Doublespeak

It’s not just the politicians, nor just the United States, that generates these self-contradicting equivocations.  Here’s a quick sampling from folks outside the US government proper:

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.”  This was the inspiration for the Doublespeak awards, and Col. Opfer was the first “winner.”  The following year, then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat was accused of wanting to “destroy Israel.”  His response:  “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-labeling of certain words and phrases, which earned them the Doublespeak Award for that year. 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.

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.

Read well, my friends.