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April 24, 2006

babel bound

I hear hammer blows falling upon our mother tongue: pounding the sharp edges into smooth concensus. But also the smooth round contexts endure the hammers' blows, thinning our words and splitting definitions apart like the peninnsulas that appear in a hamburger which was smashed too flat before it hit the griddle. Today I can see across a turbulent bay of spattering grease other persons standing on the same words I use. Once we were neighbors; now we must travel further than the distance between us if we would meet.

Language evolves; any moderately literate English speaker is keenly aware of this. This is not a good thing or a bad thing, any more than cold-rolled steel is a good thing or a bad thing. Steel can be used to build bridges or weapons of war. To take it a step further, it isn't only what you make of it, it's also what you do with what you've made. Weapons of war can be used to defend one's homeland, and bridges can be used as access for an invasion. But perhaps I've oversimplified the complexity of the problem of language's evolving nature.

There are, to be blunt, many people who use language to divide rather than to unite. This is the paradoxical soul of language; it is the bedrock of our species' ability to teach; and from that stone we fashion fortresses which hold our enemies at a perplexed distance. The Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel depicts what Man might accomplish when everybody's on the same page, and how a simple matter like language brings our greatest works to nought.

The ruin of Babel still hulks on our horizon today; what a grand tower Europe was poised to become in the summer of 1914. Indeed the paradox consumed the League of Nations, and engulfs the halls of the United Nations today. Everywhere in the world are those who believe, if we could just speak the same language, we could accomplish anything. And yet it never quite happens. There are too many at the UN who are drunk on despotical power and the blood of their own people, who pound and shape their words in duplicitous ways to lead by the nose those who really want to believe that everybody thinks the way we think. And so we have diplomats who carefully craft their statements as if to take for granted the principles of Christian Charity in whose cultural soil such charitable impulses never flourished. It is a false and rickety bridge as we learned at Tiananmen Square.

One gulf seems to be growing wider and gapes along the fault line of race relations in America. I know I am not alone in viewing Martin Luther King Jr. as a sort of high-water mark. In his day there were real enemies who stood on the porticos of the State and directed violence upon peaceful protesters. His message was fresh and full of hope and he urged us all, both black and white, to climb out of the darkness on the strength of character and love for our fellow man.

Today the bitterest evil is in being too white if you are black, or in being too friendly to those who are if you are white. In a stunningly racist irony, whites are told they harbour racism if they protest otherwise. And if they really have no trace of racism, then they are utterly beyond hope, for it is buried in their subconsious. All of which leads us to ask, what does the word "racism" mean these days?

The bigotry of some Black Americans, inflicted upon other black people who have succeeded is staggering. There are no mainstream, credible voices among American Whites who use the language of the slave trade to put black people down into a lower place, but Harry Belafonte freely invoked those dark days, denigrating Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell as priveldged, pampered slaves serving in the master's house instead of in the field. And this, 140 years after slavery was abolished in this country.

We have new terms like "race card" and "blaxploitation" while old words like "niggardly" and even "picnic" are put away in shame and dishonor. And as these words shatter beneath the hammers' blows I grieve to think the day is coming, and in some instances, has already come when I no longer have the words I need to tell my neighbor how I feel and what I think. This is the sort of tragedy which might lead to pride; after all we're both misunderstood. But somewhere to the east is a crumbling pile of bricks which mocks us all; whoever is to blame in any specific case, it happens at the foot of the great failure of our common race. Maybe we don't love our neighbors well enough, or maybe our grandfathers didn't, or their grandfathers didn't. Or maybe we're just cursed.

Posted by joel at April 24, 2006 01:33 AM

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Posted by: uncle jim at April 25, 2006 06:43 AM

Posted by: Saint Kansas at April 25, 2006 02:13 PM

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