Patrick McGee (author of last year’s bestseller, Apple in China, and guest on The Talk Show in May), commenting on Twitter/X re: Tim Cook’s company-wide memo regarding the “events in Minneapolis”:
This literally says nothing, via intention and cowardice.
It’s the kind of language Orwell attributed to politicians, when
ready-made phrases assemble themselves and prevent any real
thought from breaking through.
I have previously linked to George Orwell’s seminal 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”. This time I’ll quote a different passage:
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad
writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the
writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and
not a “party line”. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand
a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the
speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to
party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in
them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches
some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained
tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live
human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly
becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s
spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker
who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward
turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming
out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be
if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is
making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again,
he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when
one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of
consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to
political conformity.In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence
of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule
in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the
atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments
which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not
square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus
political language has to consist largely of euphemism,
question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages
are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with
incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the
roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer
of population or rectification of frontiers. People are
imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the
neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental
pictures of them.
Now consider Cook’s memo. Cook avoids most of the sins Orwell describes. He uses short, common words. He eschews hackneyed metaphors. He uses the active, not passive, voice — for the most part. His prayers and sympathies are “with everyone that’s been affected.” Who, exactly, has been affected? Affected how? By whom? Numerous examples come to mind, but not from Cook’s memo. Two Minneapolitans were affected, quite adversely, by being shot in the head and back at point blank range, in broad daylight, by unhinged ICE goons. A five-year-old boy — himself a U.S.-born citizen — was affected when ICE agents apprehended his father, used the boy as bait to lure other family members, and is now being detained in a detention center in Texas.
The list is long, the stories searing. But Cook mentions nothing more specific than “everyone that’s been affected”. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them, indeed.
“This is a time for deescalation,” Cook wrote. But by whom? The masked federal agents laying siege to Minneapolis, brutalizing its citizenry? Or the thousands of law-abiding citizens protesting the occupation of their neighborhoods, who are, in the words of Seth Meyers, “deploying the most hurtful weapon of all, the bird”? Cook’s call for “deescalation” is meaningless without specifying which side he’s calling upon to change course, and there’s no weaker sauce than the weak sauce of “both sides”. Using words, not to make a point, but to avoid making a point while creating the illusion of having made one, is the true sin. From Orwell’s closing paragraph:
Political language — and with variations this is true of all
political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed
to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind.
It’s colder in Minnesota, but the wind is gusting in Cupertino.
