Politics and the English language, 2010

The President has proposed a half-day, televised health care summit, and in the process of chickening out, House GOP leader John Boehner and Eric Cantor use one of the most Orwellian quotes I've seen in a long-time.

"If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate."

The mixture of Newspeak and lies in this solitary sentence is chilling. "Job-killing"? which think tank dreamt that up? And when precisely did "the American people" reject anything? When the people of Massachusetts voted in a special election?

The enduring politics of noise

Thinking about L'il Liddy and the Teabuggers, and the general nature of political discourse in this country, I was struck by a quote I just came across. Try to place it...

"It was impossible in the tumult and the shouting to hear much that was said from the platform or to deduce the essential ideology of this great crusade. But one thing came out strong and clear. It was the promise, reiterated to deafening applause, 'to get the liberal termites' out of Washington and out of the conduct of American affairs. John F. Kennedy, you have been warned."

That's Alistair Cooke, writing about a rally for Young Americans for Freedom ("which only two years ago was a defiant underground of odd-men-out and is now a national organisation") in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 9, 1961.

When Stalin went Hollywood

Turner Classic Movie has been running a fantastic series called "Shadows of Russia" about Hollywood's changing image of Russia. I haven't caught enough of it, but I did get to see last month the rarely shown wartime film Mission to Moscow, a Warner Brothers production from 1943 that answers the strange question of what it would have looked like if Hollywood had to spin Stalinism. Just before I saw it, I happened to read James Agee's review of the film in The Nation in May 1943, which sums up its weird appeal...

"It is indeed... a mishmash: of Stalinism with New Dealism with Hollywoodism with journalism with opportunism with shaky experimentalism with mesmerism with onanism, all mosaicked into a remarkable portrait of what the makers of the film think that the American public should think the Soviet Union is like -- a great glad two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht, eminently approvable by the Institute of Good Housekeeping. As such, it is as rich a subject for diagnosis as any other dream."

The film tracks the increasingly peripatetic shuttle diplomacy of FDR's ambassador, Joseph Davies, in the years leading up to the war. He pledges to go with an open mind, and travels the USSR meeting a surprising number of factory workers and peasants who speak very good English. He also encounters scheming diplomats from the Fascist powers, and spineless diplomats from the western democracies who are more suspicious of the righteous Soviets than the Nazis. As the world rushes to war, he begins to hear about strange things, like acts of sabotage at weapons factories, which culminates in the most stylized portrayal of the Show Trials one could imagine. Here is Bukharin, Radek, Tukachevsky, all revealed as enemies of the people taking orders from Trotsky to engineer an invasion by the Fascists to overthrow Stalin. Agee is fascinatingly even-handed about this, which reflects how things are black and white only in hindsight. Even for an avowed liberal anti-communist -- Agee was already good friends with Whittaker Chambers at the time -- the facts were murky:

"About the trials I am not qualified to speak. On surface falsifications of fact and atmosphere I might, but on the one crucial question, whether Trotsky and Trotskyists were or were not involved with Germany and Japan in a plot to overthrow the government and to partition the country, I am capable of no sensible opinion. I neither believe nor disbelieve it. I neither believe nor disbelieve evidence to the contrary. I am unable to trust the politicians of either camp or of any other to supply, the world in general, or even their closest associates, with the truth.... It may be that this painful impotence is an impotence merely of my own spirit; it may be that I am immobilized, rather, by my conviction that a primary capacity for telling or discovering the truth is possible, today, to few human being in few types of occupation or allegiance. In any case I can attempt to learn the truth, and can defend, or attack, only in areas where I can rely in some small degree on the hope of emergent truthfulness in the material and in those who are handling it."

It is a fascinating, somewhat uncomfortable thing to watch. Especially when they neatly present the thoroughly bogus Soviet version of the Nonagression Pact of 1939 and the invasion of Finland