Of Ceilings and Binders: The Case for Satire
10-21-2013
“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase…into the dustbin where it belongs.”
-George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
I was rereading Orwell’s great 1946 essay this morning, as I prepare to be hurtled back across the continent and into that black miasma engulfing the Atlantic coast from the great belching factories on the Potomac. There is something in the air: the newspapers smack against doors a little harder, the grumble in the deli line is a little more fractious, and the smaller canines seem still more invested than usual in expansionist aggression against my outer territories. Perhaps it’s simply the first signs of the descent of winter, but I’m inclined to attribute the collective ill-temper to more political causes, and “Politics and the English Language” seemed as important as my totemic Emergen-C packets to avoid contracting anything unpleasant. Like much of the late Orwell, I find its linguistic politics slightly repugnant and its language an utter delight, an irony that would, I have no doubt, have the pleased the author.
I’ve known a number of professors of history and politics who make this essay mandatory reading before their classes, and despite my better graces I’m leaning towards the practice. The attraction for me is less the cantankerous attempt to ward off bad essay-writing than the fact that Orwell explains, in his inimitable way, something fundamental about the politics of language and the languages of politics, and that lesson is one that I think is particularly salient for the political moment. The second to last sentence of the essay (the first that opens the quotation above) is much quoted, and it finds the most powerful expressions of its searing critique of the political manipulation of language in 1984 and Animal Farm. Maybe the existence of this pathology of political language is the one great lesson we managed to learn from the twin births of totalitarianism Arendt diagnosed (I’m less sanguine about our memory in other arenas), even if treatment for the condition has not gone terribly well: we are all well-aware of, if not always well-attuned to, the nearly infinite capacity of our languages to bear and even beautify raw, enormous dissembly. And, as in 1984, the most powerful dissemblies of the blustery political day are the pithy little gems – “death tax,” “death panel,” “debt ceiling” (conservative politicians in particular have a perennial fondness for D) – which manage to imagine into being a crisis capable of paralyzing a state.
Nevertheless you almost never read anyone quote what follows after the political respectability of murder for Orwell, the thought that concludes the essay and explains its form. More’s the pity, because it contains a point that I think just might be more salient for the particular political crisis that gripped Washington and then whimpered off into the sunset (the night that follows is always a bit too brief, and is getting shorter). The question, for Orwell, is not whether political language lies, but what one does with the species of neologism – the “Achilles’ heel” and the “yellow peril” – which seems to all tempered response almost utterly devoid of meaning, and yet manages nevertheless to grip a (part of a) national imagination and twist it into factual destruction.
It was, to be sure, an imaginary crisis. But nearly all crises have to be imagined into existence before they can take those first few shaky steps towards disaster without their parents’ support. Imagining facts into the world, Arendt reminds us in “Lying and Politics,” is the entire point of political language. It exists to craft the narratives that move nations, and the power to imagine crisis is not one that we necessarily want to do without altogether (perhaps Churchill was an Arendtian before Arendt when he suggested that Chamberlain’s greatest political vice was an extraordinary lack of imagination). All crises begin with facts – there is after all such a bureaucratic thing as the fiscal limit called the “debt ceiling” – but facts, Arendt reminds us, can be remarkably impotent in the political world until we have spun them finely and woven them with enough meanings to make them live. The trouble with crises is not that they are imagined, but that after they have been imagined into the world, they are remarkably difficult to unimagine. If Boehner has learned anything about political language, this month, it is how little control we exercise over the neologisms we release into the world once they are in the mouths of others.
So what to do about these little political language imps, if they’re to be stopped before they wreck the political machines that spit them out? This is where I find Orwell brilliant as a political writer, a representative of a literary tradition that stretches from Chaucer through Swift to Burgess and Vonnegut. Orwell’s answer here, perhaps more recognizable in Burmese Days and Road to Wigan Pier than in their later cousins, is to jeer: in other words, to make language – and language, not speakers – an object of mirth. This impulse never left Orwell. For all that 1984 is decisively, almost irresistibly crushing, it is also one of the darkest, bitterest exercises in history of a political tool of the arts of language that has always thrived when the political world is at its worst: irony and mirth in the face of horror. We forget that about 1984, perhaps because the young are often assigned the book before our little burgeoning faculties of irony are fully sensitive to what Arendt calls a “vulnerability to human unsuccess”…or then again, perhaps the opposite is more true, that we understood it then, and forget as we struggle to shed that vulnerability Arendt describes as the killer of poets.
Some are suspicious of jokesters and satirists in moments of political crisis, on the one hand because they seem to rarely offer any positive way forward, and on the other because they work to make light of things that, in their graveness, ought not be made light of. Arendt herself emerged from the pale of the events that offer our best examples of horror’s power to make us resist its translation into humor (though it should be remembered that one of her first pieces after the war was the darkly witty “We, The Refugees”). In that, we risk becoming horror’s willing agents, but perhaps in some cases it has already won its victories and we can only subsequently mourn. It’s a difficult question, which terrible things can be made funny, and those who would play in the languages of politics should be granted a measure of leniency for those times when they traipse over the line. In their defense, that line is one that can never be drawn in advance, because it comes bearing ever-shifting whens and whoms that can always be pushed further back by an extraordinary gift that not even the most talented satirists can live up to in every moment. The line can be pushed back, and should be pushed back, because when undertaken by the most talented, satire and seriousness have never been opposites, but on the contrary are what allow each other to do the utmost that they can do. This is what made Orwell, for all his limitations, one of the great political writers of and on the English language: in the face first of empire and then of anti-semitic totalitarianism, he staked his artistic life on a faith in the power to express what is most utterly serious better through wit, to join the sustaining narrative power of sad mirth to the deepest and most inexpressible of pains. The lesson of “Shooting an Elephant” always seemed to me to be something along the lines of an idea that horror must be swallowed just long enough to give us sustenance, if we are to go once more into the breach against it. It’s a difficult and contentious thought, but worth swallowing.
This, in turn, is why the satire of language, in particular, does offer a way forward. It’s a case that Orwell makes and has been made brilliantly in a more American vein by Pryor, Carlin, and its modern geniuses Dave Chappell, Jon Stewart, and Tina Fey. If our morasses are mostly made of imaginings, in fact for better or worse must be, then the talent for jeering precisely those imaginative failings that turn crises into disasters is our best hope for sorting out in time what is more silliness than substance, what we should and what we cannot afford to leave to laughter. Orwell’s talent is one we should be paying more attention to as things get blacker, not less, because ungentle teasing by that gift’s greatest artists may be our last, best hope of sorting through a world of imagined politics and its deafening neologisms. The most gifted have unleashed some imps of their own: who will now forget poor Mittens’ binders full of women?
It is commonplace, on both sides of the political spectrum, to wail and gnash about the sheer irrationality of some ways of understanding America’s problems. But there are some forms of attachment, especially those that seem to inhere powerfully in these little language-imps, that the aesthetics of detached analysis and even fiery polemic are simply ill-equipped to combat. When debating has become shouting, neither louder shouting nor studiously detached sermonism are likely to have much effect. Sometimes, someone needs to kick out the soapbox.
We do need communities of analysis, communities of clear-eyed engagement in a political world so thoroughly fogged over with huff-puffery, and that will always give those like the author not blessed with the flair for jest something to do with ourselves (my closest friends assure me that I’m terrifyingly unfunny, and it’s true, but I’d like to still have something to do, even if it’s to be a lighthouse without a beacon or a coast). Fate save us, though, from ever being delivered wholly over to the hands of the terminally serious, because it might just be that the emotional sacrifices of our jesters that are our best offerings to appease the gods of democracy. As a public feeling powerless and deeply estranged from its state looks for ways “one can at least change one’s own habits”, a daily dose of satire with strong coffee may be better for political revival than what punditry and prognosis have on offer.
-Ian Storey