Doublespeak (2001)

This article was originally written in 2001, which is especially interesting in light of my pursuit a decade later of a degree in communication with a polisci minor.  (Still got a year’s worth of electives left; money.)  I didn’t realize it when I wrote this repost, but I actually started to put this up like a year ago and ended up rewriting it.

As I write this preface to the March 2021 republication of this article I haven’t re-read it or changed anything, and I don’t intend to do so outside of perhaps a bit of spelling and grammar checking.  I’d like to think I’ve developed a little bit as a writer in the last two decades, but the purpose of these posts from way back when is to archive and curate the content, not retroactively polish it to make myself look cooler than I really am.

At any rate, I find it interesting to watch myself trying to explain these things without having the formal education with which to properly frame and express my understanding of them.

I notice immediately as I glance down that the first paragraph contains a swipe at “political correctness” and would remind folks of the fluidity of language and meaning over time.  That phrase has taken on different connotations, as has the critical examination of substituting the surface appearance of being “politically correct” for the far more difficult and energy-consuming task of really and truly trying your best not to be an asshole.

I will add some annotations as I read through this, I’m sure; they’ll be marked as [2021: …]

Thanks.

Doublespeak:  the art of saying things that make absolutely no logical sense in such a manner that the inattentive listener hears something more positive to their ear than what is actually said.  Another function of Doublespeak is to strip (or sometimes, to intentionally include) “trigger” words and phrases, those things which might give the listener a reason to react unfavorably.  A good example of this is the “political correctness” that has invaded the English language – especially in the US – over the last decade or so, like the motion by the San Francisco city council to stop referring to “manhole covers” and instead call them “personhole covers.”  [2012: As you may imagine my thoughts on this have evolved considerably in the last twenty years, and even ten years ago I wouldn’t have written this.  Concepts like microaggression and a more refined understanding of the impact of language and inclusion were way ahead of this point in history, and my own attitudes have matured as well aside from riding along with social progress as a passenger.  The actual source of this, which amounts to my retelling an urban legend in the original writing, is here:  https://apnews.com/article/3962c20a9b644607b5d509aba29079f1 A contest in 1990 by the city of Sacramento to rename “manhole covers” as a joke that then got blown way out of proportion.  A great example of how we can get caught by our own biases and preconceptions, and get lazy about our research.  I don’t mind having some egg on my face 20 years later to help illustrate that point.]

Which is kind of funny.  But the following examples…well, they’re not always so amusing.  Take a look at some of the smoke  your leaders, elected officials, military personnel, and court officers are blowing up your posterior.

Each year, the National Council of Teachers of English announces the Doublespeak awards, given to those public figures or groups which engage in using deceptive, evasive, or intentionally confusing language.  Source material for this article includes the Book of Lists #3, and the Book of Lists of the 90’s, from the editors of The People’s Almanac, with additional source material provided by the NCTE website at www.ncte.org.  Read on, and get educated.

• President George Herbert Walker Bush –
  • When the US invaded Panama in 1989 to bring Manuel Noriega to justice for allegations of drug trafficking and a host of other charges, Bush was positively bent over backwards trying to avoid using the word “invasion.”  Instead, he “sent troops down to Panama.”  He “deployed forces.”  He “directed United States forces to execute…preplanned missions in Panama.”
  • During his campaign for President in 1988, Bush swore that there would be “no net loss of wetlands.”  After he took office, he “clarified” his promise to really mean there would be no net wetlands loss “except where there is a high proportion of land which is wetlands.”  In English, this means “except where the protection is needed most,” like the Alaskan Tundra, the Florida Everglades, and the Outer Banks and Great Dismal Swamp areas of North Carolina.
  • After the Oil War in 1990, Bush proposed a Middle East disarmament initiative that was supposed to stop “the proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons in the Middle East.”  Less than a month after this proposal was made, the Bush administration announced plans to sell over $5 billion in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
• President George W. Bush –
  • Although he hasn’t won one yet, I suspect that GHW’s little boy is gonna get a nomination himself, for declaring a war on terrorism and then announcing the sale of 50 brand new F-16’s to Israel, a country which is by any standard engaged in terrorist acts, covertly and overtly.  Even more disconcerting is the fact that this author is questioning whether to delete this entry altogether, because one of the first acts in the “war on terrorism” was to make dissent against the actions of the US Government in this “war” a crime in and of itself.However, this author is of the mind that this very prohibition is an act of terrorism by the US Government against it’s own citizens, and I hope that any arrests attempted in the enforcement of this new law are met with a public outrage to make the Vietnam war protest look like a love-in.To commit a terrorist act against the free country you lead even as you declare a war on terrorism…this is the very essence of doublespeak. [2012: GW won three times, twice by himself and once as part of his entire administration.  However, the specific violation of logic I mentioned above was not listed as a reason for any of these “honors.”]
• President Ronald Reagan – In spite of still being held as a hero by many right-wingers and Republicans, Reagan was probably the most dishonest and euphemistic Presidents this country has ever had.  I have a couple of features planned just on his lies and misquoted “facts” all on his own, but for now, we can note a few peccadilloes for the record…
  • During his 1980 campaign, Reagan was positively effusive regarding the great works he had performed as Governor of California.  One of his favorite red herrings was that he had “refunded 5.7 billion dollars in property taxes to Californians.”  What he didn’t say is that this was only possible because he had raised taxes by $21 billion.
  • Reagan also liked to point out how General Motors “has to employ 23,000 full-time employees to comply with government-required paperwork.”  A GM exec pointed out at the time that the actual number was 4,900, and that included employees for all paperwork.
  • Another favorite campaign lie of Reagan’s was that the Alaskan petroleum supply was greater than that of Saudi Arabia.  When this “fact” was proved to be ridiculously in error, Doddering Ronnie just kept on repeating it.  As the New York Times so eloquently pointed out, Mr. Reagan never “let the truth spoil a good anecdote”.
• President Bill Clinton –
  • Most of Clinton’s more egregious violations of logic and sense occurred recently enough that readers should remember them fairly well.  His most famous, of course, were the “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, however, we did have a relationship that was…inappropriate,” and the infamous “define ‘is'” defense.  Apparently, a blowjob is not considered sex.  Wish I’d known that a few years ago when a girlfriend caught me “not having sexual relations” with another woman… [2012: It shouldn’t need pointing out, but that’s a joke, it didn’t actually happen.  I’ve had plenty of relationship issues over the years but being unfaithful was never one of them.]
• President Jimmy Carter –
  • In late 1979, when the US military failed miserably in trying to recover US hostages being held in Tehran, Iran, Carter reported the action as an “incomplete success.”
  • Carter went on to justify the government bailout of the Chrysler corporation by saying that “this legislation does not violate the principle of letting free enterprise function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances.”
  • Like his successors, Carter was less than forthcoming about foreign diplomatic policy relating to arms reduction.  He bragged that his administration never supported “nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree, and which are completely antithetical to our principles.”  In spite of this heroic stance, the US under the Carter administration continued to provide aid both military and financial to some 26 governments which were known to systematically violate the unalienable rights of their people.
• The United States Supreme Court – The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows:  “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
  • In 1991, the Supremes heard a case in which a defendant had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole for the possessing 672 grams of cocaine.  In their ruling, it was decided that while such a punishment might be cruel, it was not unusual, and therefore it was constitutional.  The logic behind this ruling, in simple English, is that as long as a punishment is frequently inflicted, it is constitutional, regardless of how cruel it is.  Perhaps our founding fathers should have said “cruel or unusual…”
  • In 1980, the Refugee Act was passed, authorizing political asylum to a person with “a well-grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, membership in a particular group, or political opinion.”  In a small town in Guatemala in the late mid-80’s, assault weapon equipped masked men guerillas showed up at the home of Jario Elias-Zacarias, 19, and demanded that he fight with them against the Guatemalan government.  Rather than fight, Zacarias came to the US, but he was denied asylum.  Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his judgment to deny the young man asylum, said that he had failed to show that the guerillas would persecute him for his political opinions “rather than because of his refusal to fight with them.”
• US Representative Newt Gingrich and GOPAC – [2021: pay attention, there’s some serious foreshadowing of how misinformation is communicated through social media now.]
  • Congressman Gingrich heads up GOPAC, a conservative Republican political action committee.  Congressman Gingrich is an author, and GOPAC prints various pamphlets and tracts designed for use by Republican political candidates in speechwriting and public speaking.  They would be perhaps better off communicating through some cabalistic system of cells or something, because they have an unnaturally well-developed propensity for churning out pure bullshit and claiming that it’s fudge brownies.
  • In one of GOPAC’s booklets, there is a list of sixty-nine words which will “help define your campaign and your vision,” as well as sixty-four words of a less positive nature to “define out opponents.”  The “good” words, to be used only when talking about one’s self, one’s party mates, or one’s party, included “environment, peace, freedom, fair, flag, we/us/our, moral, family, children, truth, hard-working, reformer, and candid.”  Appellations to be hurled at opponents included “traitors, betray, sick, lie, liberal, radical, corruption, permissive attitude, they/them, anti-flag, anti-family, anti-job, unionized, bureaucracy, and impose.”
  • But it doesn’t stop there, ooooh no.  Remember what we said above:  Gingrich himself is also an author.  In 1995, Gingrich won the NCTE Doublespeak award for his book To Renew America.  In one example, pointed out by Robert Wright in a Time magazine article (“Newt the Blameless,” 17 Jul 95), Gingrich states in his book “When confronted with a problem, a true American doesn’t ask ‘Who can I blame this on?'”  Later in the book, Gingrich proceeds to “survey America’s problems and blame them on various people…the ‘bureaucrats’ have helped destroy the family, undermine the work ethic, and dumb down education.  Meanwhile, the liberal ‘elites’ (in a ‘calculated effort’) have helped ‘discredit this civilization,’ sapping faith in American values.”
  • NCTE Doublespeak Awards committee chairman Keith Gilyard, director of the Writing Program at Syracuse University, said Gingrich was also cited as a “winner” (bit of doublespeak it itself, eh kids?) as a key author of the Republican Party’s “Contract With America.”  (Even the title is doublespeak – if anything, this piece of fluff was a contract ON America.)  The award nomination reads in part:  “The Republican Party’s 1995 Congressional agenda consisted of ten acts with glittering, euphemistic titles that in many cases concealed key details that, in the manner of classic doublespeak, were calculated to produce the opposite effect from that promised by the titles.”  Examples given at the NCTE website include the “Personal Responsibility Act,” which deeply cut or restricted welfare benefits; the “Common Sense Legal Reforms Act,” reduced the likelihood of succeeding with legal action against corporations for securities fraud; and the “Job Creation and Enhancement Act” contained a proposal for a cut in capital gains taxes, which are levied on income derived from the sale of financial instruments and real estate, among other things.
• US Senator Orrin Hatch – Hatch, a proponent of the death penalty, once said that “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”  While this commentator feels no passionate regard either way for capital punishment [2021: No longer true; I have long opposed the death penalty on general principle while allowing for the barest sliver of possibility that there may be a set of circumstances under which death is the only appropriate means of dealing with a person who has made themselves odious to the rest of the species], having a nonsense-spewing jive-talker like this spout such unbelievable nonsense is almost enough to force consideration of an anti-death-penalty stance, just because its supporters appear to be utterly ignorant.

But don’t get the idea that this sort of nonsense is limited to US politicians, or to prominent government leaders.  3rd-string congressional representatives, leaders of other countries, sects, and ethic groups, military personnel, as well as many members of corporate America also engage in this sort of thing regularly….

• Col. David H. E. Opfer, USAF – in a press conference following a bombing raid in Cambodia, Col Opfer opined to reporters:  “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing, bombing.  It’s not bombing, it’s air support.”
• Yasser Arafat –  In 1975, then-PLO leader Arafat was quoted as saying “We do not want to destroy any people.  It is precisely because we have been advocating coexistence that we have shed so much blood.”
• Harry Volweider – President of the Springdale Golf Club in Princeton, New Jersey, Volweider was questioned in 1975 about the rejection of a black applicant for club membership.  His response?  “We didn’t turn him down.  We just didn’t accept him.”
• The Nuclear Power Industry – After the 1979 “accident” at Three Mile Island, this group of doubletalking automatons went absolutely insane with the redefinition or re-labelling of certain words and phrases.  Explosions were no longer explosions, but “energetic disassemblies.”  Rather than a “fire,” there was “rapid oxidation.”  At Three Mile Island, there’s no such thing as an “accident.”  Instead there were “events,” “incidents,” “abnormal evolution,” “normal aberrations,” and “plant transients.”  Of course, radioactive “plutonium contamination” doesn’t exist; instead there was “plutonium infiltration” and most laughable of all, one speaker’s report that “plutonium has taken up residence.”  Hi, I’m your new neighbor, Plutonium!  I have a half-life of 35 thousand years and I’m deadly to any living tissue that I come near!  Where’s the Welcome Wagon?
• Gen Joao Baptista Figueiredo – When this Brazillian President was sworn in in 1979, he was quoted by reporters as saying the following:  “I intend to open this country up to democracy, and anyone who is against that, I will jail, I will crush.”
• The USDA –
  • While some of the USDA’s more egregious offenses against the language have been eliminated by the passage of time and increasing public awareness of and interest in what goes into their food, it will forever be remembered that in 1981, the USDA reclassified catsup as a vegetable so that it could be included as one of the two vegetables required as part of the school lunch program.
  • The department also changed the label for chickens which had been stored in a 28° environment from “frozen” to “deep chilled,” allowing the chickens in question to be sold as fresh.
• The Exxon Corporation – Shortly after the Exxon Valdez ran aground under the command of drunken skipper Joseph Hazelwood in the late 80’s, Exxon declared 35 miles of Alaskan beaches to be “environmentally clean” and “environmentally stabilized.”  Upon being informed that the beaches were still saturated with millions of tons of raw crude oil, Exxon cleanup general manager Otto Harrison revealed that clean “doesn’t mean that every oil stain is off every rock…it means that the natural inhabitants can live there without harm.”  Even with that rather underhanded caveat, the designation was completely off the mark, as the beaches remained poisoned to fish and wildlife, and in the eyes (and by the evidence) of many environmentalists, the affected areas are still not safe for wildlife, and may in fact still pose long-term health dangers to humans as well.

And let’s not leave the “Men of God” out of this, shall we?

• Pat Robertson – When Tom Brokaw referred to Robertson on an NBC news telecast as a “television evangelist,” Robertson accused Brokaw of religious bigotry because he had not used the phrase “religious broadcaster” instead.

The moral of the story is this:  Pay Attention.  More than any other factor, it is the willful ignorance and apathy of the “average Joe” which allows these sorts of “incomplete truths” and “clarifications” to take place with impunity.

If you’re young enough to still be in school, this is why English class is important to you in your adult life.

If you are old enough to have already graduated, this is why you should have been paying attention.

Any one of the entries on this page should have been grounds for a massive outrage on the part of intelligent people worldwide.  Instead, they are left to linger in the pages of out-of-print books and fringe-politics/ odd-facts websites to remember.

Especially in democratic countries, where people fight and die every day to protect the right of the “average Joe” to form his own opinion, unimpeded by propaganda or flat-out dishonesty, it has never been more important for YOU (yes, YOU) to listen carefully to what you are told, and do your very best to understand what is actually being said.  If something doesn’t sound quite right, it probably isn’t.