This is going to sound like a kvetch, but it’s not intended that way. Please believe me. Last week I posted a piece about the list of words and phrases that are now taboo in all government documents and publications. I said that I found this one of the more distressing atrocities among the many that the administration has perpetrated in a few short weeks. Controlling language is a shortcut to controlling thinking and altering our realities. That’s scary as hell.
What I found equally scary was that I got a total of two replies/comments on the posting. Interestingly, both respondents are in the word business – one a writer/editor and the other a well-published author. It’s not surprising that they share my reverence for words and are quick to grasp the implications of this clumsy form of mind control. When I told the editor that she was, at that point, the sole respondent to my blog, she made the obvious alibi for the silent ones. “People are tired.”
I get that. These past months have constituted an assault on the brain, not to mention the unsettling campaign that preceded it. I’m willing to cut people some slack. On the other hand, there are many situations that elicit weariness – being the parent of young children (or even adolescent children), for example – but that weariness doesn’t grant you license to stop carrying out your responsibilities for keeping those children alive. This may seem like a stretch but in our current situation democracy is the child on life support, and if we choose to take a break from nurturing it, it may be dead by the time we’re ready to re-enter the fray.
The other night, we watched “I’m Still Here,” the moving Brazilian film which was an Oscar nominee in several categories. It’s streaming on Apple+. It’s the story of a privileged upper middle-class family with a history of political activism. Suddenly, the father is taken “for questioning” by the military regime, never to return. In a day, his wife’s life shrinks down to a constant search for information about her husband, all the while lying to their children about his whereabouts, until fairly conclusive evidence about his murder arrives.
The story bears striking parallels to the amazing Irish novel Prophet Song by Paul Lynch whose praises I sang a while back on this blog. (At breakfast with a friend yesterday, I was delighted to learn that this was one of her favorite books as well. I had found few people who were familiar with it.) There too a family’s world is upended by the arrest and disappearance of the father who was last seen at a protest rally sponsored by the teacher’s union which he heads. His arrest is one of the early acts of an authoritarian regime, in the early stages of establishing its hold on the Irish population.
For me and Rosellen these two stories were strongly delivered gut punches. We could see ourselves in these characters’ shoes. There was plausibility in the suddenness with which their comfortable lives evaporated. I know that many readers and viewers will argue that this couldn’t happen in America, but it is happening in plain sight. After all, the only people being taken off are immigrants, some of them more outspoken than the regime would like, not people like us. And the military doesn’t show up at our front doors, on the order of the villainous dictators in these stories. But isn’t there cause to worry about the removal of military leaders who might resist the commands of their president and the cleansing of the FBI of agents not loyal to the regime.
This can happen – and is happening – at warp speed while so many of us are resting up from the lightning assault on the world as we’ve known it. We may be bone-weary, but we can’t stop because the parade will be too far down the road for us to catch up with it by the time we’re ready to move.
I want to circle back here at the end to where we started – on the subject of the power of words and our need to protect and respect them. Many decades ago in Houston, I forged an unusual bond with a student named Marcus Guillory who had the coincidental misfortune to be in my English class in the sixth, eighth, tenth and twelfth grades. I followed him through college, law school, an early career as an entertainment lawyer, later veering off courageously into the creative life of a novelist, filmmaker, screen writer for popular shows like Empire.
But it’s his latest turn as an artist that I want to focus on. Marcus recently had a show in Los Angeles of his word-dominated canvases, painstakingly constructed, letter by letter. It represents an act of worship of the value of words in our lives. It takes that worship to a different level, beyond what was possible in the pages of his novels, where the words and letters were extruded effortlessly with a few strokes on the keyboard. Marcus has constructed an almost mystical world of words where every letter deserves attention and respect. Here at the end of today’s piece is the antithesis of what is represented in that contemptible government list – an acknowledgement of the preciousness of words and their need for protection from the invading hordes.
