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Category: language

Cream Puffs and Champagne

Cream puff

Too often, pleasure is programmed out of politics. Strong ideology finds the aesthetic and the pleasurable to be extraneous to the struggle. Optimization optimizes for optimal optics.

Rebecca Solnit on her book “Orwell’s Roses.”

“I also wanted to see if I could write a book that was about climate change and totalitarianism and fascism, and a guy dying of tuberculosis, and make it a deeply pleasurable aesthetic experience. You know, Georgia O’Keeffe said that she painted her flowers big so people would look at them. There’s a way that people think of politics as always eating your spinach, when often it’s eating cream puffs and champagne.”

Helen Rosner talks with Rebecca Solnit

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When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain

When something becomes uncountable, or its number too large to fit into ordinary experience, we go numb. We sense our words and feelings won’t have the slightest impact on something of such magnitude. Quantity introduces a qualitative difference. Language is outscaled.

A poem written in exile by Bertolt Brecht in the years from 1934 to 1936.

When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain

Like one who brings an important letter to the counter after office hours: the counter is already closed.
Like one who seeks to warn the city of an impending flood, but speaks another language. They do not understand him.
Like a beggar who knocks for the fifth time at a door where he has four times been given something: the fifth time he is hungry.
Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor: his blood goes on flowing.

So do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

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The Weaponization of Language

Just a quick note to help people, particularly the Media in the United States, to better understand what it means when language is weaponized—and especially what it means in the context of connected digital communication networks. While these techniques have been refined over many years in Russia and the former Soviet Union, they are somewhat new to mainstream American politics. This is not to say that these techniques haven’t been used over the years, but generally they’re employed around the edges. It hasn’t been possible, until recently, to move them to the center of a political communication strategy.

Certain tools are designed as weapons, for example: guns, knives, clubs, brass knuckles, bombs, poison gas. Each of these tools is specially constructed to inflict a certain kind of harm on its target. Now here’s another list of tools: a cast-iron frying pan, a fireplace poker, a baseball bat, a car, a brick, and an electrical current. Each of these tools has a proper use—a set of uses that humans understand through habit. All of these non-weapons have been used to commit murder in some mystery novel. Part of solving the mystery involves a detective envisioning an ordinary tool expressing its potential as a deadly weapon.

When language is used as a weapon—it’s deployed to inflict the maximum possible damage. The usual response to language used in this way is to say that it is neither true nor proper. While this may be a reasonable approach to language used to communicate, it has no effect on language when used as a weapon. It’s the equivalent of saying that the blow inflicted by a frying pan to the head of the victim was not a proper use of frying pans.

Much of the effectiveness of advertising is due to the frequency with which it is broadcast. If you see or hear an ad ten times a day for three months, it’s likely you will remember it for the rest of your life. Most of us can recite ad copy we heard in our childhood even when the product has long since disappeared from the shelves. To maximize the effectiveness of weaponized language, it must have high frequency. In political campaigns this is usually accomplished through producing negative attack ads and buying lots of radio and television time.

In the age of cable news and connected digital social networks, another strategy is possible. An attack is constructed that will harm the target using metaphors, statements and images. In itself, this isn’t enough to assure the attack will be retweeted frequently and universally (by all sides) throughout cable news, newspapers and social media networks. Two elements must be added to the attack, the first is that it should be demonstrably false. This will cause many media outlets to rebroadcast the attack, and then explain why it is false. If the attack is on the veracity of the media itself, many will discount the explanation. The second added ingredient is that the attack must break with ordinary decorum, it must cross a moral line. This causes many media outlets to rebroadcast the attack and explain why it is immoral. Each of these media responses is the equivalent of decrying the improper use of a frying pan in committing an assault.

The media becomes complicit in the attack because it serves as the force multiplier that maximizes the harm. That’s how “playing the media” works. And as the media chases its tail on obviously false sensational headlines, it loses its credibility on the serious investigations it’s doing. When a President has immunity through Republican majority in Congress, a free press is needed more than ever. The attacks on the media have escalated and the media seems blind to its own role in amplifying the harm that is done.

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Self-Deleting Criticism

You've heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's when your present belief about a future event becomes an indirect cause of the future event.

In this presidential campaign the media has been engaging in something called “self-deleting criticism.” The Republican candidate does or says something that for previous candidates would be disqualifying. The journalist goes on at length about how awful it is. On the televised segment, they laugh in disbelief and nudge each other in the ribs. And then they say, “but for some reason the normal rules don't apply to Trump.”

And then, they utter the classic line, “Well, we'll have to leave it there.”

Whatever criticism they've leveled is deleted. It's as though they've said nothing.

Unfortunately at some point self-deleting criticism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

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