Abstract

Death and Discourse

The author claims that the language of brutality and vengeance towards perceived enemies has come to dominate public discourse in the United States. I worry that much of what comes out of the mouths of Pentagon officials these days is utterly undisciplined and deeply unprofessional. From comments that we're fighting a holy war against the evils of Islam, to the presidential invitation to "bring' em on," there is a kind of giddy, hopped-up video-game quality to the way our top brass discusses things. However barbarous the foe we face, such muscle-flexing on our part displays an astonishing lack of awareness of the provocativeness of such language, not just to our enemies but to potential allies as well. Living inside the bubble of any discipline can reorder one's values in ways that are startling to outsiders, I suppose. As a "possessor society" ourselves, we must indeed begin to grapple with the totalizing power of this narrower discourse upon us. September 11 was a horrific trauma upon our national psyche, but in the space of those two years we have become less of who we were in ways that are increasingly self-inflicted. We are frightened, yes, but we seem also to have lost the ability to speak about the demise of due process, habeas corpus and regard for international law in any civic-minded way. Instead, the very language of dissent has been turned as upside-down as the notion of peace.