Language is a virus from outer space.
William S. Burroughs, noted American author
Bill Burroughs for all of his demons, was capable of blasting away the facade of deception and uncovering the truth. Burroughs adroit use of elegantly worded but simple seven word sentence, has the power to unlearn decades of cognitive conditioning about the nature of the world we live in. Our view of human reality is a social construction mediated only by the instability, the ambiguity, and the volatility of languages used to signify our perception of the world. Indeed, language is a virus from outer space.
A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts.
In Genesis the confusion of language was a curse handed down to from God to the citizens of Babylon:
And the Lord came down to see the Babel and the tower, which the children builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel (confusion); because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth
It's not a whole lot different from Burroughs' virus from outer space, except Genesis calls the same phenomenon a curse from heaven.
Language spreads like a virus but people like Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus and Anne Coulter are far more efficient carriers of the virus because the understand the power of the virus to confuse and confound. They exploit the ambiguities of the language virus to the ends of power.
There is more than one meaning for most words and the meaning can change depending on who the speaker is. For instance:
* A black man can call a saltine a "cracker" but if he calls a white man a cracker it has a racial connotation.
* If a white man calls a ghost a "spook", it's an entirely different statement than calling a black man a spook.
* If any man, white or black, calls a garden tool a "hoe", it's not the same thing as using ho to describe a woman.
* The use of the word "boy" by a white man in addressing a black man doesn't mean the same thing as the use of by a white man to address someone of his own race.
* If two black men address each other as "nigga" in a private conversation, it's entire different from a white person using "nigga" to address a black person in public.
Language is neutral. Language is subject to context and the intent of the speaker. The Politically Incorrect crowd would have us all believe that words don't have a contextual meaning and every word has a single absolute meaning, which is based on one's subjective construction of reality.
Therefore, if a black man uses "nigga" to describe a member of his own race, Rush Limbaugh tells us that the word "nigga" has same exact fixed content neutral meaning, when he uses to term the to describe Jesse Jackson.
Sorry Rush you may think world is not a fair place because your use of the word "nigga" has a socially mediated meaning. If Rush Limbaugh calls Jesse Jackson a "nigga" he shouldn't be suprised when his station manager tells him to pack up his microphone, clean out his desk and issues him his last paycheck with 2 weeks severance pay. .
Rush Limbaugh couldn't possibly stupid enough to think that language is devoid of any contextual meaning. Limbaugh is a master of using nuanced and equivocated language to insult people he doesn't like. You may have flunked out of college Rush, but you know more than Joseph Goebbels did about the techniques of political theater, agitprop and use the use of loaded language.
I always want to slap Rush across the room when he tells blacks they shouldn't feel offended when he calls them niggas because, after all , they call each other the same thing.
The flaw in Rush's sophomoric reasoning is that a vast majority of blacks don't call each other "nigga" and most blacks still find "nigga" an offensive term when used by a black and even more offensive when used by a white.
Rush is playing a clever little game of linguistic gotcha for the sole purpose of making it socially acceptable to slur blacks. He knows it, his listeners know it and anyone who has a fifth grader's appreciation of the contextually of language knows it.
Rush is like the school yard bully who gets reprimanded by the teacher for shoving around a classmate, so he heads straight back to the playground and punches the same classmate and then says to the teacher," You told me not to shove him, but you never said anything about punching him."
Hellooooo!---the purpose of the First Amendment is the protection of religious, political and artistic expression. The First Amendment doesn't affirm the right of stupid people to insult other people with racist remarks. There is no inherent constitutional protection for speech intended to promote hatred or to disparage the social reputation of entire ethnic or racial communities.
Most Americans are tired of hearing excuses from the anti-PC crowd for promoting creeping racism by altering the entire meaning of the lexicon. Language can be a deadly virus in the hands of a scoundrel.
Being culturally illiterate on race relations can get you into a lot of trouble these days. Things used to be easier back in the good old days when black men called each other "brother" instead of "nigga."
The next generation of Americans is like no other in our nation's history. The next generation is first generation that is racially diverse and politically sophisticated enough to understand that race baiting hurts us all. In this new reality of a culturally diverse American, being racially offensive can make you a social leper and get fired from your job. Ask Don Imus.
