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The lessons of “Politics and the English Language” are eminently applicable here, to Obama’s penchant for smooth distortion of meaning and inclination to relabel things such that the new labels obscure rather than describe. “Such phraseology,” Orwell wrote, “is needed if one wants to name things without calling up pictures of them.” And if one wants to pretend that a warring nation isn’t warring or that terrorists and terrorism aren’t terrorizing. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” was a murky concept, Obama’s substitution - the “Overseas Contingency Operation” - is even murkier. As to Orwell’s warnings about verifying lies and prettifying murder, Obama’s secretary of homeland security, in recent testimony before Congress, referred to cases of terrorist violence as “man-caused disasters,” an intentionally anodyne lexical concoction. Do not today’s politicians (and yesterday’s) avoid clarity precisely to pseudo-solidify their windiest decisions and pronouncements? The president is on this count surely not alone in his culpability, but he is alone in his obscurative prowess and propensity. is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder sound respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” This is never truer than in politics, he writes: “Political language. When people countenance vagueness in speech they welcome into the mix every sort of distortion and lie, which can’t be spotted in the general haziness and so come off as facts. Language does not merely reflect but also shapes societies, and so Orwell writes that far from being futile or irrelevant, defending the integrity of English is indispensable for the right functioning of the society that speaks it. It commences with an insistence that battling bad English is no “sentimental archaism” as is generally supposed.
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Subject the current political chieftains of either party to Orwell’s lens and the wispiness of their rhetoric is laid plain. Fortunately, two new collections of Orwell’s essays, Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art is Propaganda, edited by George Packer, were released late last year, just in time for Election Day and on page 270 of the latter volume begins the piece “Politics and the English Language,” as effective an inoculation as exists against Obamaspeak’s hardier strains. It is loopy and lofty and often lubricious, and is precisely the type that Orwell’s famous edict “Good prose is like a window pane” sought to banish. The liberal president surely knows better but, as Orwell wrote, “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” He does not merely redefine words, in fact, but on occasion undefines them, wiping them of their meanings - say, by insisting that words such as conservative and liberal are insignificant.
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Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t. Those lessons are timeless but also timely, educative on the day’s latest headlines. The particular manner in which he pierced worthless theory, faced facts and defended decency (with fluctuating success), and largely ignored the tradition of accumulated wisdom has rendered him a timeless teacher - one whose inadvertent lessons, while infrequently acknowledged, are just as valuable as his intended ones.