New Quaker Notebook

Maybe this means Rumsfeld will now have to resign. I'm sure I won't be the only one to see the significance of Mr Bush's glowing endorsement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today: "He's done a heck of a job," the President said, drawing the obvious comparison to former director of FEMA, Michael "You're doing a heck of a job" Brown.¹ As for his unsolicited comment about Dick Cheney ("my respect for him has grown immensely"), I think that this is actually code for "if I waver in my public support for the vice president, he will have me rendered to North Africa and tortured."

Obviously, everything is going well now in Iraq, after a thousand days. Let's go ahead and give them another $100 billion.²

1. See Reuters, December 14, 2005. When Bush uses the "heck-of-a-job" phrase, isn't that the equivalent of the evil eye?
2. AP, "Pentagon may request up to $100 billion more for wars," Indianapolis Star, December 14, 2005: "The Pentagon is in the early stages of drafting a wartime request for up to $100 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan, lawmakers say, a figure that would push spending related to the wars toward a staggering half-trillion dollars." One could stare in amazement at basically the same request made less than a year ago. Here's what USA Today reported on January 3, 2005: "Congress expects the White House to request as much as $100 billion this year for war and related costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional officials say. It would be the third and largest Iraq-related budget request from the White House yet, and it could push the war's costs over $200 billion—far above initial White House estimates of $50 billion-$60 billion. So far, the Iraq war has cost about $130 billion, according to the White House's Office of Management and Budget." Hey, it's déjà vu all over again, again.

Pinter's complaint. As far as denunciations go, Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture on Thursday immediately made it onto my top-ten list of literary performances. It was a great pugilist's take-down: more like a competent right hook than a coldcock. But to what purpose? I mean, I get the impression that his rapt audience was the choir as he spoke his videotaped acceptance speech. Maybe history will be his listener, too, if he's not rewritten out of it. As a citizen, as a human being, Pinter did at least what each of us ought to do in the face of a "brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless" government. He spoke truth against it.

Admittedly, as an artist, Pinter's vision of truth is itself an artist's construct. He retells for us a statement he made in 1958: "'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'"¹ The artist takes what is true and reshapes it into something else, something not exactly the same as the believed, the accepted, or the given; when language is the medium of this transformation what is true for the artist really becomes a translation. Or the attempt at a translation:

"Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost."²

As a citizen, as a nonartist, the truth can't be treated in this way, for that's against the rules—the rules of logic, of linguistic structure, of meaning. Without this, common sense is extinguished and we no longer have a frame of reference and the artist is left with nothing to translate, or his translation becomes gibberish. As expressed in politics, language and its truth are manipulated differently. Says Pinter:

"Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed."³

What is true, for the Bush administration, is "something entirely different," blending its version of America into what Pinter says is "without doubt the greatest show on the road":

"Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'"⁴

Language is used to lull Americans on "a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance," while at the same time removing intelligence and all critical faculties from life support. But this is language that does not convey what is true, or even what is false, but what will elicit allegiance and vigilant patriotism, wherein even the attempt to speak out against this abuse of language is a form of treason.

Not for nothing, then, does Quaker and Christian Peacemaker Team member Tom Fox write about the impotence of language as it is used to convey the truth concerning Iraq. Tom is one of four Christian Peacemakers still being held captive by the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. In his November 8 blog, Waiting In the Light, speaking about the aftermath of the demolished Fallujah, Tom wrote this about the failure of language to get us beneath the tapestry of lies:

"The ongoing difficulties faced by Fallujans are so great that words fail to properly express it." Words from a cleric in Fallujah as he tried to explain the litany of ills that continue to afflict his city one year after the US-led assault took place.

"All the men in the mosque were from my neighborhood. They were not terrorists." Words from a young man who said he left a room of men either injured or homeless thirty minutes before the raid on his mosque, the same mosque shown in the now-famous videotape of an American soldier shooting unarmed men lying on the mosque floor.

"There haven't been any funds for home reconstruction available since the change in Iraqi government last January." The words of a civic leader from Fallujah as he showed CPTers the still-devastated areas of his city.

There are no words. A city that has been demonized by Americans and many Iraqis, using the words "the city of terrorists." A city that its residents call "the city of mosques." A city that even its residents have to enter at checkpoints, often taking up to an hour to traverse. A city that is being choked to death economically by those same checkpoints.⁵

Amid the juxtaposition of suspicions and confirmations about "extraordinary renditions," tortures that we do, but do not do, and charges of treason if we speak against our elected government, we ought to find ourselves deafened by the din of words that now fight each other, no longer confident that our language is used to speak what is true, or even that truth is still a desired outcome of communication. We can't get hear the truth over the noise of this new battlefield.

1. Pinter said this in his program note for The Caretaker. See "In His Own Words," American Repertory Theatre, for the wider context.
2. The full text of Pinter's videotaped Nobel Lecture,"Art, Truth and Politics," has been published in the UK by the Guardian, December 8, 2005. The text of his speech is also archived at Truthout.org and Common Dreams NewsCenter. The video is available at Nobelprize.org. You'll find more information and links about Pinter at Technorati and of course his website.
3. "Art, Truth and Politics."
4. "Art, Truth and Politics."
5. "There are no words," Waiting In the Light, November 8, 2005.