Actually this was all advice to
myself
when I was petrified about putting one word on the page. I could have published this self-help book if I chose to. I had a publisher who wanted it, paid for it and scheduled it. But the more I looked at it, the more dismayed I became.
There were too damn many books on writing! We needed more
readers,
not more writers. We had a whole industry of writing workshops. I myself went to guest lecture at them and found myself encouraging people who would
never
be writers, who hadn’t the guts to be honest or hadn’t the talent for words or hadn’t the
Sitzfleisch.
They were good kids or earnest adults and I had the social worker’s instinct to help the needy. And I was paid those lecture fees to tide me over to the next book. Sometimes I even did it for free if a good friend or my daughter asked me. I love teaching; it was my first and only real job.
But writing is a god-awful profession. One year you get an advance and two years later you’ve spent it and the book is nowhere near finished. Most writers can’t make a living without teaching or editing or working in advertising or journalism or TV or writing movies that never get made.
Why was I recommending this purgatory to people? Only if you have
no other choice
should you be a writer. Publishers are getting leaner and meaner. Advances are going down and you’re only as good as your last sales figures. Even agents don’t want you if you’ve had a flop. Literary writers used to regularly make the best-seller list when I started. Now romance novels that were once luridly paperbacked in drugstores—or novels by committees using a brand name—mostly monopolize the list.
Not that I have a problem with syndicate-written books, if they announce their syndicate on the cover. Anything that gets people reading is good. The Nancy Drew mysteries were written by committee and I adored Nancy Drew when I was eight, nine and ten. Summers on Fire Island, I used to save my wagoning and babysitting money to buy the latest Nancy Drew and read it through in two hours. I loved boyfriend Ned Nickerson and Nancy’s red “roadster” and her “tomboy” friend George. I’m sorry they ever updated the series. It was both quaint and true—the perfect story of a motherless girl who loved her daddy. I felt it was the story of my life.
In contrast, my daughter, Molly, spent her whole childhood saying, “I’ll never be a writer! I don’t know why
anyone
would be! The first year we go to Europe and by the third year we’re totally broke and you’re hysterical and looking for teaching jobs.” Then she turned nineteen and sat down and wrote
Normal Girl.
Clearly, she had no choice. She published it at twenty-one and immediately wrote
Girl Maladjusted—
a book of satirical essays she published at twenty-six when she had a year-old baby. She was driven—just like her mother. She had no choice but to write. And she refused to let me help her. She found her own agent and her own publisher. Without that drivenness—and a trust fund or Grandpa paying the bills—who can write? Only people who can live in cold-water flats and like it.
So why was I going into the advice business? My job was to tell the truth as I saw it. I had always been a shit disturber. And I had never received unequivocal praise. In fact I had been proud of being controversial. The brickbats told me I was doing something right.
So tell the truth, I told myself. That’s your job, not advice and self-help.
And then I had a pivotal experience. Invited to speak at graduation for the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York (and be awarded my first honorary doctorate), I decided to tell the students the truth instead of mouthing hollow words of encouragement. I knew that Staten Island was a red borough in an otherwise blue city. I knew that my audience was likely to be composed of the sons and daughters of firefighters and cops who voted for George W. Bush. But what was the point of being chosen as commencement speaker if I was just going to soothe them and tell them what they wanted to hear?
What would
I
have wanted to hear at age twenty-one? What would my favorite authors—Jonathan Swift, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson—have talked about? They certainly wouldn’t say “Seize the day or be seized by it” or “Write your dream on an egg and watch it hatch” or “Follow your bliss”—which may have been fresh when Joseph Camp-bell first said it to Bill Moyers but was now tattered and shopworn from all the New Agers who had tried it on and paraded about in it.
There was only one way to tell the truth. And that was to tell the kids and their parents and professors why I was there. I was there because I was a writer and a writer is someone who takes the universal whore of language and turns her into a virgin again. I wasn’t going to coast on clichés. I was going to talk about the power of words—something I had been thinking a great deal about since the so-called war on terror dragged on and on, kidnapping the language and proliferating terrorists. Language, I thought, has never been more abused. And here’s what I said:
Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
Telling the truth has never been easy—not for Jonathan Swift or Alexander Pope or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson. Not for Mary Wollstonecraft—or any Enlightenment scribe. But now the Anglo-American idiom has been captured by deliberate liars: politicians, movie stars, advertisers and the corporations they write for, New Age gurus and other celebrities who all have what they think are good reasons to say the opposite of what they mean.
The Misleader-in-Chief says “healthy forests” when he means clear-cutting trees, “clear skies” when he means pollution. His generals say “pacify” when they mean killing people, “collateral damage” when they mean killing foreign civilians. They say “friendly fire” when they mean killing our own soldiers. And it’s not only our government that’s deliberately lying to us.
Movie stars tell us that they’re in love when they’re just doing PR—think of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Most people think their love is loveless, but they’ve pledged it on Oprah so it must be true. Did Oprah believe them? I doubt it. She’s smart.
New Age gurus may be the worst word corrupters of all. Do we really need “wellness” when we have health? Do we need “healers” rather than physicians? (The words mean the same thing, but one sounds more “alternative”—another cant word.) Do we need “holistic” when we have “whole”? Is holistic somehow cooler than whole? It certainly has more syllables. Simplicity of language can contain the most profound ideas, as Jonathan Swift taught us. Wellness is not better than health. It only sounds fancier.
Not long ago I read on a “wellness web site” that chocolate is good for your heart—but not when it is mixed with fat and sugar and made into candy bars. This has not stopped the Mars company from claiming the heart-healthy effects of their chocolates. “Heart-healthy,” by the way, is another phrase that sounds like a great deal more than it is.
You cannot tell the truth when words are corrupted. Our country was founded on the notion that the plain words of the people are more important than the fancy words of kings. We admire George Washington not only for refusing to be king but also for not sanctioning lying—even though the cherry-tree story may be wholly apocryphal. We hold politicians to a much lesser standard today. We expect them to lie to us. We grant them the latitude to lie. We are lax about holding them to their word. We don’t expect them to tell the truth about power any more than we expect movie stars to tell the truth about love. And we write off many lies as PR. Having stopped expecting truth, we rarely get it.
I’ve never stopped expecting it, never stopped trying my best to tell it and never stopped getting mad when it is not told to me. Why do I care so much? God only knows. I was born that way. I’ve made it my mission in writing to get other people to hate lies too.
Why is getting mad at lies so important? Because our survival depends on it, our republic depends on it. Our lives depend on it—whether it’s pharmaceutical companies lying about drugs or chemical corporations lying about pollution or politicians lying about why our young people are coming home in flag-draped boxes. We are in danger unless we know the truth, and the truth depends on words.
During the Vietnam War we used to say that people came home in “body bags.” Those words became politicized, so now the military speaks of “transfer tubes”—transferring “folks” (as the President says) from the battlefield to the cemetery, I guess. This happens after “the patient failed to fulfill his wellness potential”—i.e., died.
It was when I said this in my commencement speech that the faculty and some students started to cheer and others started to loudly boo while they passed various beach balls above their heads through the crowd.
My speech had started very late because three unannounced politicians had been limousined up to the outdoor podium and wedged in front of the other speakers—like the college president, the provost of City University, the dean of the faculty, the winner of the top student prize and me. The pols had been nowhere in evidence when the academic procession began at nine-thirty in the morning. So we all sat there in our gowns and hoods and mortarboards while some nameless nerd who was hopelessly running for mayor of New York City, Senator Charles Schumer and a hopeless would-be challenger to Senator Hillary Clinton talked on and on about their own triumphs.
Chuck Schumer was mercifully brief. He told the audience that he was the one they should thank for the deductibility of college tuition. I wistfully remembered those days in the sixties when I taught at CCNY and tuition was free. This generation of students probably didn’t even know about the great ideal of college education for all who were capable. They worked two or three jobs and incurred enormous tuition debts (or their parents did) and yet they kept voting for a President who thought only the rich should have college degrees. Their ignorance of history pained me. I am becoming an old fart, I thought, woolgathering about free college tuition at CUNY. Young people just assume they have no choice but to begin their adult lives deep in debt. Surely they would shoot the messenger if I talked about the antique ideal of free education. I decided I would keep my speech about language and telling the truth but cut it as short as I could.
Orwellian Newspeak is everywhere in the air, I said.
Senator Orrin Hatch has alleged “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.” I could go on and on. There is no dearth of examples.
Why would someone like me spend her whole life indoors playing with words? Because words often determine who wins or who loses. When the anti-choice movement coined “pro-life,” it was just a matter of time before they won the debate. “Pro-life” was a brilliant if misleading choice
—
pun intended. I think it’s entirely possible that we will have to lose choice to get it back again. Nobody can get behind the right to abortion now that the sonogram lets us see all the little fingers and toes. It used to be the moment you first heard the heartbeat that melted your maternal or paternal heart. Now it’s the first sonogram. Young parents-to-be show the first sonogram to their parents and everyone weeps. How can they not? Life is beginning again. How can one be unmoved?
I have spent my life and my lucre supporting
Roe v. Wade,
yet now I understand the so-called pro-life activists. I hardly agree with them, but I do understand them. Roe, schmo. Privacy is an abstract concept compared to those little fingers and toes. We old lefty liberals didn’t know what hit us when the sonogram was invented. And “pro-life” is so much sexier than “pro-choice.” Never mind that many pro-lifers love the death penalty, they have the better slogan and we are stuck with the vagueness of “choice.”
So language matters. It matters a lot. If it’s not clear, the motivations aren’t either. Murky language means somebody wants to pick your pocket. Phrases like “wellness web site” and “heart-healthy” mean that your credit card will soon be punched. Phrases like “axis of evil” and “9/11 changed everything” mean that your draft card may be the next thing punched. And locutions like “the bravest that fell” and “honor the fallen” mean that you may soon be among them. All these phrases are meant to keep you from thinking. All these slogans are meant to instill those fuzzy feelings of pride and patriotism that prevent clear thinking.
Hell—I have felt these fuzzy, patriotic stirrings myself. After 9/11, I dreamed of joining the CIA! Not that the CIA would have taken a woman with a reputation for writing about the Zipless Fuck! But I was full of fervor to help my country. I wandered around my native city in a daze, trying to think of ways I could protect New York from future terrorist attacks.
I can be moved by fuzzy false patriotism just like anyone else. But sooner or later I try to wake myself up.
Here the cheers from the faculty and students got louder and the boos of the parents increased. They didn’t want me in the CIA (or CIA, as insiders call it). They probably wanted me in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib.
Why should anyone want to keep you from thinking? There are only a couple of possibilities: to pick your pocket, to cover up something or to put your life at risk while pretending to protect you.
If Newspeak narrows the range of thought, then clear speaking expands it again. If New Age cant obfuscates truth with fancy verbiage, then puncturing it shows us the hollowness at its core. If political speech is meant to lull you into unconsciousness with ready-made slogans, then clear speech wakes you up.