I heard on the radio last night that whoever set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon was "trying to send a message," but unless the message is "I am a homicidal maniac," bombs are a particularly ineffective rhetorical method. (That's why we don't teach bomb construction in composition classes.)
So many ways to send a message: letters, books, tweets, music, manifestos. The Donald Barthelme story "The Balloon" portrays a man who deploys an ambiguous message--a gigantic red balloon--onto which observers project their own meanings, which differ from the private meaning intended by the balloon's author. But no human beings were harmed in the deployment of this balloon.
What sort of message might a bomb convey? News analysts suggested a number of motivations: maybe the bomber has a grievance against the Boston Marathon or athletes, or maybe the bomber hates Americans (on Patriot Day!) or hates paying taxes (on income tax day!). Anyone who wants to protest paying taxes ought to revisit Thoreau,who never threw any bombs but whose message about civil disobedience remains clear and compelling. If the "machine of government" produces injustice, says Thoreau, the citizen has three choices: wait for the machine to wear out; consider whether "the remedy would be worse than the evil"; or "Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine."
Thoreau was willing to throw his body into the gears of the machine, sacrificing his own comfort for his cause; he didn't drag his neighbors to jail with him or inscribe a painful message on the bodies of random strangers. That's why Thoreau's message still earns our attention even if we disagree. The bomber who hides behind technology to toss strangers' bodies into the machine may in fact be trying to send a message, but the only message listeners will remember is one of horror and hatred and incomprehensible evil.
Need to send a message? Words work better than bombs, cost less, and last forever, as Robinson Jeffers reminds us in "To the Stone-Cutters":
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
4 comments:
I can't disagree that words are certainly safer than bombs in conveying messages, but I don't know that they "work" better. After all, our entire discipline is constructed around the many interpretations of meaning. Who was it that said we never say what we mean and we never mean what we say? Words, apart from their assigned meanings have implied meanings; synonyms never say the same twice, all words are not equally accessible to all users, and words are never formed in a vaccuum. Then you have the misinformed listeners if, under the New Critical tradition of literary theory, you can ever really "misinterpret" a passage.
So no I don't know that words work better. Regardless, the world could do with less bombs.
Words have a resonant effect; this much I know. But when I read that words are never "formed in a vacuum" (what a strange spelling that is) and I remember a Polymer Technology course and vacuum forming, I'm suddenly less certain of what I know. I don't think that it's by vacuum process that words achieve form. But are they like gasses or liquids, expanding to fill the space? No, that's not the case either. Someone should write an essay, or a blog post, on the Physics of words.
D.
Good point, but it depends on what we mean by "work." What sort of work do we expect of words?
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