Denote refers to the literal thing. If one screams “fuck” when one makes a mistake is one denoting rough sexual intercourse? Not likely. To connote is to refer to qualities implied or suggested by that thing, but not the thing itself. In trying to apply the above example I am therefore lost — obviously we often use the F word solely for emphasis…as far as I know when one says, “that’s a big fucking tree” one does not imagine the tree engaged in sexual intercourse. So how did “qualities implied or suggested” by sexual intercourse become an intensifier, how did a word for sex become a word for adding emphasis?
Parallels
Here are some frames from Blind Spot — Hitler’s Secretary, that is pretty much one long contemporary interview with that woman. It is a wonderful example of how we humans can deceive ourselves, delude ourselves and blinker ourselves.
Now, of course, she realizes what she had willed herself not to see or admit, just as now many people (many less than previously) refuse to admit what the Bush admin is doing because the politicians and others push their buttons with words or national security, terrorists, democracy, small government…
Our ability to live in denial and hide from facts in front of our faces is obvious. I am thinking that it must have evolved out of a survival mechanism — some mental ability that helps one focus on the hunt, on courtship, on our children and on other ancient behaviors that are essential and absolutely necessary…necessary at the time that they are needed.
The fact that demagogues, advertisers, marketing experts and religious leaders have learned to tap into these powerful instincts is unfortunate, but maybe inevitable. In fact, since it is natural that we have these abilities, maybe it is also natural that they will be exploited and that some will become skilled at this exploitation.
However, as powerful and irresistible as these buzzwords are, it is possible to resist them and be aware when they are being employed — employed for better or worse. And then to make a decision whether one wants to be manipulated or self-deluded, or not. There are times when a certain amount of self delusion is “good”, when it allows us to accomplish a necessary task, create something unlikely or new, or even speak out — and in those cases it might be deemed worthy.
E.B. White, Death and Hope
Read E.B. White’s skinny little book This Is New York. It was written in 1948 as an assignment for Holiday magazine — I’m not sure travel and leisure mags would accept a piece like this these days — it concludes with some very prescient meditations on death and war.
When he wrote this piece, a few years after WWII, the UN building was either just completed or was being built. He points out that after that war all cities, New York being a prime example, were opportunities for massive carnage and destruction on a scale not hitherto imagined:
"A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages, cremate the millions."
Cities once were secure refuges for people — whether walled like the Medieval ones or not — they were places where people met, haggled and were to a degree protected. Now, with the atomic bomb especially, the protection part has been turned upside down.
But he notes that just as this shadow begins to loom over great mixtures of humanity like New York, an institution, the UN, rises to attempt to put an end to this threat. Death and hope, simultaneously, as always.
That the U.S. has clearly and brazenly taken an anti-UN stance in recent years — failed to pay their bills and has acted in defiance of UN resolutions and principles is a bad sign. The U.S. are not the only ones to have done so, but being the biggest kid on the block, it’s the most obvious, visible and ominous. It sends a sign to all the other kids that this kind of behavior is OK. A sign that death is sometimes more powerful than hope, temporarily. The UN is far from perfect — self interested parties and nations skew its abilities to perform its mission, its members are human — but the fact that that a little ray of hope still exists and it is unavailable to corporate lobbyists, religious demagogues and crooked election rigging is something.
