S06E14 Words: The spiral of self-censorship

The spiral of self-censorship

Where did it all start? Was it George Carlin’s “7 words” routine? Maybe. Although I think it really began long before Carlin was part of my input machine.

Perhaps it was in my sophomore year, when I got the part of Dr Armstrong in “Ten Little Indians”, when I had the chance to shout with frustration “Will you please stop your damnable shouting and fighting?” Oh, to be able to use the word “damnable” in public, one of those words that I as a youth was prohibited from saying.

Perhaps it was the summer on Aunt Maxine’s farm, that summer I’d turned 16, had a driver’s license, got paid for the farm work I was doing. Aunt Maxine told me, perhaps the first day of work, that there was nothing wrong with letting a “damn” or a “shit” slip, it was natural, but that I wasn’t to think that I could just use those words willy-nilly, they were reserved for hammered thumbs or stubbed toes. When I heard Uncle Corky let fly his first “fuck”, a word that I’d rarely heard spoken, I was somehow taken aback, an adult had used the worst of the worst in front of a kid!

Today, at least, it began with Davos. It began with the Primer Minister of Canada talking about living in compliance with the lie. It began with the symbol of the sign in the greengrocer’s shop, the sign that every shop put in the window, the sign that let the eyes and ears of the powerful know that the powerless were abiding by whatever lie the sign displayed. It began with “[we have] the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.” and “What does it mean for middle-powers to live the truth? Well, first it means naming reality. ….We (Canada) have a recognition of what’s happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We (Canada) are taking the sign out of the window.”

Or perhaps it actually began yesterday evening, as I turned from editing a story to reading a story by a fellow trailing-edger. The story was called The briefing room and told the tale of journalists finally having a heart-felt reaction to a ridiculous changing of the words of a narrative: “[The president] did not throw his lunch. He placed it down firmly.” “throw” becomes “place it down firmly”. That sign in the greengrocer’s shop window, will you prop it there when you open shop or will you gossip about what really happened with your customers, worry about the stability of the leader of your land who is staining the wallpaper again with ketchup? The sign means you don’t have to do anything, don’t have to think anything, don’t have to opine anything. The gossip might mean you have to think, analyse, come to some kind of personal conclusion about what really happened. “throw” or “place it down firmly”?

And then, as I continue my morning, limited browse through the snippets on the Bluesky platform, I am treated with this comment:

I wish people would stop spelling “rape” as “r*pe”, “dead” as “unalive”, “assaulted” as “a*saulted”. Those are weasel words that dilute the importance, the impact, of the real words…. Face the truth head on.

Which, of course, made me think about an almost life-long pet peeve about the print press using symbols, that is, punctuation marks, to replace letters in those words to avoid actually spelling out the word. You know which ones I’m talking about: f@#k instead of the clean, clear f·u·c·k that we all know is behind those marks. Why pretend it’s not the word it is when it’s obvious that it is the word that it is?

Which of course, led me to two recent episodes here on you’re listening to radio revel in which I spoke about my use of suicide as a way to kill off characters in my fiction. I’m like the Bluesky poster, I kind of get peeved when I’m looking at a YouTube video and words are bleeped, or spelled with punctuation marks replacing letters, or there’s strange silent spots where words should be and I’m forced to fill in that blank thanks to the context. And I wondered if my use of the word “suicide” would get me banned from YouTube because there’s some list of prohibited words on the platform that I’m not aware of.

You know, like that list of words, the “banned words list”, words that seem to offend the emperor’s sensibility? So I checked, turns out that those “creators” on YouTube avoid using those words because advertisers don’t want to be associated with certain words, or rather the variety of concepts or difficult discussions the use of any of those words might bring about, the critical thought needed to realize that a person committing suicide in a work of fiction is not necessarily the glorification or animation to commit suicide. Come on, let’s not be a Tipper Gore, not in this day and age. Advertisers, then, are encouraging the self-censoring, what a surprise, follow the money.

Then I remember just the other day, another guy I kind of follow on YouTube, Richard J Murphy, well, he comes out and calls Trump “evil” as part of a message for the need to begin calling a spade a spade. Looking for the video just now to link, I see a new video of his “Delay now is a strategic failure, and our leaders need to get their heads around this. In response we need three things…. first, we need clarity; second, we need naming; and third, we need countermeasures.”

What I’m seeing is akin to what we’ve heard so often from the knumb-skulls who hang the Trump sign in their shopwindows: “He tells it like it is.” That is actually what is being called for, that is a noble stance, we want our leaders to tell us how things really are, we don’t want spin, we don’t want platitudes, we want facts, information upon which we as individuals may act. The pity is that Trump and those that surround Trump only seem to be telling it like it is, and those who blindly believe the lies were bereft of the concept of critical thinking long enough ago to not even realize they don’t know how. They don’t put on their thinking caps, they put on the red MAGA cap and let the sign do the thinking.

This is actually something that brings me a little bit of hope, though it is a very cautious hope, a hope that I do not indulge in, only allow to shine when I am doing the restricted-to-fifteen-minutes doomscrolling with my morning coffee. More and more people are now saying that they want the facts, what has happened, who is responsible and what will the consequences be, without the dramatic music, without the round-table opinion-fests, without the self-interested self-censorship.

Here’s my proposal. We all know that is against the law to lie in certain situations. Those that come to mind are: lie to the police; lie when under oath in court; lie to the FBI; lie to Congress. There’s that word, perjury, that carries with it the weight of the law, lie and there will be consequences, legal ones that may include fines or even the loss of liberty, read: jail time. So, at some point in time it was agreed that telling a lie in certain situations is unacceptable. But you do notice that that unacceptability is one-sided, right? There are only consequences when the individual lies to the authority figure.

For example, police are allowed to lie to people during interrogations. Politicians are actually expected to lie to the people they are trying to convince to vote for them. And once elected, those same politicians continue to lie to cover up for the lies they told to get the job in the first place when they do not follow through on those lies. Your boss can lie to you in order to get you to work more hours. You can lie to a client in order to make that sale. It all filters down, and yet who does the child lie to?

My proposal, then. Make falsehood a crime. It doesn’t have to be a criminal crime, it can be a misdemeanor, it can even be just a civil matter. It does, though, need to be legislated and criminalized in the case of authority figures. Police must be 100% truthful during interrogations. Any hint of untruthfulness must cancel out any information attained in said interrogations. And fine the detective who lied, or demote him.

Politicians must be truthful when speaking publicly. Of course, I’m not really talking about promises made that simply can not be kept…. I’m talking about things that have actually happened. “I did not have sex with that woman” almost brought a president down. “Iran has weapons of mass destruction” should have brought that one down. We can no longer accept that the people who evidently have (and evidently long for) the power tell us lies. Those lies must be called out, made public, the public figure must be fined, must be banned from his or her office until the fine has been paid, must not be allowed to speak publicly until public mea culpa has been performed. Or demote him or her, kick them out of office immediately for having lied.

Don’t hang that sign in your shopwindow. Don’t accept the lies with a shrug of “well, politicians always lie, nothing to be done about it”. Until the lie has been legislated into a criminal act, a source of shame and castigation, we must be the ones to shame and castigate.

The spokesperson tells a lie? The answer is clear. Someone must shout out “that is a lie”. The journalist writes a lie? The reader must write to the editor (or in this modern world, leave a comment) pointing out that lie. When you, as an individual, see something that is a lie, that is false, that is simply not what you know to be true, say so. You may be wrong, someone else may call you out on your falsehood, but that is not bad, that will be what makes you look deeper into the truth, find out what really happened, look for facts and apply a bit of critical thinking to those facts.

It’s time to simplify and say things as they are. Let’s stop the self-censorship and call a spade a spade, a suicide a suicide, an assault an assault, a death a death, a killing a killing and not some made-up spin of fear and self-defense.

Didn’t I say I wasn’t consuming shit-show shit? Well, I’m getting better at it, it wasn’t something I was going to do cold-turkey, but it’s really down to about fifteen minutes a day, got too many other kind and beautiful things to draw my attention to spend them on Donald Trump and the crappy world leaders who continue to wipe his ass as they kiss it daily. Ugh, just not something to spend one’s time on. We’ll see how Davos plays out over the next couple of days.

Cheers,
revel.