Jonah Goldberg NRO

Truth Makes a Comeback A real politics of meaning.

September 19, 2001 5:30 p.m. Have you noticed a lot of poetry around? No, I'm not speaking metaphorically about the heroism of firefighters or the eloquence of a nation united in grief. I mean, literally, there's a lot of poetry floating around. Since the attack, Andrew Sullivan has run some new poetry almost every day. NRO's John Derbyshire has reached into his stunning literary arsenal as well. Of course, these guys were educated in Britain, so it's understandable that they'd actually know some appropriate verse (not unrelated, the Brit papers overflow with poetry). But poems have been popping up all over the place in America. U.S. newspapers and magazines, memorial services and mass-blasted e-mails are chock-block with verse from Auden, Tennyson, Eliot and other dead white geniuses long forgotten by average Americans and long despised by grievance-poets dependent on government grants and angry college sophomores for a living.

Now, I know next to nothing about poetry, other than that I know what I like. But I do think this is a sign of something bigger. Language is making a comeback. People are recognizing that words have fixed meanings again. Capital-"T" Truth can be gotten at, it can be described and illuminated by words accessible to all. This is great news.

For the last few decades, words have been under attack. They were, well, "just words." Most of my professors in college, for example, subscribed to the view that words were merely aural Rorschach tests for the biased, and often bigoted, ears of the masses. Around the country, where the fever swamps of political correctness were the most fetid, students were chastised for using words like "individual," "merit," you name it, because somebody somewhere could bend and twist the word's true meaning into something personally offensive.

Sometimes this subjective alchemy reached the point of true comedy. Not too long ago, Washington's public advocate was forced to quit his job because he used the word "niggardly" correctly in a sentence. You see, niggardly sounds like another word, and that is transgression enough — never mind that it means miserly and is of Scandinavian derivation — for the ignorant and their over-educated defenders.

I guess I'm particularly sensitive to this phenomenon because I receive so much e-mail from people who have their own personal definitions of words. For example, a few months ago, when I unintentionally offended a lot of Asian-American college students with some dumb jokes about China, I made them even madder still by defending myself with — gasp — a dictionary. I merely pointed out that what I wrote wasn't racist according to the dictionary (or my own conscience). "How dare you use a dictionary!" dozens of kids pounded furiously into e-mails, as if a dictionary were some wholly illegitimate and oppressive tool of the ruling class. (See, "A World of Feelings")

This week President Bush said, "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." Intellectuals and politicians across Europe — i.e., the crusader nations — winced. American pundits and peacenik callers to radio stations, always inclined to look for the blameworthy within our own borders, immediately invoked the authority of their dictionaries: "You can't use a word like 'crusade!'" they shrieked. "Don't you know that means 'holy war' or 'jihad'?" the foreign and domestic intellectuals asked. Never mind that a holy war against terrorism — as opposed to, say, Islam or America — is no vice and the defense of murderers is never a virtue.

Regardless, whether or not you think the word crusade — or the White House's apology for it — was merited, I for one thought it was great that so many people felt the need to scurry to a dictionary.

It seems to me that objective meaning is flowing, like transfused blood, into all sorts of concepts which were tragically anemic not too long ago. Patriotism is of course the most obvious example. Freedom is another word people are reacquainting themselves with. But we've also seen good and evil (and even capitalized Good and Evil) used by all sorts of politicians and commentators normally embarrassed by such morally loaded — and hence unacceptably judgmental — words.

When Reagan accurately used the word "evil" to describe the Soviet Empire, the pointy-heads got flat abs laughing so hard at the silliness of our president.

Well, no one except the most asinine of sophisticates (Susan Sontag call your office) laughs today when we hear the word evil used by the president to describe the assault on the World Trade Center. The same holds true for freedom and tyranny, heroism and villainy, and a host of words which until eight days ago drew snickers and eye-rolls from people who live by the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Today, few people are rolling their eyes.

And this is an unequivocally good thing, and not just because a lot of dumb college courses will suffer in attendance as a result. When words lose their connection to truth, tyranny is not far behind. Orwell's "Newspeak" in 1984, the Soviet's co-optation of the West's democratic vocabulary, and even the recent inflation of our rights to include every single good thing a government could or could not pay for, were all examples, to me, of the dangerous waters you can drift into when a society unhitches words from their moorings.

The prevailing propaganda on college campuses, various U.N. conferences, and much of the activist Left and even a few obscure corners of the hysterical Right, are all examples of the tyranny of malleable or meaningless words. This tyranny isn't always apparent at the point of a gun. It may simply be the absolutism of a mob that makes words hostage to its own self-esteem.

Scores of journalists and politicians say that September 11, 2001, was the day everything changed. They usually appear to mean how we see the world and our own security or how American priorities have changed or some such thing. But I think there's more to it than that. A lot of ironic detachment and cynicism has been washed away, and on the whole that's a good thing.

There's a downside to all of this, beyond of course the actual tragedy at its heart. So far, it is very difficult to make jokes. When David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien came back on the air this week, none of them could make jokes. The latest issue of the New Yorker dropped its jokey cartoons. I myself have been striving for two days to figure out an appropriate opportunity to write, "Hey Mr. Taliban, tally me banana" without success. But the inability to make jokes, too, is a testament to the newfound power of language.

Jokes will make a big comeback, of course, as they always do. And that's a good thing, too. But I don't think it will be easy to be funny about all sorts of things for a very long time.

-- Anonymous, September 19, 2001

Answers

High Flier

© 1992 by Nigel Rees

From Volume 1, Number 2, April 1992 issue of The "Quote... Unquote"® Newsletter

On a bleak winter's day we drove up to a service station in the tiny Lincolnshire village of Scopwick. If there had ever been any poetry about the place it was probably a distant echo of some line of Tennyson's about the utterly flat wolds, but the pump attendant sized us up instantly. `It's Magee you've come to see?' he said, and directed us to a small burial ground (not the church graveyard) a few hundred yards away.

There, amid the score or so military graves from the Second World War--Allied and German--was the gravestone we had indeed come to find. We wanted to see whether it bore Magee's most quoted lines.

It did.

"Oh I Have Slipped
The Surly Bonds of Earth...
Put Out My Hand
And Touched the Face of God"

How did these lines become so famous? Because they are a classic case of a speechwriter having the appropriate quotation to hand at the right moment. On 28 January 1986, in his TV broadcast to the nation on the day of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, President Reagan concluded: `We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.'

This immediately sent people the world over on fruitless journeys to their quotation books. Reagan was quoting `High Flight,' a sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. He came to Britain, flew in a Spitfire squadron, and was killed at the age of nineteen on 11 December 1941 during a training flight from the airfield near Scopwick.

Magee had been born in Shanghai of an American father and an English mother who were missionaries. He was educated at Rugby and at school in Connecticut. The sonnet was written on the back of a letter to his parents which stated, `I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.' The parents were living in Washington, DC, at the time of his death and, according to the Library of Congress book Respectfully Quoted, the poem came to the attention of the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, who acclaimed Magee as the first poet of the war.

Copies of `High Flight'--sometimes referred to as `the pilot's creed'--were widely distributed and plaques bearing it were sent to all R.C.A.F. air fields and training stations. The poem was published in 1943 in a volume called More Poems from the Forces (which was `dedicated to the USSR'). This is a transcription of the original manuscript in the Library of Congress:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,--and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor e'er eagle flew--
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

How did the poem come to be quoted by President Reagan in 1986? As it happens, he knew of the poem: `I hadn't heard it in years, but of course I knew it from years back, the war. And I think it was written on a sort of tablet or plaque outside Patti's school that I took her to when she was a young girl.' It transpires that Reagan had also been present the night fellow actor Tyrone Power returned from fighting in the Second World War--a party at which Power recited `High Flight' from memory. (When Power died, the poem was read over his grave by Laurence Olivier.)

It was also used for years as the close-down reading of a local Washington TV station. It was generally well-known in the United States (and much more so than in Britain). One person who learned it at school was Peggy Noonan who wrote the speech for Reagan, as she describes in her book What I Saw at the Revolution (1990). This is not the occasion to discuss the rights and wrongs of speechwriters `going public' and revealing the extent to which they pull strings. Suffice to say, it was a brilliant stroke on Noonan's part to select such an apposite quotation and one it was not too far-fetched to put in Reagan's mouth.

Two footnotes: in his lyrics for the English version of the musical Les Miserables (1985). Herbert Kretzmer blended Magee's words with something from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (`to know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom') to produce the line: `To love another person is to see the face of God.'

Magee's original words are curiously reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's lines prefixed to his Poems (Paris edition, 1903):

Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.


-- Anonymous, September 19, 2001