Bush wins again! by Ghoulman

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Bush wins again!

POSTED BY: GHOULMAN
UPDATED: Thursday, December 9, 2004 04:48
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Thursday, December 9, 2004 4:48 AM

Wide Agreement' Yields Award for the President
by Mike Leonard, Hoosier Times
November 21, 2004

*Reprinted on the NCTE Web site with permission from The Herald Times (Bloomington, IN).

Bush wins again! Not the presidency. That's old news. For the second consecutive year, George W. Bush has been named the winner of the National Council of Teachers of English's Doublespeak Award.

The award is scheduled to be announced today at the 94th annual convention of the teachers' association in Indianapolis.

The group calls the Doublespeak Award an ironic tribute "to American public figures who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory."

Bush, the Committee on Public Doublespeak decided, "has set a high standard for his team by the inspired invention of the phrase, 'weapons of mass destruction-related program activities' to describe what has yet to be seen."

In its official announcement, the committee also took note of the president's description of an open forum as a place where "you're able to come and listen to what I have to say."

It also gave dishonorable mentions to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for describing the torture of Iraqi citizens at Abu Ghraib as "the excesses of human nature that humanity suffers" and for changing the Vietnam-era term, "body bag" to the innocuous sounding "transfer tube."

Some people will read this and think that Bush's political enemies are still at it. Actually, it could well be said that the NCTE's Doublespeak Committee is a conservative group, because its mission is to preserve clear and accurate language and decry the intentional abuse of words to hide or confuse their meaning.

Charles Bazerman, chairman of the NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak, said by phone last week that politics had nothing to do with its award to Bush. Nominations were submitted by individuals in the 60,000-member organization and "there was wide agreement that the administration was the source of many misrepresentations and manipulations obscuring the facts. This was not a controversial decision by the committee," the professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara said.

Bazerman agreed with the suggestion that one could legitimately call into question the administration's often repeated statement that U.S. troops are fighting for freedom in Iraq. Whose freedom? America's? Iraq's?

"Precisely," he said. "They are taking words that are very meaningful and powerful and applying them where they are totally inappropriate, so that they are not only misusing the word but the force of the word. And what's even more troubling is that it undermines the meaning of the word so you can no longer think clearly with it.

"If that word becomes tainted as acclaim about the removal of one regime ("Operation Iraqi Freedom") without any sense of the new conditions of life the Iraqis have been put in, it loses meaning," Bazerman said. "Does it mean the actual ability of people to make choices in their lives or simply the removal of order? That is actually the meaning of doublespeak: to create a condition of doublethink so you are not troubled by contraries. You're not troubled by contradictions."

The Doublespeak Award has been given by the teachers' group annually since 1974. The word itself is a combination of the concepts of "newspeak" and "doublethink" that were made famous in George Orwell's novel, "1984."

The NCTE is so concerned with misleading language that it launched an initiative last year to promote the reading and discussion of Orwell's novel in high school and college English classes. Reports will be presented at the organization's annual convention about how deliberately deceptive and misleading language has permeated politics, journalism and corporate culture.

"The teaching of language and the use of language is what we do," Bazerman said. "'1984' is a very timely vehicle at this moment in history to raise questions of language and meaning in public discourse."

At the other end of the spectrum, the English teachers will honor writers Seymour Hersh and Arundhati Roy with their George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. "Only when we can properly name what our global corporations, international financial institutions and governments do in our name, can we struggle intelligently for a more moral, more just, more equitable world. Clear language makes possible clear planning, and clear planning can direct us towards effective action," Bazerman said in a prepared statement.

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