Wartalk
IN TRYING to come to terms with the benefits and challenges of globalism, it has become necessary to recognize that the term suffers from its own history. It is not imperialism, internationalism, or even universalism. Certainly a major distinction between globalism and its predecessors is how much it is marked by speed: the rapid reconfiguration of political and economic alliances, and the almost instant reparsing of nation-states. Both of these remappings encourage and repel the relocation of large numbers of peoples. Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now than it has ever been. It involves the distribution of workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants, and armies crossing oceans, continents, through custom offices and via hidden routes, speaking multiple languages of commerce, or political intervention, of persecution, exile, violence, and defiling poverty. There is little doubt that the voluntary or involuntary displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the neighborhoods, the streets. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of fresh military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of people.
This slide of people across the globe has altered and freighted the concept of citizenship. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity in the United States, by press descriptions where origin is of more significance than citizenship. People are described as “German citizen of ‘fill-in-the-blank’ origin” or “British citizen of ‘blank’ origin,” all this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The relocation of peoples that globalism ignites has disrupted and sullied the idea of home and has expanded the focus of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that leads us to the perception of an implicit threat within “difference.” The interests of global markets, however, can absorb all these questions, thrive in fact on a multiplicity of differences, the finer, the more exceptional the better, since each “difference” is a more specific, identifiable consumer cluster. This market can reconstitute itself endlessly to any broadened definition of citizenship, to ever-narrowing, proliferating identities, as well as to the disruptions of planetary war. But unease creeps into the conversation about this beneficial morphing ability when the flip side of citizenship is addressed. The chameleon-like characteristic of global economy provokes the defense of the local and raises newer questions of foreignness—a foreignness that suggests intimacy rather than distance (Is he my neighbor?) and a deep personal discomfort with our own sense of belonging (Is he us? Am I the foreigner?). These questions complicate the concept of belonging, of home, and are telling in the alarm apparent in many quarters regarding official, prohibited, unpoliced, protected, and subversive languages.
There is some gasping at what North Africans may have done or are capable of doing to French; of what Turkish people have made of German; of the refusal of some Catalan speakers to read or even speak Spanish. The insistence on Celtic in schools; the academic study of Ojibwe; the poetic evolution of Newyorican. Even some feeble (and I think misguided) efforts to organize something called Ebonics.
The more globalism trumps language differences—by ignoring, soliciting, or engulfing them—the more passionate these protections and usurpations become. For one’s language—the one we dream in—is home.
I believe it is in the humanities, and specifically the branch of literature, where such antagonisms become rich fields of creativity and thus ameliorate the climate between cultures and itinerant people. Writers are key to this process for any number of reasons, principal among which is the writer’s gift for teasing language, eliciting from its vernacular, its porous lexicon, and the hieroglyphics of the electronic screen greater meaning, more intimacy, and, not incidentally, more beauty. This work is not new for writers but the challenges are, as all languages, major and dominant, minor and protected, are reeling from the impositions of globalism.
Yet globalism’s impact on language is not always deleterious. It can also create odd and accidental circumstances in which profound creativity erupts out of necessity. Let me suggest one case in point, where severe changes in public discourse have already taken place as communication floods virtually every terrain. The language of war has historically been noble, summoning the elevating quality of warrior discourse: the eloquence of grief for the dead; courage and the honor of vengeance. That heroic language, rendered by Homer, Shakespeare, in sagas and by statesmen, is rivaled for beauty and force only by religious language, with which it frequently merges. In this parade of inspiring wartalk, from BC to the twentieth century, there have been disruptions. One moment of distrust and disdain for such language occurred immediately after World War I when writers like Ernest Hemingway and Wilfred Owen, among others, questioned the paucity of terms such as “honor,” “glory,” “bravery,” “courage” to describe the reality of war, the obscenity of those terms being associated with the carnage of 1914–1918.
As Hemingway wrote: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot….[A]nd I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”
But the events of 1938 quieted those interventions and once more the language of war rose to the occasion of World War II. The glamour-coated images we carry of Roosevelt, Churchill, and other statesmen are due in part to their rousing speeches and are testimony to the strength of militant oratory. Yet something interesting happened after World War II. In the late fifties and sixties, wars continued, of course—hot and cold, north and south, big and small—more and more cataclysmic, more and more heartbreaking because so unnecessary; so wildly punitive on innocent civilians one could only drop to one’s knees in sorrow. Yet the language that accompanied these recent wars became oddly diminished. The dwindling persuasiveness of combat discourse may have been due to the low requirements of commercial media: their abhorrence of complex sentences and less-known metaphors, the dominance of the visual over linguistic communication. Or perhaps it was due to the fact that all of these wars were the seething mute children of preceding ones. Whatever the cause, warrior discourse has become childlike. Puny. Vaguely prepubescent. Underneath the speeches, bulletins, punditry, essays lies the clear whine of the playground: “He hit me. I did not. Did too.” “That’s mine. Is not. Is too.” “I hate you. I hate you.”
This decline, it seems to me, this echo of passionate juvenilia affects the highest level of contemporary warrior discourse and sounds like that of the comic book or action film. “I strike for freedom!” “We must save the world!” “Houston, we have a problem.” An inane, enfeebled screed has emerged to address brain-cracking political and economic problems. What is fascinating is that such language sank to its most plodding at precisely the time another language was evolving: the language of nonviolence, of peaceful resistance, of negotiation. The language of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King Jr., of Nelson Mandela, of Václav Havel. Compelling language, robust, rousing, subtle, elevating, intelligent, complex. As war’s consequences became more and more dire, wartalk has become less and less credible, more infantile in its panic. A change that became obvious just at the moment when the language of resolution, of diplomacy was developing its own idiom—a moral idiom worthy of human intelligence, shedding the cloud of weakness, of appeasement, that historically has hovered above it.