Wednesday Morning Rant

When Emperor Hirohito's voice went out over the Japanese airwaves announcing his government's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration and the Empire's unconditional surrender to the Allies, it was particularly notable for two reasons. First, emperors do not speak to commoners, so it was the first time that most of his subjects had ever heard his voice. Second, Hirohito spoke in an ancient, hidebound dialect that was nearly incomprehensible to his subjects.

Between the courtly classical Japanese dialect and the careful couched language, many of those who heard it were left struggling to understand what, exactly, they had heard. The Emperor said that Japan "accepts the provisions of the Joint Declaration," but what does that mean? Did Japan surrender or not? What was the meaning of those odd words from their God-emperor?

This incomprehensibility is often quite beneficial for the group that engages in it. Cant - or argot, or "academic language," or "ecclesiastical language" - serves its purpose. It's a group marker and fluency with it implies membership. To those outside, it's "duckspeak." The insiders can scheme openly in specialized language, keep out the riff raff and - crucially - have the riff raff ignore them. This is all well and good, until it happens that one of the speakers of that language tries on purpose to speak to - and be understood by - the riff raff. Then, it becomes an obstacle.

I saw a wonderful example of this in a YouTube ad. I usually skip these but the person who was actually watching it did not. I wouldn't have anyway, because it caught my attention. Not for the reasons the producers desired, but attention nonetheless:

This is one of the 2024 winners of "Freedom Scholar" prize, awarded by an outfit called the Marguerite Casey Foundation. That Foundation is based on the Casey family fortune, which is rooted in UPS. Yes, the shipping company. It turns out that what Brown can do for you is fund revolutionary left-wing causes. Their YouTube channel makes that quite clear.

But I digress. This is about language, not the tendency of all "philanthropy" toward revolutionary radicalism. The woman in this ad - the winner of the prize - is a University of Illinois (Chicago) professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Global Asian Studies. The language is likely incomprehensible to most laymen. Transcriptions are mine, please forgive any errors.

We're gonna need to do more work on conjoining prison abolition movements and movements against militarism and for decolonization, especially since all of these structures are already sharing technologies and strategies of sexualized violence, reproductive injustices...

... to a world organized by collective and communal care and love, a world organized by community accountability ... where people are living in safety and dignity with each other and on their lands. ...

The importance of these ideas is to help us build social movements that are not rooted in Oppression Olympics, but ... rooted in the intersectionality and conjoining of all of our struggles ...

And this is the simplified version, the version dumbed down for broadcast to the rubes. Many of you reading this understand it. Many of you don't. This is hard to parse - in excerpt as above, and in totality - if you don't have at least loose familiarity with Postmodern language and concepts. This is what they took to the public, though. It's the best they can do. They can't break free from their ecclesiastical language.

What she's saying is simple, of course. It always is, because it's always a variation on the same theme, no matter what. She, like all radical progressives, is calling for codifying a vindictive group-power dynamic above all else, and exacting vengeance upon the enemy during the continuous revolution. It never varies, but the language obscures it. That's the point.

But what was the point of this ad? It's the simplified version and it's still probably pretty hard to deal with for many normals. But are normals the target? If so, this is a swing and a miss and the Marguerite Casey Foundation should fire all of its publicity people. If it's a message to fellow travelers about who the Certified Good People are, it is perhaps more effective.

One of the challenges of ecclesiastical language is that, even if you can understand it somewhat, it can still be hard to suss out the intent if you're an outsider.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments