No. 17: Did I hear you right?
Listen for dangerous words.
The Old Truck on Tyranny.
This week continues a series inspired by Tim Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny and the “20 Lessons” derived from his study.
No. 17: Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.
Our family vacations in the seventies were simple, if we took them. Mom and Dad never let us feel the money pinch. Maybe a long weekend visit to an aunt’s cabin in Wyoming. Maybe a trip to Chico hot springs up near Livingston, where dinner was served family style at big round oak tables for eight, first come, first served. Once you settled in to your old wooden seat, a platter of fried chicken would soon appear along with a big bowl of buttery mashed potatoes to pass around and some steamy green beans to carefully avoid.
Then there was also that one time we spent two weeks in Dad’s station wagon driving over the Rockies to watch the U. S. bicentennial fireworks blow off in Portland while visiting another aunt, two uncles, and four cousins. This bombastic eve of burgers and fireworks was followed by an epic journey down the west coast to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm; the stuffings of seventies childhood dreams. My sisters and I came back to Montana with bragging rights after that family vacation.
Visiting family was just what we did, when there was time and money for travel. There were other small trips with family stops, to Denver, Lewistown, Sheridan, and such. For a time, I thought myself a tiny part of a big clan, united by my parent’s marriage. Both sides had family scattered about Wyoming and Montana. It would have never occurred to me that the word “family” could be turned on me like a weapon.
I was young.
For thirty years, from 1973 to 2003, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) thundered against the gays, along with everyone and anything else this old son of the southern Confederacy disdained the way he hated homosexuals: public lands, environmental protection, civil rights, feminism, and the arts. Jesse Helms was the politician who first loudly defined the term “family values” to mean aggressive state and federal policies opposed to all the above. The Heritage Foundation, Reagan administration, and hundreds of other organizations they inspired all stepped in line behind him. He and his network laid down the founding political ethos of the modern Christian nationalist movement in the USA.
Starting under Reagan’s two terms in the White House, the term “family” became a not so subtle code. It was a weapon for slicing boundaries against anyone Evangelical politicos needed to strategically exclude for membership and fundraising purposes. “Family” became a wall outside of which anything queer or strange could be banished, just before the pastor passed the collection plate.
These were my school years. I learned quickly that no matter how or to whom we are born, gay folks will never be part of some people’s “family.” An entertaining aunt who once warmly welcomed me to her Wyoming cabin on many summer family vacations years later drunkenly hissed to me in my mother’s kitchen that she thought I was a pervert, and a disgusting embarrassment to “the family.”
Homos being the clever folk we are, the gay rights movement responded to this weaponization of vocabulary by adopting the 1979 disco hit “We Are Family,” by Sister Sledge, as the gay national anthem. It has ever since been played, to death and then some, in virtually every lesbian and gay bar, and every Pride celebration, ever since. Old as it now is, we all still dance to it, or at least knowingly roll our eyes.
When you write someone out of your family, they will find one of their own. Harden a word into a weapon and someone will revise it in response.
Words are slippery like that, especially in English.
This political gimmick of redefining words towards a preferred political spin has become so common — on both the left and right — that historian Snyder explicitly warns us against it. He calls us to be alert, alive, and angry when people change the meaning of a word to wedge distinctions among those who might otherwise find common cause.
If we fail to resist such abuses of language, then storming the capitol to block an election becomes “patriotism,” just because some loudmouths say so. Excluding non-white people from a nation built on lands that were already occupied by red and brown people can become “American.” Supporting public health workers or the police can become “fascist.” And, historically low crime rates in D.C., or public protests in L.A., can become “emergencies” invoked to excuse deploying Unites States soldiers against the citizens they swore an oath to defend.
When my aunt told me I was no longer part of her “family,” I chose not to accept her abuse of that term. Eventually. In my own good time, I decided I was free to keep my family, as originally defined, and then expand it to include some friends who had been far kinder, and then my husband and his own family, once I met them.
This past week, my husband and I visited that now long-deceased aunt’s cabin in Wyoming. We did not stay the night, as they already had a full house. We stayed instead at the nearby Wagon Box Inn, an oddly scruffy place that has gained some recent notoriety.
My aunt’s youngest daughter warmly welcomed us. It was my first time back at the cabin in nearly forty years. It has hardly changed. The big mossy boulder is right where it belongs and the little brook still babbles out back under the porch.
Michael and I had a great time sharing family stories with two of my cousin’s thirtysomething year old children. They had just returned from swimming in the pond I can recall splashing around when I was all of two feet tall. These were my aunt’s grandkids.
Her grandson was there with a husband of his own.