The Literary Meaning of the Election of 2004

In my writing classes, my students often like to deflect criticism of vagueness in their work with the mantra, "But it sounds good." In response, I tell them it isn't good enough for words to sound good. They have to mean something as well.

Unfortunately, the relationship between word and meaning is becoming a radical concept, an outmoded value. We live in a country and a time when musicians lip sync and call it "singing," when museums exhibit bicycles and Armani dresses and call it "art, when performers preen for the camera and call it "acting." Evangelical preachers support the death penalty to promote a culture of life; bacon, raw fish, and candy bars are marketed as health food; people appear on reality TV shows as "characters."

At last this country has found a president to match our predilection for falseness and inversion, our ongoing project of divorcing word from meaning. In 2004, we re-elected a president who goes to war to keep peace, who imposes democracy on other countries so their inhabitants can express their free will (under the watchful eyes of our troops), who builds a case for war on the grounds of "weapons of mass destruction," and when that evidence is disproven, takes no responsibility for the falseness of those words, but instead changes the grounds for the war. Now we are fighting to spread democracy. The words about WMD, peddled for months by the president and his cohorts, don't matter because they are only words. They sounded good at the time, but their meaning is fundamentally unimportant.

It will probably strike future generations as more than a little odd that a president with such a penchant for falseness is so beloved for his honesty. But then, we as Americans on both sides of the red/blue state divide have lost our ability to judge and interpret language. Many of Bush's supporters like him because they think he sounds honest, not because they have spent five minutes parsing his words to see if he really is honest. Many of Bush's detractors compare him to Hitler, and especially to the terrorists themselves, but these comparisons are unfortunate exaggerations that obscure the real danger of Bush's presidency.

The problem is not that Bush is a terrorist. A terrorist is an individual or a member of an organization who cannot be held accountable for his actions by the citizens of a state. The problem is that in his careless disregard for words and their meaning, Bush uses language in the manner of a terrorist because terrorists revel in doublespeak. They fight holy wars by the unholy method of slaughtering women and children. They fail to distinguish between civilians and soldiers because distinctions are useless when you want to paint your message in broad swaths of blood. Unfortunately, our president has as little use for truth in language as our old vanquished foes, the Communist dictators of Eastern Europe.

Sadly, this is the level to which we as Americans have sunk long before "Black Wednesday," lulled by our Ipods that play music only we can hear and video games in which we score points for committing vile crimes that don't matter and "healthy" chocolate covered energy bars that satisfy our cravings for sugar our body doesn't need. In such an atmosphere, can anyone be surprised that we've re-elected President Bush? (I say "we" to include myself in the decision because we are all responsible for the outcome of the election, however we voted.)

In 2004, we said to our enemies: we in the free world think just as you do in the land of shackled. The ideals of our Constitution, of our two hundred year old democracy, those are mere words, easily sacrificed in the name of "security" on the streets of Baghdad, in Abu Ghreib, in Guantanamo Bay, and in the halls of our own Congress when the Patriot Act was rushed into law. Might makes right. We do what we do not because we should but because we can. And in sacrificing our ideals, we believe, we have made America safe. We have also lost a little of what "America" used to mean.

And so in November 2004, we sent our message loud and clear to the terrorists, the jihadists, the religious extremists and petty dictators who wish us ill. We should not be surprised when we hear their response.