[MD] Newspeak, Plainspeak

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

All,

Recently, Platt's mention one of his heros, the left-supporting democratic
socialist George Orwell. He then took pains to indicate the movement towards
Newspeak rampant in our political institutions.

This reminded me of the Indians, again, in Lila, and the differences between the
European Victorians of New England, and those who assimilated the Indian
manners of the West.

Pirsig recounts a speech given by Ten Bears, whose simple, direct words
contrasted with the deceitful and manipulative words of the Europeans (maybe
"reservation" was one of the first American examples of Newspeak!) saying,
"[Ten Bears' speech] was a damn sight better than cowboy speech-but it was
still closer to the white Plains dialect than is the language of the European.
Here were the straight, head-on, declarative sentences without stylistic
ornamentation of any kind, but with a poetic force that must have put the
sophisticated bureaucratic speech of Ten Bears' antagonists to shame. This was
no imitation of the involuted Victorian elocution of 1867!"

Writing more on the Indian manner of speak, Pirsig wrote, "Indians don't talk to
fill time. When they don't have anything to say, they don't say it. When they
don't say it, they leave thy impression of being a little ominous. In the
presence of this Indian silence, whites sometimes get nervous and feel forced
as a matter of politeness or kindness to fill the vacuum with a kind of
small-talk which often says one thing and means another. But these
well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are
"forked-tongue" talk to the Indian and are infuriating. They violate his
morality. He wants you to either speak from the heart or keep quiet. This has
been a source of Indian-white conflict for centuries and although the modern
white American personality is a compromise of that conflict, the conflict still
exists."

Here we see Orwellian-Pirsigian confluence in the "fork-tongued" nature of
Newspeak, "well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are
"forked-tongue" talk ". Pirsig continues, "The Cheyenne name for white man is
wihio, meaning "spider." Arapaho use niatha to mean the same thing. To the
Indian, whites seemed like spiders when they talked. They sat there and smiled
and said things they didn't mean, and all the time their mind was spinning a
web around the Indian. They got so lost in their own web-spinning thoughts they
didn't even see that the Indian was watching them too and could see what they
were doing."

Wihio, niatha, spider, Newspeaker. The "fork-tongue" talk of European speech the
Victorians spoke. 

We continue with Pirsig, "Normally he wouldn't have attached much importance to
this, but now, with the peyote opening up his mind and with his attention
having nowhere else to go, he bored in on it with intensity.

This directness and simplicity was in the way they spoke, too. They spoke the
way they moved, without any ceremony. It seemed to always come from deep within
them. They just said what they wanted to say. Then they stopped. It wasn't just
the way they pronounced the words. It was their attitude-plain-spoken, he
thought. . . .

Plains spoken. They were speaking in the language of the Plains. This was the
pure Plains American dialect he was listening to. It wasn't just Indian. It was
white too. It was a kind of Midwestern and Western accent you hear in Woody
Guthrie songs and cowboy movies. When Henry Fonda appears in The Grapes of
Wrath or Gary Cooper or John Wayne or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or William S.
Boyd appear in any of a hundred different Westerns this is how they talk, not
like some fancy college professor, but Plains spoken; laconic, understated,
very little tonal change, no change of expression. Yet there was a warmth
beneath the surface that you couldn't point to the source of."

Have we lost this? Is our current "return to Victorianism" part and parcel of
the web of Newspeak woven by party machines and Party Jesters to distract and
distort, like wihio, are more concerned with "fork-tongued" elocutions than
honest, open dialogue? We should be reminded, as the Party Jesters rally us
toward Victorianism, of what Pirsig had to say about the moral values of the
Indian. "The moral values that were replacing the old European Victorian ones
were the moral values of American Indians: kindness to children, maximum
freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature. ... The
twentieth century intellectuals were claiming scientific sanction for what they
were doing, but the changes that were actually taking place in America were
changes toward the values of the Indian."

Are we still moving towards the values of the Indian? Plains spoken, simplicity
and directness? Or are we moving backwards towards Victorianspeak, Newspeak,
"full of involutions and curlicues and floral patterns that had no practical
function whatsoever, and distracted you from whatever content was there"?

The Party Jesters will tell you their side neeeeeever engages in wihio-speak. Oh
no... not them. Only the evil "other". But look around. We are awash in what
Lakoff would call manipulative framing. Whether its "undocumented workers" or
"The Patriot Act", "tax relief" or "sanitation engineers". No wonder the
Indians saw us as wihio. Pirsig said, "Although the modern white American
personality is a compromise of that conflict [Indian speak versus Victorian
speak], the conflict still exists". Apparently so.

Thoughts?

Arlo