With Laundry Day fast approaching, I’m getting down towards the bottom of the t-shirt pile, so yesterday I wore the one with the peace sign. Honestly, it’s always towards the bottom of the pile, mostly because—much more than most of the genuinely inflammatory shirts I own, more, perhaps, than the one featuring Subcommandante Marcos saying “Ya Basta!” with only one finger—it seems to actively enrage people. It’s a post-9/11 thing, and I more or less understand. To fight or not to fight has come to be one of those Defining Questions. While the President has recently said that disagreement about the War on Terror is not unpatriotic, peace is still a bit disreputable.
The politics of it all are one thing—and not the thing we need to talk about. What’s of interest to us is the way in which ideas—war and peace, freedom, security, and tolerance, to name a few key terms—have taken on surprisingly fluid, multiple, and sometimes contradictory meanings in our culture. We need to get a handle on that issue before we can really even get around to arguing about practical politics—at least in any very useful and meaningful way.
We’re going to wade into the political debates that founded the U.S., and into the events in the newspapers—and we need to keep our focus on ideas and the power they possess to help us think and communicate, to act in the world, but also the power they have to stop us short, before we’ve taken everything into account. The ideas of “9/11” and “the war on terror” define all Americans (which means more than just all citizens of the United States) in ways that go beyond any personal impacts the terrorist attacks had on us. Not all of those effects are entirely rational, but even the non-rational effects are ultimately explicable, if we care to grapple with them. “Honor,” for instance, is important. We understand it’s positive importance when, for example, we saw the pitcher for Beaverton, Oregon’s little league baseball team walk to first base to shake the hand of a batter he had just “beaned.” And we can understand its potential down-sides when we contemplate the phenomenon of so-called “honor killings.” Honor itself, apparently, is not a uniformly good or bad thing. Neither, perhaps, is peace. (You’ll be hard-put to find any positive references, for example, to “peace at any price.” Go ahead and Google it.)
As you’re reading the day’s news, look for key ideas—and try to figure out just exactly what is being invoked when those key ideas come into play. Try reconstructing the phrases you find with a sort of conscious naivete. What could “homeland security” mean? What would it mean to accept or reject “Israel’s right to exist”? What is “choice”? “collateral damage”? Is it a “ceasefire” (as in Sri Lanka and parts of the Middle East) if both sides keep fighting just a little all the time? Were we “at peace” with Iraq before the second Iraq War started. (We had, after all, been attacking targets within Iraq right along.) Did the “kidnapping” of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah recently differ markedly from the seizure and imprisonment of Hamas officials in the Palestinian territories a few month’s before? Try to tackle this stuff as logically and dispassionately as you can. How much spin is there in the language we use, and to what extent does our familiarity with the terms prevent us from thinking further about them?
If you want a fairly extreme example of this process of asking “what could this mean?”, take a look at this book chapter of mine from a few years back, where I try to figure out if “virtual community” is a good way to talk about groups on the internet.
