Words

Words

I was an English major in college, which of course left me with great love and respect for words. And I once took a class in what was called “general semantics,” which was filled with lots of cryptic observations like “the map is not the territory.”

That was a way of saying that the words we use to describe something do not actually describe it, not all of it. Which sounds like a meaningless generality until the night you try to drive over the bridge your GPS says is there, only to find out it was washed out a month before.

(I could have said ‘such’ as instead of ‘like’ in that first sentence, but us English majors have the secret power to warp phrases and misuse punctuation marks to give added meaning or just for fun).

Anyway, reflecting on the denial that the Muslim ban proposed by Donald Trump’s administration is not really a Muslim ban because it doesn’t bar all Muslims from entering the United States makes me wish that only English majors knew about the power to warp words.

Oh, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it must be a duck is mostly true - although rubber duckies do not make good targets for hunters - but there is a lot more to dislike in this denial.

Lets see how many words have been bent and how many have actually been debated in the public forum. In no particular order:

1 - You don’t have to ban all Muslims to impose a ban on Muslims. Germans didn’t kill every Jew in Europe and lynch mobs in the south didn’t kill every black, but those rotten displays of behavior were clearly anti-Semitic and racist.

2 - If you decide to stop people from entering your country because they may pose a threat, you probably should start with the most dangerous people first. Banning six year old children and elderly grandparents has nothing to do with terrorism. If you say we are just banning all people from countries roiled by terror, than the ban should certainly include France and Israel. And, maybe, any country that has a national soccer team.

3 - If you claim that this ban is making our country safer by keeping out the bad dudes and dudettes, then you should say what’s wrong with the existing vetting procedure and how you will fix it.

4 -  And as long as we’re on enhanced vetting, just what is it? I recently watched the new head of Homeland Security on TV explain that it meant looking up people on social media and checking their e-mail to see if they have contacts with terrorists. Somehow, I don’t feel much safer.

5 - You can’t say this abrupt shift in procedure is needed to keep us safe, and then say it will end in 60 or 90 or 120 days. That lets the bad dudes and dudettes just wait 60 or 90 pr 120 days to apply for admission to our country, and then just wait for a year or two to go through our old vetting process.

6 - You can’t deny that this new process is harming our national security because it only keeps some bad people out of the country.  Not until you explain how a translator working for the Army in one of those banned nations can not get into the country even though that promise was made to him years ago. 

   Of course, those clever radical Islamists might have planted a sleeper or two in our intelligence service years ago, and had them work as translators against their own people for years just to get into the United States.

  Or, maybe, they could have just sent him or her to school, got good grades, and gotten admitted to some American college, which would have been less work and cheaper, too.

So, I guess the misused word for the day is “security.”