Bye bye, DEI

by David Benjamin

“The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
    
“It isn’t just one of your holiday games…” —T.S. Eliot

MADISON, Wis.—If there’s any silver lining in America’s descent toward strongman despotism, it’s the left wing’s opportunity to undertake a linguistic reset, to heed Thoreau’s advice: “Simplify, simplify.”

The people who uneasily call ourselves liberals are getting a boost toward defogging our language by a thousand cowardly corporations, universities and other institutions who have caved to right-wing pressure and begun dismantling their official “DEI” programs. To which I say, “Que sera sera.” No one who sincerely cares about diversity, equity and inclusion should mourn the demise of an acronym whose spelled-out meaning is known to perhaps a fifth of all Americans. “DEI” seems doomed to follow in the footsteps of “BLM,” a moribund monogram quietly reverting to the Bureau of Land Management.

Anyone who has observed politics since the dirty-tricks apogee of Richard Nixon knows that America’s so-called “conservatives” (a term today no more accurate than “liberal”) have mastered the rhetorical art of visceral simplicity. Nothing needs to be explained in three-word incitements like, “Stop the Steal,” “Fight Like Hell” and “Blood and Soil,” which roll off the forked tongue and beg to be chanted. Ignorant they may be, but ignorant is the charm.

By comparison, “DEI,” “BLM,” “CRT” or “LGBTQ+”—even addressed to doubters who know what all those letters stand for—require expositions far longer than the 280-character attention span of your typical 21st-century news consumer.

(I know, I know. Who knows what “news” is anymore? And when did people stop reading and start “consuming”? Let’s talk about this later.)

Anyone with an ounce of sympathy for the principles that motivated the Black Lives Matter movement understands the slogan’s intention. But its ambiguity, exacerbated by its brevity, invites racist counterpoint. The utterance of “BLM” in mixed company tends to trigger tired arguments over why shouldn’t “all lives matter,” or “what about brown lives,” or “don’t white lives matter,” or “what makes a life black” or “what do you mean by ‘matter’,” inevitably wandering off into multi-pronged digression, further obscuring the phrase’s original obscurity and petering into an ideological stalemate.

By the same token, has any conscientious left-leaning linguist yet noticed that elgeebeeteekewplus is a tongue-twister that only true believers bother to pronounce? And what, I have yet to figure out, does the “+” signify? Does it mean something, or is it just a contingency to cover a so far undeclared gender variation? And for that matter, aren’t both the “L” and the “G” covered by the “Q”?

While bigots and reactionaries revel in name-calling whose expletives everybody understands, the left has wasted energy and sympathy in name-fixing, changing a well-understood term (fairness) to one less understood (DEI), requiring a definition that nobody seems able to articulate. The prime example of liberal linguistics backfiring is “woke,” a word that fell briefly into fashion, but didn’t last long enough for any sentient liberal to tell anyone what the hell it meant.

It hung in the air meaninglessly until snagged by right-wing demagogues who—astutely—turned it onto a bludgeon that has beaten a thousand helpless progressives into a state of concussed incoherence.

There is an antidote, I think, to “woke” that can’t be twisted into mockery by the Right. It’s “cool.” Of course, the cool thing about “cool” is that you can’t define it. It’s something you know when you see it, or more accurately, when—if you’re cool—you sense it. More important, cool is too cool to be mocked or compromised. Cool floats above it all. If a stiff like Ron DeSantis tried to campaign against the corruption of our children by “cool culture,” he would only succeed in proving himself totally uncool. We’ve had cool presidents—Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton sometimes. Barack Obama forever. Harry Truman, with all due respect to Miles Davis, might have been the birth of the cool. But we’ve never had a Republican president—or very many Republicans at all—even close to cool.

And today? Anyone who kneels in obeisance to a short-fingered golden-ager with a tangerine complexion and a bottle-blond combover has no concept of cool, and never will.

Before PC—another lamentable acronym appropriated by the right wing—began to plague well-meaning liberalism with euphemisms, weasel-words and arcane abbreviations, the American experiment used words than rang out with clarity and inspiration. I remember that civil rights never turned into CR and the anthem of the movement was never reduced to WSO. I think of Martin Luther King saying “I have a dream.” I think of the Memphis sanitation workers lined up across the street bearing signs that read “I AM A MAN”. I think of Sally Field in Norma Rae holding high that scribbled sign that read “UNION.”

Which reminds me of Abraham Lincoln. He held America together by invoking the “Union,” which is the second noun that appears—after “people”—in the Constitution. Everyone not only got Abe’s drift, they understood the power and implications of that simple word. But then, on a November day at Gettysburg in 1863, with the war still undecided, Lincoln changed the most important term in his political vocabulary. Aware that its lifespan as a rallying cry was past, Lincoln did not mention the Union. At Gettysburg, in the most important speech of his life, he chose to refer twice to America as a “nation.” A simple change to a simple word, but it forever altered Americans’ very perception of themselves and their democratic polity. Moreover, although I suspect hardly anyone noticed, he thenceforth turned the United States from a plural to a singular noun.

Before, people would say, “The United States are … ” After Lincoln, they said, “The United States is … ”

Abraham Lincoln remains the most eloquent leader in America’s history. He was our most thoughtful speaker. He understood the power of language, so he took care with what he said and strove to speak in terms that everyone could understand and no one could misconstrue.

Abe was, in a word—at a time when passions burned, when lies and slurs were otherwise the currency of public discourse—cool.