Sometimes I feel guilty for being a writer. For a long time, I subscribed to the adage, “I don’t like writing, I like having written,” in a nod to the often-torturous writing process. But I’ve come to see that this isn’t quite true. Because, as painful as writing can sometimes be, at other times, it’s exhilarating.
There are few feelings like working out a difficult piece. Sometimes it starts as a hunch or intuition, something you can’t quite articulate, it’s a fragment of a theory or an argument, a point that has not quite being chiselled from its surrounds in your brain, so you file it away because it doesn’t yet quite make sense. Until suddenly it does.
I don’t know if there is anything else I can be in this world but a writer. And yet, I feel guilty because for quite a number of years now I have suspected that the written word has been a key undoing of our species. Or to be more precise, the exploitation and manipulation of the written word.
Ironically enough for a writer, one of my favourite songs is Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence, which includes the lyrics, “Words are very, unnecessary. They can only do harm.”
As a writer, I have committed myself to using words to point out harm, to challenge and resist it, to explain it and deconstruct it. But there is no denying that words, particularly the written variety, are used to deliberately cause and then obfuscate that harm.
Words can deflect, obscure, turn one thing into another. Make the victim the perpetrator and the perpetrator a saviour. Sometimes the harm is caused by the words that are used, sometimes by the words that are omitted.
I will have a lot to say about this topic in this newsletter over the coming months. For now, I am going to show you four examples from last week’s US presidential debate, or rather from the responses to it, which get progressively more egregious.
First up is this tweet from comedian and writer/director Zack Bornstein:
“Not to be controversial but personally I think we should have more options than a gently alive corpse and the dumbest Hitler of all time.”
Seems fairly innocuous at first but there are several words choices I want to unpack, beginning with the description of Joe Biden as a “gently alive corpse.” My first thought is, why “gently”? Why not “barely” alive? Or “hardly” alive? What work is the word “gently” doing that words like “hardly” and “barely” would not?
I’ll come back to that but first, let’s look at the description of Trump as the ‘'dumbest Hitler of all time.”
So, our problem is that this US election is being fought by an old and decrepit, but gentle and thus harmless Biden and a tyrannical but simple-minded and therefore not as bad as other tyrants Trump.
Here is what these word choices do: Calling Biden a “gently alive corpse” gently erases any harm he may have done, like mmm I don’t know presiding over a genocide that has killed - on the record – almost 40,000 people, but that given the complete breakdown of the health system in Gaza has likely killed many more tens of thousands of human beings.
And then we move on to Trump. Calling Trump a “dumb Hitler” both downplays the actual threat he poses and simultaneously further minimises not just any threat Biden may pose but the actual harm Biden has caused. For all his faults and danger, Trump has not caused and funded a genocide. Yes, he threatens to continue to Biden’s genocide but this is not one he caused and, more to the point, this is not the reason he is being called a “dumb Hitler.” So how is it that the man named after the most famous genocidaire in history is not the man implicated in a genocide?
Am I overthinking this one tweet? Maybe. So let’s move on to this one from Australian Guardian columnist Van Badham. For the benefit of my overseas readers, Badham is also a playwright and has been described as Australia’s “greatest polymath of her generation.” Okay, so it was her husband that called her that but I’m sure he was being objective. Why would he say that if it wasn’t true? That’s why words exist isn’t it, to help us tell the truth?
Anyway, this is what she had to say about the great debacle:
“I, for one, have enough faith in the American people that they will not hand nuclear weapons to a rapist and convicted felon even if their other option has a stutter, a cold, 81 years of experience and rather a lot on his mind.”
This is another iteration of Bornstein’s “gently alive corpse” using slightly different words. Let’s put aside for now that Americans have already “handed nuclear weapons” to Trump once before. And strangely enough he didn’t use them. I guess even “dumb Hitlers” either know better than that or do not actually have the power to unilaterally start a nuclear war.
But I digress.
Badham musters the worst offences on Trump’s rap sheet – allegations of sexual assault and a felony conviction for falsifying business records – and plays that off against the “worst” offences from Biden that her great polymath mind can conjure: he is old, has caught an unpleasant but harmless virus, and is distracted.
So, no mention of genocide again.
Look fine, if you don’t want to call it a genocide because you think things don’t actually start until they are finished, then you can just call it a “war.” Even so, you’d think the fact that Biden has signed off on $6.5 billion worth of “security assistance,” aka bombs, since October 7 would rate at least mention. Or that he sunk $230 million into that “humanitarian pier” failure that could have been diverted to American citizens. Or even just the fact that his policies on Palestine have given rise to the greatest antiwar protest movement since Vietnam.
Nope. None of that. The man is old and speaks funny. But Trump? Trump is a really bad guy!
But okay, who cares about Twitter personalities? What do people with real power have to say? Well former president Barack Obama offered us this:
“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.”
Someone who knows right from wrong versus someone who lies through his teeth. In other words, what Biden is doing in Gaza must be right. Even when he lies – say about seeing a picture of beheaded Israeli babies – he is still telling the truth. Again, not only did Obama decline to mention Biden is presiding over this catastrophic failure of humanity, but he is going as far as to champion Biden as a truth-telling, morals-having, man of the ordinary people.
What is the subtext here but Palestinians are not people?
I know there will be some of you who insist that Americans have the right to focus on their domestic issues, that Gaza isn’t the only issue. But that’s precisely the issue – I’m not bothered that these post-debate debates are not centring or focussing on Gaza, it’s that they erase it altogether. Gaza is so inconsequential, so utterly insignificant, it’s not even worth defending Biden’s position on it.
It is only through this deliberate exclusion that Biden can be praised.
And that brings me to this editorial from the newspaper of record itself, The New York Times. Like many other liberals who seem to have been asleep during Biden’s entire presidency, they too were shocked and appalled by Biden’s poor performance. They don’t think he is a bad guy or a poor leader or anything like that. In fact, they think he has been swell up until now but he just doesn’t seem to have it all up there anymore and should retire gracefully from the race:
“Biden has been admirable president. Under his leadership, the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal. But the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.”
So there you have it. Admirable. Pay attention to the reference in there to flesh wounds being ripped open. They are not talking about actual flesh wounds of course, and certainly not those of Palestinians whose bodies are literally being ripped apart. They are talking about figurative American wounds and in this alternate reality, Biden is not causing these wounds but healing them.
I don’t want to get too graphic or emotional here but do keep in mind that even while all this is going on, children in Gaza are still getting their heads blown off by American bombs gifted to Israel by this admirable, gentle, distracted, congested 81-year-old with a stutter. Palestinians are being burned alive, buried alive, crushed alive by bulldozers, starved to death, tortured to death, sexually assaulted, stripped naked, attacked by trained dogs, and having their organs harvested, all on Biden’s dime and time.
Each of these four interpretations I have discussed can, on their own, be brushed off or even dismissed. But the problem is, they don’t exist on their own. They are intertextual, meaning even though they don’t directly quote each other or refer to each other, they all allude to each other’s central premise.
A premise in which Biden is a Good Man. An admirable leader. A gentle, almost but not yet dead, old dear. And that means his own sordid history of sexual misconduct and inappropriate touching behaviour is of no more consequence in this election than is his genocide.
Here is where the true urgency lies: once Americans endorse this genocide at the polling booth there is no turning back and it will be publicly sanctioned practice. We will have entered a new phase in our collective evolution, one in which humanity wholeheartedly not merely accepts or overlooks but actively endorses the deliberate, systematic massacring of children.
Words can do harm. I don’t know if they can only do harm, but I do know that it has been in the process of writing and refining and defining and redefining words that we have chiselled them into these weapons that, although meant to explain and interpret the world around us, often do the exact opposite: they confuse, muddy, and obscure the very reality they ostensibly describe. They create a world of illusion and worse delusion. They turn fiction into reality and reality into a fiction. They turn a man who has repeatedly lied about a war on civilians that he is enthusiastically funding into a kind-hearted veritable saint who would never hurt a fly.
In the music video for Enjoy the Silence, singer Dave Gahan walks around several remote locations dressed in a king’s robe and crown, while carrying around a cheap, folded deckchair. He traverses a lush green hilltop, a desert, a secluded beach, a snow-capped mountain, all while periodically setting down and plonking himself in his deckchair.
Apparently, the band wasn’t too crazy about the concept from director Anton Corbijn at first. “We were in such remote places,” Gahan told Entertainment Weekly in 2017, “like, five miles up in the Alps walking in the snow, in the Algarve in Portugal on these remote beaches, at Balmoral in Scotland, where we could walk for days and days and not see anyone.”
And then they began shooting the video and it became apparent that this man, this king who rules the world and ostensibly has everything, even he longs to get away from people and their endless words and just find a quiet place to sit.
Anyway, enjoy Depeche Mode.
Thank you for so clear sightedly articulating what I (and I'm sure many others) have found absolutely infuriating about the liberals' responses to the debate. Have they all had their heads in the sand this whole time? Why are they so upset that he is old but not that he has enacted poor domestic policies and enacted genocide abroad? Everyone has known his age this whole time-how is this a sudden surprise? Thanks for dissecting it all so clearly