What holds us together, improbably, may be probability in relation to language behavior that involves essentially repeated sounds that develop shared symbolic meaning and exhibit more or less stability across the life of a language culture.
For me, all avenues in linguistics lead back to metonymy and the update, development, weighting, and evolution of clusters of behavior involving words, functional grammar, and, most important for our interests here, social grammar. We’re not stuck with either the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty, i.e., the development of meaning may have predictable and stable qualities, but there seems much that is accidental and arbitrary in the development of culture and, by way of language, shared cultural perception.
Near unquestioned familiarity with a primary language affords a depth in humor and intuition generally unavailable in a second language. As instruments playing with words, we may be incredibly fine tuned, but that tuning depends on the continuation of conventions, habits, and practices — the more deeply held the assemblies, the less energy required to revisit and re-validate their adventageous qualities — any part of which may be subject to cultural and linguistic evolution.
I’ve never had much respect for the deconstructionists, their drift demonstrated so much more actively by poets who, depending on their mien, for better or worse, rearrange symbolic language relationships in the heads of those reading or hearing their inventions.
There are more Muslims entered into the rolls of Yad Vashem and altogether a larger story.
Here I would like to suggest a few things not mentioned.
First, the role of religion, any, may be less important as regards the energizing of a seemingly religious conflict than the attitudes, beliefs, characteristics in personality (e.g., charisma, narcissism) and self-concept of leaders and the followers attracted to them that together comprise malignant subcultures and, at times, malignant societies.
Next: I believe, albeit not quite superstitiously, that language holds the content, shape, and interests of each mind together, and that “language uptake” includes the internalization of intergenerational attitudes, beliefs, and social behaviors. To de-energize what drives some men, usually, although there have been “black widows”, to blow up innocents, much less offing 14-year-old Pashtun school girls, wants for getting into that living language machinery at perhaps overlooked and very early developmental levels.
For this educated and highly literate group, I’ll stop here: the basic experience of language is mouth-to-ear, not text-based, and ears are conduits to signal discerning minds.
We’re a curious species, always listening (from womb to tomb, probably), always filtering and discerning.
The behavior that deflects attention from culpability for crime or disaster, that extols virtue, virtuously, on one hand and denies all presence of or association with evil in some part gets its start somewhere in the narrative of personal development.
A tank (or drone) cannot be aimed at that, but a switch in signal — example, expression — can (or so one may hope).
I’ve suggested elsewhere, and this is my best case for Obama and the west, is that he has managed a surface image for the Middle East and by extension the “Arab World” and Islam while supporting continuing U.S. Department of Defense and Israel Defense Force programs beneath the news (and image) surface.
In this choreagraphy, if it has been that, we have arrived at a sour point somewhere between the allegation of an ambivalent Obama and associated with the President’s persistence in the ambiguous — and for traditional western values, negative — diplomatic signals and policy pronouncements.
Pandering isn’t the only evil here, but it’s the one that’s most destructive short of war. The targets of the behavior — those pandered to — are its victims, as by accepting unwarranted favor or praise, they may believe themselves praiseworthy in precisely the way set out to manipulate them.
Pandering then becomes a part of a larger narcissistic complex, and until this form in dishonest speech has been faced, the world most susceptible to it will find itself deepening its miseries in conflict and improverishment at its own hands.
The second video may confuse language a little bit — today, in fact, it takes contemporary state power to genuinely protect uncontacted peoples (there are few around) and pockets of primitive tribes that have had some missionary and trade contact (I’ve the Pirahã and Dan Everett in mind) but, so far, and of their own volition, have chosen to remain put. What I believe Geller has in her sites is a political program, the one driving Hamas and Hizbollah and Jamaat-i-Islamia; also the one whipping up a maelstrom of death, displacement, and destruction between Shia and Sunni sects and others in Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria; and then the fans of the 7th Century, who would seem to transgress all limits with the killing of their own and of innocents, even in mosques.
If ye olde white man says, “This is just cowboys and Indians”, he might be rightfully rebuked as ignorant and racist.
But if a hip black poet says the same thing, summoning up the white ghost of Rousseau’s revered noble savage, then it is a war against “indigenous” — who was really of-the-land provides an endless topic for the expression of vitriol in the middle east hate-peace peace groups on Facebook — and the modern, thank God, have an unfair advantage in military power.
This is how the hip, fashionable, and devolutionary (also, alas, romantic) of the New Old Now Old Lost and Far Out Left find themselves upside-down and, most ironically, extending the conflicts and warfare they proclaim to protest.
When the “indigenous” of Gaza (minus the Jewish indigenous of Gaza) get really sick, they’re not necessarily stuck with crying out for mud plasters and prayer (or revolutionary poetry): they may find themselves in a modern hospital more amply prepared (than Gaza’s also modern medical system) to receive them in Israel.
So, back to the Transportation Poster Wars: how representative are CAIR and ISNA of the Muslim voice?
Same question: Muslim Canadian Congress? American Islamic Forum for Democracy?
Will North America, for starters, witness a shift in volunteered civic alliance?
How long will the violence accepting, enabling, or promoting behaviors of one or two (or more) key Muslim civic organizations be keeping Steve Emerson, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and others rightfully — dutifully, ethically, morally — in business, i.e., out of the obsessive (would there were not so much material to keep it going) “Jihad Watch” business?
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