And the betrayers of language
        ...and the press gang
And those who had lied for hire;
The perverts, the perverters of language, the
        perverts, who have set money-lust
Before the pleasures of the senses;
howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house
                    Ezra Pound


Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind...The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
                    George Orwell



Language, and the powerful, poetic use of it, was the thumbprint on my soul from the beginning. 

Even before I knew how, I knew I wanted to write, and it is something I have done, in one form or another, for my entire life. 

I didn't really understand the power of words until I began to be published, and I would receive hand-written letters in the mail from as far away as the former Yugoslavia, Australia, and the Yukon.

The letters would tell me what my words had meant to them, and how they had helped to make their lives more bearable or more entertaining or more thoughtful.

Occasionally, words of mine would be printed that I didn't even know about.  For 16 years I did a local newspaper column on raising kids in the country, and I'd written about an experience I'd had researching a book on arson, how I'd been permitted to don full turn-out gear and go into a training fire with the real firefighters.

Months later I learned the column had been reprinted in a firefighting magazine.  (I didn't mind, but I'd liked to have known about it so I could have gotten a copy.)

Once, a small article I had published in an inspirational magazine on dealing with chronic illness while yet still young, and with small children, brought about a flood of letters and phone calls that went on for months past when the piece had been published.  (In the days before widespread use of the Internet, people would pick up an aging magazine in a waiting room or library somewhere, read the piece, and track me down.)

While still researching books, I would always send a copy of one of my books to a potential source when requesting their help with my research.  Once they'd read the book, and seen the respect I'd shown other professions, it opened all kinds of amazing doors. 

(My favorite was when I was invited to attend an advanced homicide course provided for local and federal law enforcement officers.  We worked with cadaver dogs and forensic anthropogists and forensic entymologists and so on, long before television caught on to the idea.  During the case-exchange portion of the course, I learned that horrifying murders were taking place along the Texas border on the Mexican side, some spilling over; it was one of the few times my work actually brought on terrible nightmares.  This was years ago.  But when I approached my literary agent about doing a book about it, he said prophetically, "Nobody cares about the border.")

Now, of course, with the advent of blogging, it is becoming more commonplace to begin dialogues with complete strangers who feel a common chord because of something you or I have written.

Or to come under attack from those who disagree.

In any event, words are important to me.

Words matter.

I fell in love with the words of Barack Obama before I'd done a single Google-search or attended any rallies or organizational meetings, when I first read his two books more than two years ago.  In those books, he laid out exactly the kind of man he was and what he wanted to do for this country, and how he thought it could be done.  I remember weeping as I underlined so many passages that I practically obliterated the printed word.

There was something to those words.

I knew it.

Even when he was 30 points behind Hillary and everyone was dismissing him as a brash young upstart, I knew better, because of his words.  I knew that if he could be given a chance, he would, by his actions, bring those words to life.

When he was campaigning for the presidency, it was almost too easy for his opponents--both during the primary and also during the general election campaign--to poke fun at his eloquence.

To deride his contributions as, "just words."

I would get so angry when I heard that.

JUST WORDS?

Let's see now....


We hold these truths to be self-evident...

Ask not what your country can do for you...

The only thing we have to fear...

I am not a crook.

Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Have you now or have you ever...

Methinks thou dost protest too much.

Houston, we have a problem.

I have a dream...


All of these were "just words," and yet they can be quoted ver batim by almost every American, even those who, like comedian Craig Ferguson, are naturalized citizens.

I could go on for pages, as could anyone reading this post.

WORDS HAVE POWER.

It is that simple.

And the quickest way to tell if someone who is in power is lying is to notice when they distort or, to quote Ezra Pound, "pervert" language.

I am certain that one of the primary reasons for my constant anguish and distress during the Bush years was my certainty that virtually every word out of the mouths of the administration and their muppets was a lie.

As Ernest Hemingway said in, appropriately enough, A Farewell to Arms, "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene."

Writing in the New York Times today, Roger Cohen goes right to the heart of the matter in his op-ed, "No Time for Retribution":

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23iht-edcohen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

(my link mechanism appears to be disabled, sorry):

Language is lethal. The Bush administration's legal memos opening the way to torture are a reminder of the intimate link between a bureaucrat's lawyerly subordinate clause and a man's near drowning.

Now we all know what "interrogation with enhanced techniques" means: an insect in a human cage.

Don't say what you mean when you mean to do the unspeakable. That's an old rule. It was perfected in the 20th century from Moscow to Buenos Aires.

Opacity is the refuge of the faceless tormentor. The constitutions of totalitarian states are always unreadable, impenetrable -- and very long. In a thicket of words lies plausible deniability when the time for horror's accounting arrives. That hour always comes around.

I keep re-reading some of the sentences in the memos from the dark side. Like a labyrinth, they lead back in on themselves: "You have, however, informed us that you expect these techniques to be used in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique."

The "technique" has a "culmination" that is not necessarily an "ending"; and on round again, several hundred times.

To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.

So I'm wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America's checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

Mr. Cohen's piece speaks to me on many levels, not the least of which is his own eloquence: "language is lethal," "don't say what you mean when you mean to do the unspeakable," "opacity is the refuge of the faceless tormenter," and my favorite, how the sentences, "like a labyrinth...lead back on themselves."

He is describing in terms both poetic and precise that the Bush administration's galling play on language gave them political cover to do the unspeakable, from invade a country to torture.

"Words," says Cohen, "were spun in feckless patterns."

As an author, perhaps I'm more sensitive to the patterns of language and the nuance of phrase.  It was that very fecklessness of word-spinning that left me dizzy, disoriented, and outraged during year after year of lie stacked upon lie.

Cohen's next paragraph may come as a surprise to many; but for me, not so much.  In fact, I agree:

Those checks and balances are recovering now. I don't think this recovery would be served by prosecutions, either of C.I.A. operatives or those who gave them legal advice. Such legal action, if initiated, would split the intelligence services and the military in paralyzing ways at a time when two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are still being fought. The country would be lacerated.

The right balance between retribution and reconciliation is always hard to find in the aftermath of national trauma. Ask the Bosnians or South Africans about the trade-offs between justice and recovery. When wars are ongoing, it is wise to err on the side of caution. There's work to do. Obama's right: America should look ahead, not back.

A Truth Commission could address the broad collapse of accountability that opened the way for an imperial presidency and the use of cruel and inhuman treatment, while avoiding a facile search for scapegoats that would allow too many to disregard their own small measure of responsibility.


Cohen is not saying we should turn our backs on this institutionalized wounding of our nation's honor--not at all.  He mentions a commission which, I gather from my reading, would do much the same job as the one which investigated the events leading to 9/11, and the one on the Iraq War.  There would be light shined on the worm-crawling darkside of the Bush administration's perversion of national security.

But to take it further, to demand criminal charges and trials we progressives might find cathartic--leading all the way up to the Oval office, if we had our way--would not, in fact, play out in that manner in the public forum.

Rather, this nation would be rent asunder by the packs of howlers.

Where I live, a small pack of coyotes can yip and howl and make so much racket that your skin can crawl.  They sound as if they stand just outside the gate and, on a quiet evening, this can be disturbing and frightening because coyotes kill pets. 

The ranch dogs will set up ferocious barking and you'll run out on the porch and strain eyes and ears into the echoing darkness...but really, the beasts are merely over the next ridge.

They may be far away but they seem so near.

Already, I can hear the coyotes howling--right-wingers yelping for validation and justification of their sacred cow post 9/11 policies; left-wingers howling for justice and accountability and unanswerable answers to questions such as Does torture work? and Should we care? and Is it a sign of strength or of weakness? and Why are we even DISCUSSING it?

Scrambled words and shouted words and italicized words and viral e-mailed words and angry words and worried words, all jumbled together in a toxic soup of chaos and confusion and cacophony, all jockeying for position on cable-chatterworld, late-night TV, the blogosphere, and our wearied minds.

As with most complex questions, there is usually a common-sense solution somewhere in the middle.

Words of reason CAN cut through the noise:


With Obama, words have begun to have meaning again. Declarative sentences are back. I couldn't take my eyes off that photo of Obama shaking hands with President Chávez of Venezuela; it cut through so much epic posturing. But his use of language has been more liberating even than such images.

Two sentences uttered recently by the president in Turkey are an example: "The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country -- I know, because I am one of them."

It was one of those moments when you realize just how scary Obama must be to America's jihadist enemies. Knowing Islam across the dinner table, he has no fear of it. His predecessor, in Facebook terms, went on a spree of de-friending that made terrorist recruitment easier. Now the tables have been turned.

The U.S. has emerged from eight years of dyslexia. It has now revealed how dangerously words were manipulated and is learning again to speak a language the world can understand. America's narrative is inclusive once more, as it must be by the country's very nature. The power of language to reconcile is as great as its power to kill.

At his first press conference in February, Obama said: "The strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate, but they endure when people of every background and belief find a way to set aside smaller differences in service of a greater purpose."

That's a sentence you don't have to read twice. The differences today are not small -- they concern the rule of law and torture -- but the spirit of Obama's words still provides a useful moral compass for this moment of American self-questioning and anguish.


I don't mean to imply that all this requires is for Uncle Obama to come out and say something soothing.  Not at all. 

But I do think outrage must be tempered by wisdom.

It is unfortunate that a 24-hour news cycle can set up false narratives that can bring down administrations. 

One president's foolish foray into forbidden appetites brought our government to a standstill for YEARS and dominated news coverage to a nauseating degree.  Governing came to a virtual halt while the howlers screamed impeachment on one side and crucifixion on another.

Bill Clinton was actually a pretty good president but it took eight years of nightmare to wake up the nation to that fact, so fixated were we on the technicalities of a common blow-job.

The Obama presidency is a young one, facing many powerful and catastrophic problems.  This is a unique opportunity in history for a complete transformation of our government into one that is more streamlined, more responsive, and more transparent than ever before.

Obama is playing chess while the rest of the country dithers along in a game of tic-tac-toe, glorying in their placement of x's and o's while he's ten moves down the game, planning long-term strategy for the very survival of our planet.

The torture issue is an important one.

But it is not the ONLY one.

If we want to truly see a progressive stamp on this nation's history and its future, we must not get so fixated on where we place our x's that we look up to see the man standing alone by an abandoned chessboard, listening to the howlers and chatterers gloatingly shout, CHECKMATE!

Investigate the Bush administration's outrages, if we must.

But DO NOT get sidetracked by them.

Because if we do, we stand to lose a great deal more than just a war of words.