May 27, 2024

Infinity Mirror

A few weeks ago, I googled the phrase, “moral clarity,” because I’d been hearing it a lot lately in the context of protesters for standing up for a ceasefire in Gaza and Palestinian statehood, and I realized I actually didn’t know what “moral clarity” meant.

And before you start thinking I’m that obfuscating bad-faith “just asking questions” guy, as I googled “moral clarity,” I’d also just sent an email to the President of the university of which I’m both an alumnus and a neighbour voicing my support of students encampments, suggesting that I’d prefer the university administration to work with the protesters and learn from them too, instead of the nightmare of having protesters violently cleared as we’ve seen at other institutions. I’m writing this post now weeks later with the protesters facing the imminent possibility of forcible removal, as though this was the most pressing issue of our time, instead of the people burned alive in Rafah last night, the very people for whom the university protesters are rallying. Like, let’s have some perspective.

But even against a backdrop of abject horror, our words matter.

The article I found when I googled “moral clarity” was Frank Guan’s 2019 essay from The New York Times, “What Could Be Wrong With a Little Moral Clarity?” written in response to a line uttered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the summer before after she’d won a Democratic-primary over an incumbent. “Until recently,” Guan writes, “‘moral clarity’ was more likely to signal combativeness toward the left, not from it: It served for decades as a badge of membership among conservative hawks and cultural crusaders.” He continues, “What adrenaline does for the body, moral clarity does for semantics: It generates a surge of willpower, serving as a prelude to—and maybe a pretext for—combat.”

And I was thinking about Guan’s essay as I read critiques and take downs of Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay, “Shibboleth,” a piece I admired, which is also about how semantics becomes a weapon. Stacey Lee Kong of Friday Things (whose work I admire as well) called out Smith for “both-sidesing,” Kong and other readers discussing the essay as confusing, its point indecipherable, though I wish they’d tried a little harder to understand. That Smith’s piece is about the problem with “moral clarity,” with imagining that there is nothing remotely analogous about the following examples just because one happens to be on the right side of history (because everyone thinks they’re on the right side of history):

It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it.

It is also a great relief to say, “Moral clarity.” Even though, as Smith writes, “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” Even though, “Hamas will not be ‘eliminated.’ The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.”

I’ve been thinking of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger for months now, especially its consideration of Israelis and Palestinians being mirror images of each other, and how it turns out these mirrors are infinity mirrors, and moral clarity is part of the problem. And about how when protesters are speaking of “moral clarity,” as Guan writes, they’re unwittingly using language created by their political opponents, by Cold Warriors in the 1950s, by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, George W. Bush in his 2004 Presidential campaign, and Alan Dershowitz, author of the 2009 book The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza, whose moral clarity is a different moral clarity than than of the protesters—or is it really?

I think of how often, when you ever try to fight a monster, the monster turns into you.

Isn’t fighting moral clarity with moral clarity a bit like fighting fire with fire? I’m still thinking of that line I read in the newspaper in March: “Both sides brought large speaker systems and screamed duelling chants at each other.” And where we do go from there? And isn’t it moral clarity that got us here in the first place? Moral clarity and righteousness, and isn’t unpacking such simplistic notions (constantly testing our ethics, rather than smug certainty) the only way to break the cycle, for the mirror to finally shatter so we can see the world as it is?

January 6, 2011

A Poem: Tea words as appropriated from Oxford Canadian Dictionary

tea. tea bag. tea ball. teaberry. tea biscuit. tea bread. tea break. tea caddy. teacake. tea ceremony. tea chest. tea cozy. teacup. tea dance. tea garden. tea house. tea lady. tea leaf. tea party. tea plant. teapot. teapoy. tea room. tea rose. tea service. tea shop. teaspoon. tea strainer. tea table. tea time. tea towel. tea tray. tea tree. tea trolley.

October 27, 2010

Do the Grandpa

Stuart was excited to discover the 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World, in particular “Iktsuarpok”, which is an Inuit word meaning, “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.” Iktsuarpok actually is translatable, at least into our family shorthand, in which “to go outside [or to the window] to check if anyone is coming” is to “Do the Grandpa”. Both of us remember pulling up to our grandparents’ as children, and seeing Grandpa appearing at the window because he’d been listening for our car. Which is to say that both our Grandfathers had either keen ears, or rather empty days, or maybe they had both sometimes, or traded one for another as their lives got longer. Or maybe it’s to say nothing in particular at all, because both of us from time to time find ourselves Doing the Grandpa too.

June 15, 2009

The Name Game

We got a cat when I was fourteen, and as I was the oldest and precocious, I decided I would name it. I named it Socks first, I think, after the White House cat (naturally). But then seeing as our cat didn’t have socks, I decided to name it Tim Johnson instead, which was the name of the dog in To Kill A Mockingbird, and I liked the idea of pets with surnames. But that was stupid, so I changed the cat’s name to Daisy, and I can’t remember why. Then we found out that Daisy was a Tom, so I decided she would be called Casey (at the bat?). And then when I decided to change the cat’s name next, my family called it off and Casey the cat stayed, though I never called it that. I always called it Cat, because I’d seen Breakfast at Tiffanys, and wanted to go Golightly.

So this was why I was apprehensive about naming my child. Though I’ve always found names fascinating and entrancing, I’m fickle about them. In many ways, cats and children are different creatures (so I’ve found of late), and you can only change a daughter’s name so many times if you must do it at all. How to pick a name that would stick?

The first name I ever loved was “Julie”, after Mackenzie Phillips’ character on One Day at a Time. Julie was also my best friend in grade one, and I adored her and she beautiful, though she was sensitive about her hairy arms. I went through an “Ellen” phase, after the character on Family Ties, I think. I watched far too much television; I would have died to have been named “Jo”. I fell in love with “Bianca”, not from Shakespeare, but from Shelley Long’s character’s sister in the movie Hello Again. I was particularly impressionable, and agreed that “Cordelia” was the most exquisite name imaginable. I loved the name “Zoe” for a while, and after I read Louise Fitzhugh’s The Long Secret, I thought “Zeeney” was similarly cool, though she’d not been the most appetizing of characters. And these name fixations would go on and on, influenced by all kinds of sitcoms, films and pop stars. I kept ever-changing lists of what my future daughters would be called, though it never occurred to me to think much about a son.

Strange that Louise Fitzhugh ultimately did decide my child’s name. Baby was not to be Zeeney after all (which is good) but Harriet, after the book from which The Long Secret was a sequel. And I’d never read Harriet the Spy until last year, actually, after I heard this feature on NPR. But I fell in love with Ms. Welsch, and her name topped my list. I knew immediately that I wanted a little Harriet of my own one day. I couldn’t think of anyone better to be named after– such a feisty, clever, independent, hilarious, and wonderful character. Impossible too, which strikes me now as a somewhat fortunate/unfortunate quality to project upon one’s child. Perhaps I should have thought it through a little bit more, because this baby fits the bill so far. The name itself means “Home Ruler”, which is appropriate, I think. So this is what we’ve got ourselves in for…

But it sticks. It’s belonged to her since the moment we saw her, and I do love that we now know someone with this name– have a Harriet in our family even! It is a ubiquitous name throughout literature, but all too rare in the real world. I think I’ll not stop loving it soon, because it’s Harriet’s name after all.

Though I do wonder whether she’ll thank us for it. If she’ll find Harriet M. Welsch as charming as I did. It is a tremendous power, isn’t it? Naming a person? Even fictionally, the name is such a determinate and the author certainly bestows innumerable qualities by such a fact. Naming a real person requires as much consideration– this is destiny. I find it strange that we were handed so much power. At the hospital they asked us her name, we told them, and it was that simple. I would have expected some kind of seminar, or at the very least a lecture (a stern one) about the seriousness of the decision we were about to make based on a 1960s children’s novel. Is nothing sacred? Apparently not, but we’re three weeks in, and at the very least, I’ve not wanted to change it yet.

March 1, 2009

Prodigy/Prodigal etc.

February 13, 2009

Table

I can’t quite figure out why I find the first part of the dictionary definition for “table” so delightful, but I really do: “table. 1. a piece of furniture with a flat top and one or more legs, providing a level surface for eating, writing, or working at, playing games on, etc…” Laid out like that, has there ever been anything more charming? Must any world with tables in it not be such a terrible place?

January 20, 2009

"Because We Want To" by Alison Smith

The few words that I learn
make reality. No, reality exists.
Words push me
into the moving water.

In the morning
I learn words for Lu Ling
while she brushes her teeth.
She’s said that she laughs
because she is pregnant
and wants to be happy.
Me too, I’ve realised, I do
want to be happy.

Today, I say, are you busy?
She says my Japanese
is good, is good!
I say tonight? dinner? together?
She says pizza?
and I say hai.
This is our common language:
eat dinner tonight yes.
And because we’ve wanted to
we’ve learned how to say next—
these have become feast days
and we will not stop
until we are satisfied.

–from Alison Smith’s gorgeous collection Six Mats and One Year, published by Gaspereau Press, which TSR has informed us recently entered the blogosphere.

May 24, 2008

Epizoodic

From Bryson’s Diction for Writers and Editors:

Epidemic. Strictly speaking, only people can suffer an epidemic (the word means “in or among people”). An outbreak of disease among animals is epizootic.

January 30, 2008

Words I encountered

Words I encountered today whilst reading Nabokov: violaceous; canthus; effluvia; elytra; gouache; basilisk.

January 24, 2008

Cleistogamous

New words I’m fond of are “jactitation”, “lintel”, “spoor”, and “cleistogamous”. Now reading Sister Crazy. Also quite pleased that the latest The New Quarterly has arrived in the mail. And it’s about time I read AL Kennedy, I think.