June 03, 2007
Oppressing English
Illustration by JdB
Rebel against the tyranny of the multiculti hegemonists!
by Jerome du Bois
Late last year syndicated columnist John Leo gave a speech --"On Good Writing"-- at Ursuline College. Last week City Journal posted an abridged version online called "The Office of Assertion." In both versions several sections chimed with echoes of themes we've published here, just one of which I'll get to below.
I don't recall ever reading anything by John Leo, though he's been writing professionally for about 20 years. I'm just not the magazine reader I used to be. I mention this because I have no investment in criticizing the man. But attacking English I take very seriously, and, in defending it, which he does, accuracy is crucial. He quotes George Orwell, which seems obligatory these days if you write about language and power:
At the beginning of his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell made clear that he thought the language had become disheveled and decadent.
In at least one section Leo got sloppy, but in finding that out I saw hints that the multiculti hegemony may have peaked, and now dribbles away its waning energy in defense of increasingly ridiculous positions: "personal spelling" replaces "misspelling." Would that such a withering were so; let it be so; let the governor listeth away from decadence, and turn toward decency; let the Ship of Culture free its propellors from the sucking swamps and stinking marshes of self-loathing, and steam forth proudly again into the Great Living River, with a boiling wake, a high green prow, and bow waves arching like great white wings!
. . . Ahem. So: here's that problematic section from Mr. Leo's October 2006 speech:
Rules, good writing, and simple coherence are sometimes depicted as habits of the powerful and privileged. James Sledd, professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas, writes in the textbook College English that standard English is “essentially an instrument of domination.”
You couldn't find a more damning quote. It's as if the whole title of the textbook should be College English: A Self-Destruction Manual. And it echoes the depressing hegemony we referred to in "So This Is Where They Come From: The Zombie Dispositions." I don't mind reprinting some of my own exuberance:
But, like some kind of recurrent, accursed stain, the professors still foreground the forlorn and discredited "white male oppressor" meme. The first caricature they drug out so long ago to whack us with they now unashamedly abandon as the last one on the stage, rack-ribbed, nearly naked and shivering-- only now they want to extend this rusty voice-vise to the entire English language. English itself, they insist, is an instrument of oppression. Even as they use it, over and over, retreading dead ideas. I guess it doesn't affect them because they know better. They must be immune. Cuz they smart.
Uh-huh. All time kukai moa, I say.
These arrogant dummies claim that the most sophisticated, flexible, accommodating, liberal, capacious, and evolutionarily-stable language for the Western World --English-- the best verbal stew men, women, and children in this hemisphere ever cooked up, and to which we're still adding ingredients-- that this gloriously alive, future-facing, transcendental physiomental organism was whomped up by some wizened old ofays trying to squeeze everybody else's peaches!
And if you believe that . . .
But they do! Thousands of credulous students have been accepting this crap, becoming teachers, and passing it on to other malleable fools. (One vivid proof and result, supported by many posts on this blog: local Phoenix art, culture and writing.)
Think, people, think. What --there's some evaluation committee declaring what is a word, or an allowable word to put into the stream of the Great Conversation? No way. Whereyat, mon ami --France? Since the English language became interesting, several hundred years ago, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, George Gordon, William Blake, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, scientists, philosophers, philologists, and millions of other self-reflective human beings, most of them multilingual, all invented new words that eventually became part of the common coin of English that we all pass around. My own wife creates words in an ongoing fashion, flashy new florins tossed into the stream of the verbal trade; that may seem disjarring to some, but to me it's enlifting, and you don't have any problem deciphering either word, do you, reader?
We gotta get the chin music back into our heads.
That was fun. By the way, I think I could make the case that nowadays English itself qualifies as a victimized, misconstrued minority language, under constant attack and suffering twisted smears by the multicultural hegemony of academic people of color and their fellow travellers! So there.
As with John Leo, I'd never heard of James Sledd --Rhodes Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa-- though his message was tiresomely familiar: the white man oppresses, and one weapon he uses is the English language; therefore, defuse --dismantle-- destroy the weapon. Leo's citation implied that thousands of impressionable freshman nationwide were reading those damning words every semester, and that Professor Sledd was spouting them in the classroom. Two snags in that scenario, though.
Number one: Mistah Sledd -- He dead.
He's four years in the grave now, after living to 88, the last forty-so spent mining the black resentment / English-is-evil veins in academia. Larry Faulkner, President of the U of Texas at Austin, wrote in Sledd's obituary:
His two best known and most widely debated essays are “Bi-Dialectism: The Linguistics of White Supremacy” (1969) and “Doublespeak: Dialectology in the Service of Big Brother” (1972).
(I've only read synopses of these essays, but they manage to insult black people by implying that they can't speak in two different ways --in both Black English and Standard English; as if they're too stupid to switch fluidly back and forth, which millions do all the time, of course. He flaunts this kind of paternalism --aimed at one's own ethnic relatives!-- in the face of the knowledge that most of the planet is at least bilingual. A moment's reflection on those two titles reveal their unintentional hilarity as well. Amazing anyone took --and takes-- this crap seriously. I assume they still do, despite the age of the essays, given Faulkner's use of the words "widely debated.")
Number two, not only is the guy dead, but I clicked through fourteen pages of both amazon.com and booksamillion to try to find the book John Leo cited. I couldn't find it. So if it was used as a college textbook, that was a while ago, or Leo is confused or misinformed. Either way, it's sloppy. For a professional journalist, that's a real misstep, especially these days, and with a crucial subject. Faulkner, in the obituary, cites no such textbook, though he refers to two textbooks on linguistics which Sledd authored.
I have no doubt that Sledd held the sentiment in the quotation, and, along with thousands of other academic cowards, bears responsibility for such phenomena as what immediately follows the Sledd quote in Leo's speech:
English Leadership Quarterly ran an article urging teachers to encourage intentional writing errors as “the only way to end its oppression of linguistic minorities and learning writers.” The pro-error article, written by two professors at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, actually won an award from the quarterly, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. So you can now win awards for telling the young to write badly.
Reminds me of the adult baby man who was so proud of retraining himself into incontinence.
So Leo should have picked a more current example of the pomo-decon attitude. There's no shortage of these priveleged, braying bullies, and other language-manglers. No need for straw men like Sledd. You can find plenty of culprits by going through the "Zombie" piece above to our series "Rebarbarization In The Academy," which begins here.
I don't want to leave James Sledd just yet, though, because he was a player in corrupting the language and driving academic credibility down the tubes, and because somebody else just stepped into the picture: Ray Bradbury.
Where did he come from? you ask. Well, he just received a special Pulitzer Prize, and LA Weekly interviewed him. The main theme of the piece was that Bradbury must continue to insist that his best-known work, Fahrenheit 451, is not about government censorship; it's about people voluntarily zoning themselves out on television, and neglecting to read. He puts the onus of responsibility on each person him/herself. Reading the interview right after finding out about Sledd led to inevitable comparisons. A black guy born in Atlanta six years before the white guy in Waukegan Illinois. A lifetime of grim finger-pointing and growling resentment versus a lifetime of glowing, sparkling, vivid stories. Government paternalism versus personal responsibility. The black-clad mortician rattling his keys and chains, versus the heel-clicking magician in the ice-cream suit. But most of all, two men who laid their hands on their native language every day, one to smother its brilliance, the other to hold its multifacets up to the light.
* * * * *
WINDING UP: If you haven't read Leo's piece, please don't get the impression that James Sledd is a big part of it. He isn't. I quoted the reference in its entirety. Most of the rest of Leo's piece is familiar to those who monitor English: Alan Sokal's fake gravity piece taken seriously by Social Text; Judith Butler's 94-word gobbledygook sentence; Hemingway's admirable brevity; examples of governmentese here and abroad, such as “ground-mounted confirmatory route markers” for "road sign;" and nanny-state nice-talk created to avoid offending anyone, such as "achieving a deficiency" as a smiley-face stand-in for failure, and “unacknowledged repetitions” for plagarism. (Talk about accentuating the positive . . . )
Posted by Jerome at June 3, 2007 04:45 PM | TrackBack