When the Hudson River gets polluted beyond acceptable levels fish die in it and little boys can't go skinny-dipping without serious risk. All of us swim in the sea of language every day. It is our air, our water, it reflects and sometimes is the quality of our lives. If it is our joy when it is used well in the service of humankind, then it must be our despair when our words (our environment) are laced with slow-acting poison ("constructive engagement," "a light at the end of the tunnel"), or used to zap our minds (calling the Somozista bullies "Freedom Fighters") or honed to dagger point poised at our throats and used to mug our civic consciousness ("left-leaning," "premature anti-Fascist").

Part of the pleasure we derive from language is its infinite ability to expand as we expand, helping us (when it works well) to learn to deal better with our environment. The slang of the streets -- whether in the argot of Place Pigalle or the Cockney of Ben's Bow or the rap of Lenox Avenue -- has added salt and pepper to our speech patterns, more "human" certainly than the Newspeak of Mad Avenue and corporate boardrooms ("prioritize," "bottom line").

There are water holes in many deserts where the water is brackish and lethal. Such places are usually marked as deadly. Comedians would lose their audiences if they joked about someone drinking from that "soup," or (of suffocating in quicksand) someone who was trying to "walk on dirty water." No one would laugh. In similar fashion it is inconceivable in speaking of rape that anyone, comedian or otherwise, would talk of the rapist as someone who wanted to "dip his wick," "get his ashes hauled," "try some jellyroll," "change his luck." Rape is a serious crime and we take it seriously. There are no witticisms which can illuminate the act. Rape offends even if not committed against us personally. The act bespeaks a deep sickness in the perpetrator as well as in the society in which we all play a part, and we don't consider the crime humorous.

How then shall we react to crimes relating to drugs? Somehow we know how we feel about arsonists. They are definitely not funny. No one speaks in puns about a "torching," yet drugs have transformed whole cities and even countries into a polluted and corrupt ocean in which even the sharks savage and kill each other. None of this seems terribly amusing to me which may simply be an indication that I do not have the sense of humor I thought I had. Or it may be that something interesting has happened to our society and our people who have opened their arms to, embraced, the language of those engaged in this traffic and also find humor in that language (based on brackish water and quicksand) to such degree that the lingo is so much a part of our lives that the commonplaceness of this threat to our peace and health has become a part of our lives and therefore non-threatening. Remember we used to call cigarettes "coffin-nails" (as we took another puff) long before the doctors labeled it so.

It used to be that "fix" was a slang word for "pickle" or trouble. One was in a "fix" when one had a particularly thorny problem. Then came Allan Ginsberg prowling the night searching for "an angry fix." What a strange (if powerful) use of the word. This is not "fixing a fight" (using bribery to win a bet) or "fixing a cat" (making it neuter) or for that matter fixing a bell that's out of order, although the last meaning is closest.

The drug that one injects fixes, cures, makes better, one's soul, one's heart's-ease, and enhances one's ability to cope with life's harshness. Thus is one fixed in the post-World War II ambiance and unknowingly "fixed for life" -- but not in the original sense of that phrase. The word "fix" today is rarely employed without the connotation of its relationship to drugs and drug use. How then shall we deal with the President of the United States who says that there is no "quick fix" for the budget deficit? How shall we deal with our friends who need their "nicotine fix" or their "coffee fix" first thing in the morning? Dope talk from the Prez? From our friends?

When one is "fixed" by "smack" or "girl" or "snow," then all things become distorted. Some images or ideas become very sharply focused while others become hazy and sometimes unrecognizable for what they are. Thus, under the influence of drugs one is in a state where things may be one thing but may equally be another. You can say of an object that it is like a glass but you cannot be sure that it is one. In fact you cannot be sure of anything, because your faculties are impaired, and it is quite ordinary during a drug experience to express oneself dreamily, as in "Like, you know, man, I mean, like wow!" For a drugged person that's as expressive as you can get and, I suppose, meaningful to a listening friend. How strange it is then to find our entire youth talking in this fashion. It should be apparent that along with the "weed" and "nickel pops" some fifty million youths in the U.S. alone have embraced the language, a far more insidious acceptance than the flirtation with the illicit use of controlled substances.

I suppose it's a kind of sacrilege to speak of Bob Dylan and the Beatles in any terms except those of praise. Yet I remember Dylan's song where he talks of the ecstacy of Christ at one point and comments "Everybody must get stoned." How very cute it is for the Beatles to sing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" which makes no sense at all, of course, unless you know (as all the kids did who sang it) that it refers to LSD. Or another Beatles song speaking of drug paraphernalia, the "gun" (hypodermic needle) and the experience which is jumbling, confusing, disorienting, distorting, in the line "Happiness is a warm gun" and again "The outside is in, the inside is out." What fun! How clever! What a triumph it is for the candymen of this world (the candyman, of course, is the "connection," the dealer who brings the dope) to have a group of youngsters singing in chorus about the wonderful person who can change all the colors of the universe and make everything beautiful. The Candyman can!

Comedians make jokes about "funny" cigarettes and use the word "stash" (the place where you hide your "grass" or your "coke") quite matter-of-factly as though we should all know the reference (and of course we do). And yet, we all know about sex but no one makes jokes about gravity knives and forcing young girls up to rooftops, raping them and dropping them over the side. No, there's something else going on here that makes this phenomenon acceptable where other criminal acts and other acts against society are not.

In our search for an answer to this interesting question (hardly a Safire-like investigation of the curious linguistics of this affair) let us turn to the movie The Godfather. The scene I recall vividly has Don Corleone (the head of a Mafia "family" which traffics in prostitution, loansharking and labor racketeering among other fruitful activities) in a hospital after having been wounded by a rival gang in the same fields of endeavor. This vying gang has a "fix" (bribe) in with the police chief. The chief has therefore pulled all cops away from the hospital so that Don Corleone's enemies can have a clear shot at a defenseless man. The head of the hospital has also had to have been "got to" since the hospital corridors are empty of orderlies, nurses, lab technicians. The Don's son, Michael, and one single member of the "family" (gangster, "button man") hold off the rival gang by themselves until their own gang can come to the rescue. The police chief, "in the pocket" of the "bad" gang (could you believe there's a good gang and a bad gang?), arrives to try to arrest Michael and now it's a race against time! How exciting! Will Michael's hit squad get there before the police chief can prevail? They do! The movie house resounds with applause! I saw the movie three times in movie houses and each time, at this very scene, the house erupted with vociferous approval. Just as the Cavalry used to arrive to put down the "bad" Indians in the name of our righteous Government (ourselves) here came the Cosa Nostra "soldiers," the private army of a Mafia "family," with whom we presumably have no ties at all, and we applaud as the police chief is discomfited and slinks off (the police chief! who represents Law and Order!) and the hoods move in to protect the Mafia Don. An amazing scene since it could never have played in Peoria (let alone anywhere else) even twenty years ago.

And yet this is a world where Cap Weinberger announced that the Salvadoran Army had "taken care of" the rebels who had killed U.S. soldiers there. It turned out that he exaggerated but his locution was clear enough. The Mafia "takes care of" its enemies by "hitting" them and there was our government's spokesman (our spokesman) announcing calmly that we'd "taken care of" our enemies. It is surprising only that he didn't state that he had had them hit!

Let us turn now to examine the language of war. As our system takes on more and more bellicosity it is necessary to calm the citizenry. How? Just change the language! No one is called a soldier any more. A soldier fights and kills enemies. Armies now are "forces," which "engage" (almost like getting married) other "forces." All these forces employ "troops" (almost like baboons who are cute). The troops use "pieces" instead of weapons (guns) and "fire" (they don't shoot) "rounds" instead of bullets (bullets can hurt someone of course, rounds seem like a description of sorts). These troops attempt to "neutralize" the enemy (like neutering a cat). Sometimes they have to "search and destroy" but they don't say it's human lives they are destroying. Troops "interdict" supplies (like a policeman holding up a hand, blowing a whistle and saying "Stop"). Troops "sanitize" an area, which sounds clean enough. Files too can be "sanitized" by officials who, on reading their own files, find matter "offensive" within (illegal?). The charade of course goes on and on. We conduct "surgical strikes" (sounds terribly therapeutic) on enemy "zones" -doesn't sound like much life is lost there. We "tilt" (oops) toward Saudi Arabia instead of Israel (which conducts its own surgical strikes). The Shiites are so much messier. They use people, who drive suicide missions of cars laden with bombs in order to kill their enemies! Not nice at all.

Am I saying that all these people are crazies, engaged in some macabre struggle called a war to eliminate all dissent, Mafia, Government, Fundamentalists, all? If being crazy is a designation for someone maniacally intent on a single purpose regardless of consequences, the answer must be yes -- they are crazy. Are they all equal, or equally crazy? They've accepted each other's language, mores and morality.

But this too is old hat, as those who follow my thinking might say. It is no big thing to demonstrate the craziness of extremists in our government or their perversion of truth or the interchangeability of the ethics and morality of the people in governments (including our own), the Mob et al. What is remarkable here however is the wedding in language of all these elements; Mafia, government, religious nuts, the crazy bombers of the Right to Life killing in the cause of life (little different from Hitler's slogan of Work Makes You Free over the concentration camp gate). All these people use language, my language, to pervert, twist, distort, not only the nature of what they are doing, but in order to poison the well of my language. This rape of my language is what drives me up the wall, for it is the only tool I have for fighting them (outside of my energy). When they usurp the words "freedom," "justice," "liberty," "public good," "decency" then I am in trouble, for the Gresham's Law of Language asserts itself and their co-option of these terms deprives me of the opportunity to use them at all lest they be seen as invested with the same cynicism.

I get as mad when someone tampers with my language as I do when they tamper with my mind.

-- Jeremiah

This essay first appeared in the newsletter Jeremiah: I'm Mad as Hell (Volume 1, Number 1, January 1986).

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