by Penny, Laura
Hallmark should make a combination congraduations/condolences card for those unfortunate students who finally finish only to discover that the world is already lousy with underemployed lawyers or IT professionals. Nevertheless, we routinely encourage eighteen-year-old North Americans to think about post-secondary education as if they were deciding what they are going to do for the rest of their lives. They aren’t old enough to drink, but they are supposedly mature enough to pick the occupation that will eventually drive them to it.
If they choose wisely and work hard, they shall know comfort and ease and fine single malts for the rest of their days. If they pick the wrong major, attend the wrong school, or simply fuck up, they risk eternal loserdom, a life pockmarked with humiliations like cheap draft beer, renting, and public transit.
This hyperbolic, false choice presupposes that there are still such things as lifelong jobs, guaranteed majors, educational bets that always pay off. Most of us will end up trying several jobs, ones that may never add up to anything so lofty or lucrative as a career – or at least not the kind of career that college recruiters, guidance counsellors, and educrats sell to prospective students.
We tell students that education is important. But we also tell them that their educators are merely self-important, the inferior opening act for their bosses, who will determine their real worth in the real world. Here’s one of my favourite examples of this kind of thinking. In Chapters Three and Four I mentioned the Spellings Commission, led by Bush’s pal Margaret Spellings, who worked in his education departments when he was governor of Texas and president of the United States. In a 2006 college commencement address, which she delivered while she was secretary of education, Spellings told the following inspiring tale:
I’ve always liked the story of the college student who got a C on his final paper because his idea was implausible. The idea [was] an overnight delivery service. The student [was] Fred Smith. You may know him better as the CEO of FedEx.
So, don’t let anyone else take the measure of your worth and capabilities. Always stand proud in who you are!2
Once again we see the people who run companies, like the folks who win elections, triumph over the myopic old Poindexters who give their money-making insights C’s.
Thanks, Secretary of Education, for totally undermining the concept of grades! It is also pretty rich and creamy to hear Spellings, who spent her entire tenure preaching the gospel of standardized tests, tell students they should never let anyone measure them. I thought her boss had said that measuring was the Gateway and education was the Key-Master, and defeating the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man of low expectations was the civil rights issue of our time.
Spellings’s story is a pithy summary of some common opinions: The only real ideas are lucrative ideas, business ideas. Popular success is the best evidence that an idea is plausible or worthwhile. Professorial types who criticize these ideas are just negative nellies. What do profs know about ideas? If they were really smart, they wouldn’t be professors; they’d be running big companies like FedEx. So don’t let their assessments of your capabilities get you down, kids. Let the C’s slide off you like water off a duck’s bum, for they matter not. The market is seated at the right hand of the Father and comes to judge all ideas, the living and the dead, the profitable and the wasteful, the useful and the useless.
It’s ludicrous to assert that nerds run the world when they don’t even run the bloody Department of Education. Again, this is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Ontario Premier Mike Harris demonstrated his commitment to common sense when he appointed a minister of education, John Snobelen, who had dropped out of school in grade 11. He had the necessary qualifications: he was a successful businessman, a credential that trumps any piece of paper from a college or school board. An H.P.D. (huge pile of dough) is always better than a Ph.D.
The commonsensical allege that nerds, especially useless humanities nerds, are Nosy Parkers, always sticking our schnozzes where they do not belong. We misuse our phony book-learnin’ to pontificate about the real world, where our theoretical knowledge just does not apply. What a load of hooey!
This is factually and morally wrong. First, it is the money-minded, not the brainy, who currently occupy the bully pulpit. The moneyed are perpetually instructing us, telling us how we should run schools, universities, hospitals, and the government. They are proud of their particular expertise and they apply it to every institution and field of human endeavour. Bosses and business executives, and their hired brains in think tanks and lobbies, pitch solutions to public problems – or at least the same couple of solutions – over and over again. Biz groups such as the Chambers of Commerce and the Conference Board love schooling teachers and professors by telling us how to do our work. Apparently we should stop wasting so much goddamn money while simultaneously doing a much better job teaching their future employees how to read and write, do math, and understand science and technology.
Second, we nerds are citizens too. Pseudo-populists try to convince the public that the ivory tower is some distant imaginary realm and the language people learn there is some exotic foreign tongue. They continue to sell this line in spite of the growth of professional programs and the countless links between university and industry. Ostracizing nerds and undermining universities helps politicians and business leaders pre-empt any expert criticism. If some nerd releases a study that suggests a particular policy or product is a bad idea, it is very easy for politicians and CEOS to deflect and diminish it. It’s a study, and everyone knows those things come from cloud-cuckoo-land.
Ordering nerds to butt out of public matters and confine their kooky readings to the classroom is an important part of the “shut up, quit whining, and get back to work” ethos of idiocracy. Idiocratic politicos may act as if economics is the only true expertise, the kind of thinking that matters most, but this is belied by their actions. They spend scads of spondulicks on the services of image consultants, speech writers, spokespeople, and communications experts.
The oft-maligned liberal arts teach people to analyze language, stories, and images, which are just as real and politically relevant as the latest numbers from the Dow-Jones or the Toronto Stock Exchange. Words and images are the marrow and sinews of personality politics, and the 2008 U.S. election demonstrated that personality is an increasingly important part of political life. The anti-rhetorical rhetoric of pols such as Harper, Palin, and McCain, with its endorsements of “common sense” and “action” and insulting references to “talk” and “ideas,” is still rhetoric. It sure would be great if idiocrats could address their constituents while somehow avoiding the sissifying taint of words, but it’s tough to give a speech without the damn things.
Barack Obama’s eloquence has triggered a backlash against language, a hostility towards words. For example, in a September 2008 interview with Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin defended John McCain’s assertion that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.” This statement was a major gaffe, but the stalwart Palin soldiered on, arguing that Barack Obama’s criticisms of McCain were unfair. The problem? When Obama criticized McCain for saying the economy was strong, he was just quibbling about mere words. Maybe McCain had picked the wrong words, but everybody knew what he really meant, so it was wrong to pick on his verbiage.3
Two salient details: Palin repeatedly mispronounced verbiage as “verbage,” getting one of the words for words wrong. Second, she was making an argument that I have heard from a few intrepid students and see all over the Internet. It’s unfair to criticize someone for the way they say something or the words they use. What they’re saying really matters. Content, regardless of spelling, grammar, or diction, matters more than form. And anyone who says otherwise is a grammar Nazi, trying to score picky points, or an elitist, trying to distract you with technicalities, so they can dodge the real argument.
Again we see that words are not really real, or at least not as really real as the opinions and beliefs that they are supposed to convey. But th
ose opinions and beliefs are made of language too, and cannot exist apart from it. Even numbers, which many consider more trustworthy than words, are still a part of language. Form and content are not as separable as Sarah Palin (and some of my students) would like to believe. Words are not just little red wheelbarrows that schlep our beliefs and opinions around. Words shape the way we think and the world we live in, so it’s silly to pretend they are incidental, just so much static interfering with our real meaning.
I can sculpt a birthday cake out of shit and insist that I obviously mean cake, that my real intent is to wish you a happy birthday, but my intentions and protestations cannot turn crap into a delicious dessert. People who dismiss and devalue words sanction sloppy language and serve up crap that looks like cake, which leads to sloppy thinking. People who deny the power of words while they are wielding that very power are usually trying to deny the responsibilities that come with it.
Anti-rhetorical posturing is disingenuous. Palin may cop a dismissive attitude towards the “verbage,” but she hires ghost writers too. She and Lynn Vincent, her co-author, compiled a heap of words to produce Palin’s autobio, Going Rogue: An American Life; it’s over four hundred pages long. Palin’s op eds and lengthy Facebook missives are much more polished and verbally sophisticated than the word salads she dished up throughout the campaign, which suggests that language just might be important after all.
I don’t want to keep prattling on about Palin-speak in all its disjointed splendour. But I do want to single out one of her verbal tics, since I think it says something about the relationship between the way we speak and the way we think.
When Palin talks about her own accomplishments, she uses simple, active verbs: I fixed, I cut, I kept progressing the state of Alaska, and so forth. But when she needs to address serious political problems, she slides into the passive voice. There were a couple of good examples of this in her vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden. When she was talking about the meltdown on Wall Street, she said, “There have been so many changes in the conditions of our economy in just even these past weeks that there has been more and more revelation made aware now to Americans about the corruption and the greed on Wall Street.” She also went passive when the moderator asked her about global warming. Palin agreed that it was real, but went on to say that there “is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.”4
There are situations when the passive voice is appropriate, but Palin’s passive voice is weasel-speak. The passive form, like the PR classic “Mistakes were made,” posits a world where things get done to things. Nobody does anything, so nobody is responsible for anything. The explicit themes of Palin’s speeches are rugged individuality and personal responsibility, but her language dissolves and dissipates that responsibility.
Right-wingers and real-worlders tend to see language as instrumental. Words are a set of power tools. They are ways to sell stuff and get people riled up to vote. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and spinsmith, has made a fortune selling righties and major corporations the right verbal tools. Don’t say estate tax, domestic wiretapping, or public option; use death tax, electronic surveillance, and government option instead.
When politicians use phrases like “straight talk” because consultants like Luntz tell them average folks love straight talk, they are not delivering straight talk. Quite the opposite – they’re mouthing a buzzword. But if that buzzword gets the right emotional response, then it has done its job. Words are sharp sticks, poking and prodding till they stir up the hornets’ nests that slumber in the heads of potential voters.
When right-wingers and real-worlders claim words do not matter, they are nerd-bashing, taking a few whacks at the wordy elite. But they are also saying that their instrumental understanding of language is the only valid one. Language, like reason, is only a tool, something people use to achieve other ends, such as wealth and power. Ergo, the majority of people who work with language, such as journalists, teachers, and professors, are mere hobbyists, people who do a lot of hammering but never manage to build a house.
Language is one of the main staging grounds for the culture wars that have raged since the 1980s. For example, the English Only movement has waxed and waned in accordance with the public’s anxiety about illegal immigration and America’s shifting racial demographics. When Clinton was in office, the economy was humming and unemployment was low, so the government was able to pass some legislation offering government services in funny foreign language. Now that the economy is in the toilet, the jobs are gone, and the president has a funny foreign name, the English Only movement is back.
“Speak English!” is definitely one of the planks in the Fox News/teabagger platform. Here’s an example from one of the town hall meetings of 2009. On September 2, Representative Jim Hines was taking questions from his constituents in Norwalk, Connecticut. A bishop named Emilio Alvarez wondered if it would be okay if he asked his question in Spanish. Hines is fluent in Spanish, so he agreed, but his response was drowned out by the crowd. The auditorium erupted in loud, sustained boos and cries of “You’re in the United States of America!” and “English! English!“
When Hines tried to translate the question for the yelping yahoos, he made a point of underlining that the bishop was a clergyman as he tried to placate, or maybe reproach, the crowd. A woman in the crowd responded, “He oughta speak English.” The bishop might be doing the Lord’s work, but that did not give him the right to sully her ears with that taco talk.5
In this instance, English is a polite way of saying white and American. “Speak English!” is rude, but it’s still more acceptable than “Don’t be so brown!” or “Go home!” This equation of English and American means that the people who love Sarah Palin for her sassy straight talk also cast themselves as English’s true defenders. They are not racists or xenophobes but knights, crusaders protecting their virtuous mother tongue against scurrilous incursions by foreign invaders. Government forms en español are only the beginning. What other horrors does the shadow tyranny of King Juan Carlos portend?
This wing-nut allegiance to English clashes with the belief that words are not important – with comic results. Many English Only types are not very good at English. For example, there’s a great photograph of an incensed middle-aged woman at a protest in Texas, her shirt festooned with flags, brandishing a sign that reads “Make English America’s Offical Language.” Many of the tea-party signs also boasted misspellings, whimsical use of quotation marks, and a festival of factual errors. My favourite was the one that read “Obama: More Czars than the USSR“ – an awesome example of something that is so wrong it is right.
There are certainly Canadians who are anti-immigrant, and those who worry that immigrants are not assimilating, but there isn’t the same hue and cry about English here. When Canadians bitch about official bilingualism, it does not really carry the same cultural and political charge as the complaints of the English Only movement. The majority of Canadians who object to official bilingualism hate it because it wastes money. It offends their parsimony, not their patriotism. People grumble about the Bloc Québécois squandering the rest of the country’s time and money by thwarting the possibility of a majority Liberal or Conservative government.
Such complaints have little to do with language. English was certainly a political issue for Quebeckers circa Bill 101, but French is not really a political flashpoint in the rest of Canada the way Spanish is in the United States. The rhetoric does not come to the same rolling boil. When someone asks a question in French at a Canadian meeting, people wait for someone to repeat it in English, summon up their scraps of high-school French, or zone out. Speaking another language is not a boo-worthy offence.
Hostility towards words, imported and domestic, is not confined to politics. It is also evident in consumer culture. Coffee ads are a good example. Since lattes have become shorthand for the nerd elite, advertisers must convince potential customers tha
t they can enjoy delectable caffeinated beverages without all that obnoxious, snobby culture. The campaign for McDonald’s line of McCafé drinks featured two similar ads, one with two girls and one with two boys. When the pairs discover that McDonald’s finally has lattes, they are jubilant. The boys are thrilled that they can shave their goatees, take off their fake glasses, and watch football. The girls are delighted that they can stop listening to all that wretched jazz and pretending they know French; they can toss their books and read gossip mags again. No longer need these young people live a pretentious lie to avail themselves of premium coffee.
A similar, and similarly annoying, Dunkin’ Donuts commercial begins with a chant of foreign coffee terms, a dirge of mokkachokkolatte. Then the people standing in line for coffee sing, “My mouth can’t form these words … Is it French? Is it Italian? Perhaps Fritalian?” This is a shot at Starbucks’ pseudo-Euroisms such as venti, which is about as foreign as Häagen-Dazs. But it is also saying “English only” in its own corporate way. Foreign words are onerous or pretentious, even though English itself is a hodgepodge of them.
Far’n-bashing is part and parcel of anti-intellectualism. Far’n-bashing usually involves Yerp, which usually means France. I won’t revisit the bad old days of wine-dumping and freedom fries. But Mitt Romney is still in the running for the 2012 Republican slot, and he rocks the Francophobia like it’s 2003. To be fair, Romney was anti-France before hating France was cool. When he was in college, he dodged the Vietnam draft by waging spiritual war in France, where he did his required Mormon prototyping.
For Romney, France is like a bizarro America – her godless, socialist, pathetic double. The Boston Globe managed to get its paws on a campaign document, a seventy-seven-page PowerPoint presentation, that outlined Romney’s strategy. One page bore an equation: “Hillary = France,” and another was emblazoned with a tricolour clip-art version of le mauvais pays and instructions to hit France hard. When Romney announced he was quitting the race in February 2008, he said, “I am convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st century – still a great nation, but no longer the leader of the world, no longer the superpower. And to me, that is unthinkable.”6 The Romney camp also had plans for a bumper sticker with the same theme: “First, Not France.” Which is another way of saying money, not brains.