Editor,
The Bush presidency should be giving us some second thoughts about the deep function of language.
Specifically, is language the means whereby we communicate with each other, or is it the means whereby we lie to each other?
This presidency has raised lying to a science. "Spinning" is clearly a euphemism for lying, since its function isn't to share knowledge or information, but to generate smoke screens to conceal such atrocities as the rape of Mother Nature by Texas energy companies, or to justify preemptive invasions of other countries for what now appears to be possession of their oceans of oil. Thus, Karl Rove and company are consciously using language as a form of "anti-communication."
But could this have been the secret function of language from the beginning? Could language be a sort of wrong turn for our species? Perhaps we turned to it to avoid more truthful and courageous forms of relating.
In a life and death crisis, no one stops to chat with our neighbors. You act, you rise to the occasion - or you die. You take care of business or else.
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Karl Marx thought religion was the opiate of the masses. Maybe he was wrong - maybe the opiate of the masses is language.
Certainly so long as we merely jabber about the Republican slaughter of planet Earth, Mother Nature will continue to die before our eyes and our vulnerable human adventure will quickly follow.
An illusionist is a master of distracting our attention from what's really happening. Similarly, is language or spinning distracting our attention from the horror of what the Republican Party is doing to our mortally wounded planet?
W. Christopher Epler
UNM staff
