-destructive lies.  What amazes me is people craft these excuses for their spin and jive, and they’re all self-serving bovine excrement. “I don’t want to be stigmatized as an addict; so I just stigmatize everyone else who’s an addict and then reject that label for myself because I’m better than those people I’m unfairly stigmatizing in the very process of complaining about being unfairly stigmatized.”  And we’ve become so corrupted in our thinking that people don’t even hear themselves when they say this stuff.

Fundamental Dishonesty

Doublespeak is destructive in that it is essentially dishonest.  It can be, and often has been, used as a tool of manipulation by governments and other leaders and officials to attempt to avoid consequences of egregiously terrible actions by making them sound less terrible.  It is this particular aspect of doublespeak that will consume most of the rest of this article.

Each year, the National Council of Teachers of English announces the Doublespeak awards.  They describe the award as “an ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.”

Source material for this article includes the Book of Lists #3, and the Book of Lists of the 90’s, both from the editors of The People’s Almanac, with additional material provided by the NCTE website.

Without further ado, I present you with some shining examples of doublespeak.

President George Herbert Walker Bush – When the US invaded Panama in 1989 to bring Manuel Noriega to justice for allegations of drug trafficking and a host of other charges, Bush was positively bent over backwards trying to avoid using the word “invasion.” Instead, he “sent troops down to Panama.” He “deployed forces.” He “directed United States forces to execute…preplanned missions in Panama.”  Never once did we “invade.”

During his campaign for President in 1988, Bush swore that there would be “no net loss of wetlands.” After he took office, he “clarified” his promise to really mean there would be no net wetlands loss “except where there is a high proportion of land which is wetlands.”

In English, this means “except where the protection is needed most,” like the Alaskan Tundra, the Florida Everglades, and the Outer Banks and Great Dismal Swamp areas of North Carolina.

After the first US-Iraq War in 1990 (as Bill Hicks pointed out so eloquently, even referring to this event as a “war” is an exercise in doublespeak), Bush proposed a Middle East disarmament initiative that was supposed to stop “the proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons in the Middle East.” Less than a month after this proposal was made, the Bush administration announced plans to sell over $5 billion in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

President George W. Bush – Ol’ Gee Dubya’s presence on the awards list should come as no surprise.  Indeed, I predicted it in the original (2002) version of this article:

Although he hasn’t won one yet, I suspect that GHW’s little boy is gonna get a nomination himself, for declaring a war on terrorism and then announcing the sale of 50 brand new F-16’s to Israel, a country which is by any standard engaged in terrorist acts, covertly and overtly. Even more disconcerting is the fact that this author is questioning whether to delete this entry altogether, because one of the first acts in the “war on terrorism” was to make dissent against the actions of the US Government in this “war” a crime in and of itself.

Bush II ended up winning twice by himself, and once with his entire cabinet.  Among the linguistic felonies NCTE selected:

• In 2003, NCTE’s award centered around the heavy euphemism employed in the search for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (which, at the time of this writing 17 years later, still haven’t been found).  Use of phrasing like “a growing fleet of…aerial vehicles” and the assertion that “Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised” were complete fabrications, with these and many others intended to suggest that we actually knew the weapons were there but hadn’t found them yet, when the functional reality was that all we knew is that we had sold Iraq various materiel that could be used to create weapons, but never had any evidence they had done so.
  • I will bolster NCTE’s award citation by pointing out that one of the most egregious uses of doublespeak in the contest of the second Iraq War was Bush II’s repeated reference to Saddam Hussein “gassing his own people,” “a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people,” and so forth, but never once mentioned that not only did we sell them all of the gear and intelligence they used for those attacks, it was Bush’s own Defense Secretary, Don Rumsfeld, who demanded Iraq be removed from the State Department’s list of terror sponsoring nations so we could sell that materiel to them, back in 1983 when he was acting as Special Envoy to the Middle East under Ronald Reagan.
  • Worth noting: to this day, most people either don’t know that we sold Hussein “dual-use material” including anthrax, botulism, tetanus, and c. perfringens, or they think it’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theory in spite of the reality that everything we know about it comes directly from US Senate Committee reports.
• Bush’s 2006 award was given in recognition of his September 15, 2005 speech regarding Hurricane Katrina, in which he made lovely, flowery remarks about poverty and racial discrimination and how we needed to ‘confront this poverty” and “rise above the legacy of inequality…” a week after he signed an executive order allowing federal contractors rebuilding from Katrina to pay less than the prevailing wage, suspending a sixty-four year old law to do it.

But wait, there’s more!

More Examples

I don’t want to get into the underhanded and dishonest game of simply re-writing press releases and calling it original work; you can view the historical list of winners of the Doublespeak Award at the NCTE website.

There are, of course, plenty of examples that haven’t won awards.

President Bill Clinton – Many readers here should be able to remember Clinton’s most egregious assaults on critical thinking fairly well. His most famous, of course, came during the Lewisnki scandal, during which Clinton (and his wife, Hillary) engaged in some of the most comical linguistic calisthenics ever recorded.  Clinton’s initial position was that he was entirely innocent of wrongdoing, going so far as to say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski” during a press briefing prior to the 1998 State of the Union address. It subsequently came to light, however, that Clinton was deliberately misleading.  He later testified that his intent was to use the definition of “sexual relations” laid out in the investigation documents, which were worded in such a way that, by the letter of the given definition, simply receiving oral sex was not “sexual relations” because Clinton didn’t touch any sexual part of Lewinski’s body, and the definition given during the impeachment investigation required that touch to qualify as “sexual relations.”

Several months later, Clinton finally admitted that “we did have a relationship that was…inappropriate,” but this was only after a series of grammatical distortions that confounds description.  Aside from the core deceit, other “highlights” of this episode include Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring…” interview, and the infamous exchange described in the Starr Report where Clinton’s prevaricative response to a question about whether a lie had been told went as follows:

QUESTION: “Your—that statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?”

CLINTON: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is means. If is means is, and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means, there is none, that was a completely true statement.

No matter your definition of “is,” it’s safe to say that the above is a prime example of doublespeak.

President Jimmy Carter – In late 1979, when the US military failed miserably in trying to recover US hostages being held in Tehran, Iran, Carter reported the action as an “incomplete success.”  Carter went on to justify the government bailout of the Chrysler corporation by saying that “this legislation does not violate the principle of letting free enterprise function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances.” Like his successors, Carter was less than forthcoming about foreign diplomatic policy relating to arms reduction. He bragged that his administration never supported “nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree, and which are completely antithetical to our principles.” In spite of this heroic stance, the US under the Carter administration continued to provide aid both military and financial to some 26 governments which were known to systematically violate the unalienable rights of their people.

Lest we think this is only about Presidents, let us turn our attention to the Judicial Branch and the 1991 US Supreme Court – The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

In 1991’s case of Harmelin v. Michigan, the Supremes heard a case in which the defendant had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole for possessing 672 grams of cocaine. In their ruling, it was decided that while such a punishment might be cruel, it was not unusual, and therefore it was constitutional.

The logic behind this ruling, in simple English, is that as long as a punishment is frequently inflicted, it is constitutional, regardless of how cruel it is. Perhaps our founding fathers should have said “cruel or unusual…”

The court also offered an early preview of the current kerfluffle at the southern US border and the endless game-playing about refugees seeking asylum.

In 1980, the Refugee Act was passed, authorizing political asylum to a person with “a well-grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, membership in a particular group, or political opinion.” In a small town in Guatemala in the late mid-80’s, Jario Elias-Zacarias, 19, was attacked by masked guerrillas wielding automatic weapons in his home.  The guerrillas demanded that Elias-Zacarias fight with them against the Guatemalan government.

Rather than fight, Zacarias fled to the US to seek political asylum, but was denied. He appealed, and eventually the case made it to the US Supreme Court where Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his judgment to deny the young man asylum, said that he had failed to show that the guerrillas would persecute him for his political opinions “rather than because of his refusal to fight with them.”  Justice Scalia never got around to explaining how refusing to fight with rebel guerrillas against his government isn’t a political opinion.

US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) – Hatch, a proponent of the death penalty, once said that “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.” Read that again:  state-sanctioned killing of human beings is “our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”

Yep.

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