Tit for Tat

 Politics recently has become a ferocious, often silly game of tit for tat.  You impeached our president, well bless your heart, we’ll impeach yours.  You accused our guy of grifting, well honey how about your guy.

It’s silly, but profoundly dangerous.  Because I’m interested in what sometimes is grandly called the life of the mind, I’m really concerned about the tit for tat as it attacks thought, speech, ideas generally.

 

I come to the question from the point of view that free speech is the bedrock of any democracy, so my perspective may or may not be your cup of tea.  But as I see it, the desire to regulate speech, and via speech to regulate thought, leads inexorably to totalitarianism.  It’s no accident that the most dangerous element of the society in Orwell’s 1984 is the thought police and its key tool, the memory hole.

 

The memory hole makes the requirements of the immediate present the only criterion for what is true and what is false.  In doing so the memory hole also condition the past so that it meets the requirements of present exigency, but its main function is to make the present the sole criterion of what is or is not acceptable.

 

With that in mind, I think about actual efforts to make the present, or at least the present as it’s filtered through some ideological sieve, the basis for considering the past.  In Florida, for instance, thanks to the ideological filter of the far right and what I see as its hysterical fear of the truth, schools are proscribed from teaching the truth about slavery as it was practiced in the US.  The notion promulgated by the state, that slaves were more or less content with their condition, is so very very far from the truth that the whole of the past has to be rewritten, the truth erased, in order to meet the requirements of the ideology that dominates the state government.

 

The process is not quite a memory hole, to be sure, but the next best thing.  The actual past is still available to the diligent student who wants to do the most cursory of research outside of the bounds of what the schools are allowed to teach.  The effect for the great majority of kids in the schools of Florida is nonetheless to falsify the past according to the requirements of the present dominant ideology.

 

The same is true on the other side of the ideological coin.  It was not that long ago that the left wing in the US decided that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when it wasn’t simply banned in schools, had to be censored so that every instance of the n-word was replaced by the word “slave.”  There is an edition of the novel, edited by Alan Gribben and published in 2011, that does exactly that.  Prof. Gribben’s intention was good.  He was concerned that an unredacted version of the novel would simply be banned so that kids would not have ready access to it.  And that would have been a shame, of course, because Huckleberry Finn is as essential to understanding the US as is the Constitution.

 

But substituting the one word for the other simply falsifies the past.  It is just a matter of fact that Americans have constantly used the n-word.  Whites use it to diminish and subordinate Black people; Black people use it to reappropriate the word and assert their own position in the world.  Substituting “slave” for the word is to falsify that fact.

 

It also substitutes a legal, indeed a Constitutional condition for a social reality.  As David Sloane points out in “The N-Word in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Reconsidered,” the substitution makes it impossible to hear the point or understand the significance of “the climactic assertion by the recovering Tom that Jim ‘ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth!’”  I think that Tom here squints across the legal and the social realities of being Black in America before the Civil War.  But surely the legal status of a slave does not equal the social import of the n-word.

 

The left wing’s motive in erasing painful terms is to protect the sensibilities of a present-day reader, a mirror image of the right wing’s motive in banning books that trace the painful past.  For me, censoring Huckleberry Finn is about the same as banning Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.  Both actions do what the memory hole does.  They both seek to impose a present valuation on the past—in Morrison’s case a relatively recent past at that.  The result is to destroy the reality of the past.

 

I suspect that the banning of books by right wing folks takes its initial impetus from the censoring of books by left wing folks.  It’s the right wing tat for the left wing tit.  But as far as I’m concerned, the two wings lift the same bird.