The language of 9/11

In its coverage of the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, NPR featured linguists on both Terry Gross’s FRESH AIR and TALK OF THE NATION. Linguist Gary Nunnberg  told Terry that his studies show that in fact 9/11 had very little effect on the language. In picking its top word or phrase for the decade, the American Dialect Society chose “Google” and “blog” ahead of 9/11.

This could be for a bunch of reasons. One is that, like the Vietnam War, both Iraq and Afghanistan have been controversial – witness the recent and ongoing debate on when and whether a U.S. president actually has the right to involve us in a war we haven’t formally declared.

And then there’s the fact that we blamed 9/11 on some deranged fanatics, instead of seeing it as a calculated act of provocation by revolutionaries.

But Nunn surmises that unlike World War II and Vietnam, the wars that followed 9/11 didn’t affect Americans as directly. He mentioned, for instance, how “supporting the troops” was a major preoccupation during World War II.

What he didn’t say –  and I think it deserves saying –  is that the troops who went to both World War II and Vietnam were a very different group from those who’ve gone to Iraq and Afghanistan. In WW II and ‘Nam, we had the draft. In fact, it was largely the Vietnam War that put an end to the draft.

So we have no draft, at least not a formal, military one. But in this era of globalization, the draft is economic. There are no jobs, and many – our 20-somethings – are choosing the military despite its current very evident risks. Your money, or your life? They are offering to lay their lives on the line simply in order to have the kind of job security that their parents attained in the years that followed World War II, the apotheosis of American success.

Whether you like Michael Moore or think he is a self-serving  nincompoop, his staged attempt in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE to find a single U.S. senator or representative in Congress with a child serving in Iraq or Afghanistan is a telling moment.

At the outset, young men and women volunteered for Afghanistan and Iraq for patriotic reasons, and some still do. But there was no draft. And that’s a major reason, I think, that the vocabulary of 9/11 and all that followed it has not embedded itself in our lives. We are not, as citizens of a nation, personally and daily  invested in these wars.  Or haven’t been, up until now.  Will that change as more and more formerly middle-class young people choose the military as the only job option left to them in a country that has systematically outsourced everything from manufacturing to office work, hospital records, accounting and paralegal jobs?

Meanwhile, the provocation, as Andrew Sullivan points out in a recent Newsweek essay,  thoroughly succeeded. Its aftermath, he says, has not and will not. The “terrorists” will not defeat America.

As with the outcome of the Vietnam War, I think that remains to be seen. Victory and defeat can happen on many levels. And I think that is another reason we haven’t embraced a 9/11 vocabulary: Americans don’t like to lose. And for much of these two quasi-declared wars, it has not been at all clear from one month to the next just exactly what, if anything, we are winning.

 

9/11 is the incident we would prefer to forget, if only we could.