James B. Nicola
I. The Star Wars Factor
The first time I saw Star Wars was when it came out, late spring or summer of ’77. I went with two roommates, one of whom had a car. I was the local from the greater Worcester area and recommended leaving earlier than we did. Strongly recommended. The car-owner misestimated afternoon crosstown traffic, so all three of us walked in late, which, even at my tender age of 18, irked me. An experienced projectionist for the Clark University Film Society, he was far more of a film buff than I was, so I can’t say that “all hell broke loose”—but if I told you that “all heaven broke loose,” would you be at all interested in reading on?
On taking our seats, screening underway, I thought I heard Luke or Leia say to someone, maybe one another, maybe Han Solo, “The Lord be with you.” I had left the Catholic church six years earlier, but recalled well the doxology (the call-and-response part of mass), where the response to that phrase was “. . . and also with you.” So I wondered what kind of religious allegory this space movie, unfolding before my eyes, was going to be.
Within minutes, some other character repeated the phrase, and I realized that they were saying “The Force be with you,” not The Lord.
Nonetheless, for the remainder of that screening, and every subsequent viewing of all Star Wars movies since, I have thought of “The Force” as an invocation of something not too unlike Divine Presence.
The late ’70s and early ’80s were years I happened to start seriously reading things like literature and so-called Scripture, including a Bible or two. I could not help but think how much more resonant and even irrefutable so much of the text of both Old Testament and New seemed when I thought of a Force, which might flow through all of us, rather than a Guy in the Sky, not terribly inclined to do so. “I Am That I Am” as the Deity’s “name” becomes—arguably—an expression of, why, perhaps even quantum theory itself, now that I think about it. Nothing gender-specific about the word “Force,” after all, nor about atoms, subatomic particles, or the way Mass can convert to Energy and then again to Space, Time, and/or Gravity. Which probably has something to do with the wellspring—and continuing outflow—of Creation, after all.
Something that I had heard while doing a science research project way back in the fifth grade, which for me was still in the 1960s, suddenly made sense: When Einstein and Neils Bohr and all those physicists got together for coffee or beer or whatnot, in the first part of the 20th century, their talk ended up not about physics, merely, but about the smallest particle, the largeness of the universe, the first thing ever, the last thing ever, and so on. And all that wondering ultimately led to discussion not of physics, but of God. (Perhaps it was voiced as “the God question” or “the God variable” or something—the ultimately inexplicable, that is.) All of a sudden a correlation between the notion of The Force and Spirituality seemed to make a modicum of sense.
Of course, no words of mine could suffice to discuss such a huge topic adequately, here or anywhere else. Well, perhaps in poetry, where the whole point is what is implied or evoked, not simply what is said: i.e., what lies in the “white space” between the words and the stanzas and the lines. Yeah, a poem could strive to articulate such a daunting concept, by not articulating it at all. That is the province of poetry, after all: evoking rather than declaring.
Still, it was through one simple shift in diction—in my mind—that a whole universe of insight opened up to me. So-called Scripture started to become something I reacted to less with a “What the—,” and more and more with an “Ah! Oh, I see! Of course!” The notion of God as Patriarch—vanished, replaced with an understanding of an ever-present and eternal Divine Force that transcends AND INCLUDES those five “things” quanta become. It was all awesome, and at the same time, awe-inspiring. It made me think about that First Commandment and its word, “fear” (in the King James version). I thought: that’s got to be a mistranslation from the Hebrew. It’s got to be “awe,” really. And what do you know but, decades later, I found out I was right!
By the simple use of the word Force, those screenwriters provided me with a key to start fathoming not the nature of the Divine, per se, but a practical way to think of It/Them/Her/Him/Us—the Force that’s Everywhere—that would make the lessons of the sages, prophets, saviors, mystics, and dalai lamas of all time, well, resonant and relevant to me, for all time.
The simple fact that my roommates and I sauntered in to the screening late that day, and that I therefore misheard a word, eventually set me on a path to better understand—not just the movie, but, gosh, Everything. And every now and then I wonder: Was our late arrival at the movie theater that day just a fluke—or was it the Synchronicity of the Universe?
II. Innocuous impishness
For decades, I have clung to three totally benign, fun malapropisms (not too unlike the adjustment of “Force” for “Lord”). Two date from childhood.
a. When I was about four, my cool teenage cousins came to visit. I remember Janet taking me (and at least one of my brothers) blueberry-picking in the woods down the street from us, and then afterwards walking me all the way to the children’s room of our town library a whole mile away. It soon became my favorite building in the world. I asked her what the word “fiction” meant, which I saw strewn around here and there on bookshelf labels. (I could sound out letters phonetically by this age, and read to a certain extent.) She told me it meant a story that was not true, or not necessarily true. And that I could pick a book—a “story”—from any shelf to take home and read. From that very day I have conflated “picking” a book with “picking” blueberries, and thought I understood why the place was called a “lie-berry,” that is, full of fictional stories—“lies”—you can pick off the shelves and take home.
b. Around the same year we must have visited my Italian grandfather for the first time (or first I remember) and I still recall the day he served us kids spaghetti. Well, my brother John—the middle kid—would not use the spoon (or plate) to roll the spaghetti on the fork, as Grandpa demonstrated—a two-handed affair, with a spoon. Grandpa was a stickler for deportment, having raised my mom and aunt. John, though, reveled in sucking in each string of spaghetti, the long way (what kid doesn’t?). Eventually, a few at a time. My brother George and I still recall this meal, almost six decades ago! As you no doubt know, the sound effect accompanying any kid eating spaghetti this way makes PERFECT sense why we called this particular noodle: pis-ghetti. A variation I use to this day.
Years later I learned French and music and that the word library was related to livre and libretto and the like, but I still say lie-berry and love telling folks why, if anyone asks. It makes for a bit of interesting conversation, at the very least. And when I started to learn Italian, I learned that spago means string, and spaghetti was a diminutive form of that word, which through usage came to mean the long-stringed noodle. But I still say pis-ghetti, simply to honor my grandfather and that memorable meal. (By the way, though I did learn how to eat it “properly,” I never did learn how to spell pis-ghetti properly, since it is not actually a word.)
c. It was only as an adult that I happened to be waiting for an interview in an office in Atlanta, and the very nice secretary-receptionist called the Liquid Paper® she needed, a.k.a. Wite-Out®: “Wipe-Out.” Not as a verb, as in “I need to wipe out something,” but as a noun, as in “I have to order another little bottle of Wipe Out.” I thought that was brilliant. And so in the days before printers, the era when we used typewriters and covered over typos, I started to call the stuff “Wipe Out,” too, just for the fun of it, since what I was actually doing was, in fact, wiping out a boo-boo. And besides, (1) Liquid Paper® was not actually paper, but liquid; and (2) the little bottles of Wite-Out® spelled a word incorrectly anyway.
III. Glimmers from a gadfly
In the last few decades, I have adopted several other adjustments in diction. Something like malaproprisms, I guess, to the untrained ear. It seems the screenplay to Star Wars, and my mis-hearing of the word “Force,” inspired me to believe in the potentially beneficial uses of adjustment, particularly as the practice of Newspeak has been rising to almost epidemic levels.
a. “Reality TV?”
“What’s real about it,” I asked a friend who was trying to explain to me the conceit of a TV show in the ’90s like Lost, or Survivor, or whatever it was. Not real, but contrived, no? When folks explained to me the idea behind these shows, I would ask, So what’s really meant is something like a game show with interviews? Or a scenario with improvised, or ad-libbed, rather than scripted, dialogue, yes? But even the film Dog Day Afternoon had improvised dialogue. So by “reality” TV does one mean “unscripted, contrived-scenario” TV? Like Candid Camera, then, eh? But rather than discovering the contrivance after the fact in a “Smile—You’re on Candid Camera” moment, the “mark” or “contestant” knows they are on TV right from the start, is that it?
Even what we call a “documentary” film or TV show is contrived—choices of camera angles, editing, and so forth, all support the filmmaker’s idea, or theme, or vision, and underscore why a story is important for us to know, or at least should be of interest.
I once heard another friend say she had to get home to watch a particular show for “a dose of reality.” (If you are up on TV shows, you can name whichever one comes to mind.) I asked her, “Do you think such-and-such program has anything to do with reality?” She had to think about it awhile, first to understand what I even meant. Finally she did agree with me and conceded what, to me, was evident. I clarified that I didn’t think anything was wrong with enjoying a TV show concocted expressly to be enjoyed. Beat the Clock and The Gong Show were designed to entertain, too, after all. But what’s wrong with enjoying your favorite show for a dose of UN-reality—and knowing you are doing so?
The difference is not always benign. My nephew, during his middle school years, could not get it through his mind that the Big Time Wrestling on TV was actually staged and phony. When he saw burly guys smash metal folding chairs on each others’ heads, well, he got an idea. And did the same. At school. Other kid—hurt. Hospitalized? I don’t know. Nephew—suspended. I did not find out about the story till years later. But when he was in ninth grade, which would make him a teenager—you do remember how becoming a teenager suddenly makes you know just about everything, right? —he finally informed me, with all the smarmy precociousness of an expert, that wrestling on TV was actually fake, after all. He may or may not have recalled that I had told him the same thing a few years earlier. Over the next few years, he still got into trouble now and then, but at least not by smashing chairs on top of other kids’ heads as if it were something one might actually do in the “real world.”
Thanks so much for the entertaining shows, WWF. Thanks so much, Douglas, for finally telling me the story.
By the way, my friend Lance told me, when I told him about my nephew, that he too smashed a chair on his younger brother’s head one day—inspired by television “wrestling”—and has never forgiven himself. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind my mentioning him in this article, and he said Go right ahead. Just so you, dear reader, don’t start thinking that my nephew’s case was an isolated incident.
For more than four centuries, the wrestling scene in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It has never been construed as a real wrestling match. What would be wrong with calling Big Time Wrestling a “theatrical production,” or a “staged fight scene,” and calling the wrestlers, if not “actors,” then at least “performers.” The World Wrestling Federation® won’t do it, will they? And why should they, after all, unless required by law? On the other hand, doesn’t that suggest: we should do it, that is, try to call things what they are, every now and then? Just so another kid doesn’t get a metal folding chair denting his cranium in school. Isn’t that reason enough?
Anyway, to help me stay in the world that is, rather than the one of hype, I use the phrase “unreality TV.” Just to encourage anyone who happens to be listening to start seeing and thinking, well, more like ornery gadflyish me, and less like mindless consumers of Newspeak, where words and terms are used to mean the opposite of what the words or terms denote. So that we might remember that there’s nothing actually “real” about so-called “reality TV” after all.
When some new appellation seems misleading to me, sometimes its implication is totally harmless. Still, knowing the harm that might be inflicted, the power of Newspeak drives me crazy to the point of . . . well . . . read on.
b. “Creative writing” and “creative nonfiction”?
What the—? How can anyone write anything without creating it, and hence, being creative? In this case, the two-word phrases seem not inconsistencies but rather redundancies, a.k.a. pleonasms (how’s that for a word?). What would un-creative writing or un-creative nonfiction be, then? Bookkeeping? signatures? dictation? copying? signage? medical records? transcriptions of conversation?
Could “un-creative” writing refer to essay, perhaps?—or journalism? But I would be hard-pressed to say that an essayist is not the creator of an essay or article, and hence, engaged in “creative writing.” What is more, it could be that a particular essayist or journalist has such an important thing to say that it must be delivered with unadorned authority, laced more with facts than with figurative language. Narrator-as-witness. Recall what Sgt. Friday used to say on the TV show Dragnet: “just-the-facts, Ma’am.”
Is “creative” supposed to suggest lyrical, poetical, or florid writing? Including (1) instances where the prose enlists techniques not “typically” associated with essay or journalism: metaphor, simile, maybe even anaphora and epistrophe and the like? (2) narrating a tale through letters, lists, menus, screenplay format, or whatnot, because such abnormal—creative—choices serve the novel? But isn’t it equally a literary choice to enlist a style of, say, authoritative objectivity? Naturalist novelists, from Flaubert and Stendahl to Dreiser and Sinclair down to Dos Passos and Hemingway—all developed their own seemingly dry, factual style to incredible effect. In nonfiction, Thoreau also comes to mind, as does his mentor Emerson. Not to mention Plato and a slew of other philosophers.
Still, why does one not just study “writing,” or write a piece of “nonfiction?” Why is the word “creative” tagging along? Is there a hidden, unintentional agenda that accompanies the terminology? Are there any possible MFA-holders out there who have studied ways of being “creative” for two or three years, but cannot even so much as list for us the Parts of Speech? Or draft a cover letter? Or proofread copy for grammatical mistakes and style inconsistencies? Creativity is certainly more fun than the study of, say, grammar and style. Would MFA programs in creative writing be hard-pressed to get, or keep, students, if their curricula emphasized style and—(shudder)—grammar? I wonder.
Anyway, to be true to my role as curmudgeon or gadfly, I like to say “created writing,” just to make the pleonasm clearer and maybe get a reaction. Ditto: “created nonfiction.” When someone asks “what do you mean by that,” I ask “well what do you mean by creative writing?” It’s a fun discussion.
By the way, next writing convention you attend, if you find yourself in a cozy and friendly seminar or workshop, try polling the participants: Who knows what “diagramming a sentence” means? And then pass around paper and pens and ask them to list the Parts of Speech. Then you’ll begin to get an idea as to whether “creative writing” programs are turning out actual writers, or merely “creatives.”
c. “Social media”
Whaddaya mean? Wouldn’t it more accurately be referred to as “a-social media?” After all, it means someone is NOT getting together with the other person or people, but rather, a pixel-constructed version of a person instead? And with some of the platforms, is not actual conversation being replaced by sound-bytes, actual socializing by mere hype?
Even emojis are someone ELSE’s expressions, aren’t they? Certainly Video Conference Calls were welcome when we could not get together during lockdown—and still are, since the danger is not over. But pandemic notwithstanding, let’s not let ourselves be brainwashed into thinking that communication through pixels—chat rooms or character-limited comments—is “socializing.” As far as I’m concerned, it is a-socializing. Not to call it names. But so that we might remember that for socializing, which we need, we might want to call someone up (!) and talk on the phone or actually—shudder—get together and share a pixel-free meal—devices down—one day. That’s SOCIAL. The other might be called “short-form writing’” or “posted comments” or whatnot, but regardless of what those huge and powerful platforms call themselves, I will call them a-social media. Just to help me keep my sanity. And to remind me to pick up the phone.
d. In other words
By using the word “glimmers” above (in section III’s subtitle), of course, I can easily be accused of arrogance: as if anything I might think could shed light on anything, ha! But I only do so because I spent most of my formative years, basically, in darkness.
In Plato’s Myth of the Cave (“myth” here meaning “metaphor”), we are all chained up in a dark place, but can look beyond the cave’s mouth to glimpse what lies in the more illuminated world. (To me, these two realms could stand for all sorts of things: existence, life, society, culture, civilization, a set of ethics or mores, ad infinitum.) So from our chains, we do not see the sun, or source of light, but only the way it illuminates a terrestrial outer world, casts shadows, etc. (Indirect light, incidentally, is almost always the best for houseplants, so it does have its practical uses.)
Anyway, now and then some human gets free and ventures into that outside world only to find the sunlight so blinding that (s)he goes right back into the cave—and promptly puts those chains back on.
I am not claiming to be such a person. Only to suggest an amendment to Plato’s metaphor: that if any one of us does manage to get out of the cave, and if the light seems too unbearable, maybe we need not go all the way back to where the chains beckon. Settle near the cave entrance, say—or stay outside, under a tree. And if there are no trees, wear a sombrero. And sunglasses! We do not need to stay in the dark. In other words, why not check out the brighter light, see what you think? But please, do think, at least a bit, even if basking in only the scantest glimmer.
So some of the adjustments I have held onto are not totally facetious but rather to remind myself of glimmers I may have glimpsed once upon a time, during or after my dark period. For years I didn’t so much as even mention them. But they have indeed helped one perhaps-over-sensitive person—me—to make sense of a cruel and crazy world, by reminding me of its nonsense. Lately, though, I have been hearing more and more nonsense of a dangerous sort, so I am sharing some of my adjustments now in case you, too, might find them helpful in realizing that it may just be the world, not you, that is crazy.
e. “Self-styled” and “so-called”
Remember, just because its purveyors called their scenario-game-show format “reality TV” did not make it so. Likewise with so many things: for one, political ideology. So throughout the 1980s I used the phrase “self-styled communism” or “so-called socialism” for governments that were actually totalitarian, i.e., dictatorships—and prison states, to boot. After all, there have been capitalist dictatorships as well, even in self-styled or so-called “democracies.” (The biggest country on the planet—three decades into its existence as a democracy—just invaded a neighboring country, right?) Should we, then, use the terms “democracy” or “free country” for nations where most people are excluded from participating?
New England town meetings—that is democracy, or pretty close. Ancient Athens—not really at all. “Proto-democracy,” “limited democracy,” perhaps. But with most Athenians excluded (women + slaves + children—you do the math) even the so-called “Birthplace of Democracy”—wasn’t. “So-called” and “self-styled” seem like gentle prefixes to get this point across while still giving those Greeks credit for what was certainly a bold and radical experiment in its day.
Recall how quickly, a few thousand years later, the United States forsook the founding principle that “all men are created equal” with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in 1776 to institutionalize chattel slavery—in the Constititution—just eleven years later. A system where one group of people not only had the right to own others—steal their lives and labor—but also dispossess, relocate, rename, rape, torture, dismember, and murder them—massacre them, in fact—just because of birth. Can you call that democracy? Or a free country? Or would you call that hypocrisy? Or even evil? I leave it to you. But certainly “so-called democracy” is a gentler way of reminding people that both “liberty” and “democracy” are actually works-in-progress—so let’s keep working, people! Together, one day, maybe? Would that be too much to ask?
IV. Four More Phrases to Eschew
a. “ethnic cleansing”
What is being cleansed? If what is involved is genocide, then let us say it. Let us not let the wicked get away with murder without calling it what it is.
b. “human trafficking”
Is this not what Lyft® and Greyhound® do? If what is involved is actually the slave trade, then let us say it. Let us not let the wicked get away with kidnaping, rape, pimping, extortion, and so forth, without calling them what they are.
c. “education”
The word’s etymology—e-duce—is related to the word “duct”—to lead out. In this case, to lead out of . . . the dark. That cave! If, however, a curriculum or school leads one back into the cave, into the dark, then let us call it what it is: indoctrination.
Back in my day, a certain TV commercial slung the aphorism, “To get a good job, get a good education.” Now, decades later, we have the widespread promotion of S.T.E.M., as if Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics were all that public education should entail, at the expense of essential skills like communication, teamwork, problem-solving, public speaking, listening, leadership, time management, and Civics—all essential training for a participating citizen of a democracy, no?
A particular American professor who was born in the Soviet Union—a dictatorship—once said to a friend of mine, a colleague of hers, “S.T.E.M: the perfect educational system for a dictatorship!” She should know. It gives one pause—at least, it does, me. And isn’t it indeed the educational system in the novel 1984, where every worker is a mere technician, and virtually no one thinks for themself? Should we not have arts, humanities, citizenship, history, and so forth in the curriculum: something about the plight of the human soul over the last few millennia, and how fragile and false a democracy is if we do not actually VOTE. Why not have an ad campaign today to tell young people: “To be a good citizen, get a good education?” Is that not just as important for a nation where the government is supposed to derive its authority from the “just consent of the governed?” How can the governed consent wisely without a civic and humane foundation? S.T.E.M. and filling in dots on standardized tests do not cut the mustard, do they?
By the way, how can anything be called “education” that bans books? Putting a book behind a counter if it contains adult content is one thing. But banning access totally? Come on, people. That is the opposite of education. That is, indeed, indoctrination.
d. “War”
In my imaginary standup comedy routine, I riff a bit on the fact that there can be no such a thing as a “civil war” (“Excuse me, sir, would mind uncrossing your legs before I blast you to smithereens?”) or, for that matter, a “cold war.” Not quite oxymorons, but pretty close—“oxymoronic,” let us say (as opposed to simply “moronic”). But sometimes “war” is used when what is really going on is not “war,” but, rather, “invasion and occupation.” Warsome activities are involved—“military action” works, for sure. But I wonder: If all the Vietnam protesters had called it “The proxy-war in Vietnam” or “The undeclared war in Vietnam” instead of “The Vietnam War”—when no war was ever declared, and there was—or at least might have been—no real enemy in Vietnam, would the casual listener have understood the quagmire we were in that much sooner?
One might consider, for instance, that in an undeclared war, there is no one to surrender and end the kerfuffle. Cases in point: the recent invasion-and-occupations of Iraq-2 and Afghanistan.
If you asked a Brit in the 1800s or early 1900s, say, “Do you support the war in India?” they would be hard-pressed to say “no” and be dissed as disloyal to king or queen or country. But did the UK ever declare war on India? I believe not. Rather, they denied that India even existed except as a possession of theirs, the “Jewel in the Crown” of British colonial conquests. What war? The natives “in rebellion” were cast as “the bad guys”—even though they were the ones fighting for liberty.
But did anyone think to ask a British subject, “Do you support the invasion of India?” Or by extension, ask a citizen of any colonial power (yesterday or today): “Do you support your country’s illegal invasion of ___INSERT NAME OF PLACE___ and continued occupation of it into perpetuity?”— Well, you might start someone thinking, “Whaddaya mean, illegal invasion? Whaddaya mean occupation?” In other words, the person you ask might just start to get somewhere real, rather than creative. They might start to see how a-social their superpower nation actually is, or was. Then maybe the world would get somewhere. Like—out of the cave.
Ditto with the phrase “The War in Ireland,” older than modern English itself, since it (arguably) dates back to the late 13th century and, depending on how you look at things, is still going on today. But ask the British citizenry if they would support that invasion and occupation of Ireland in perpetuity and you would at least get more of a discussion.
I admit to not being much of a politico, but I can at least try to use “right words” or “righter” words for things, rather than call them what “they” want me to call them, by calling them not Gulf Wars, but Iraq Invasions 1 and 2, and the Korean and Vietnam Proxy Wars, and the “Invasion and Occupation” of Afghanistan—which will help explain why we were there for twenty years with no actual goal! As for America’s second-longest “war”—in the Philippines, but what American learns about this in school? —what could that possibly be called? We, too, were fighting the freedom fighters! Could you help me out here?
Eventually, the Philippines gained their independence (from us) in spite of our military efforts, as did India from Britain, most of Ireland from Britain, most of Africa from much of Europe, and Vietnam from France, Japan, England (only long enough to hand it back to…) France again, and the United States. But if more citizens—supposedly “sovereign” in a so-called democracy—had been standing just a bit closer to the light outside the Cave, could these goals not have come to pass with fewer casualties?
So you see, when I say “a-social media” or “creat-ed writing” or “un-reality TV,” my long-term objective is to get more people thinking, well, like me, I suppose, but not just when it’s inconsequential or humorous: more importantly, when a rejection of Newspeak might help lead the way—dare I say light the way?—that could end up saving a life or two. Or a few million.