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Soon after 9/11, carefully honed slogans were foisted on the media and passed into common usage. These began with the “War on Terror,” a shrewd and flawed phraseology.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Steve Zeitlin is the founding director of City Lore in New York City.

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Standing on the deck of the Bonhomme Richard during the American Revolution, John Paul Jones, when asked by the captain of the Serapis to surrender, cried, “I have not yet begun to fight.” During the trench warfare of World War I, gunnery sergeant Dan Daly sent his marines “over the top” with the rallying cry, “Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?” Posing in front of a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished,” President Bush stood in 2003 in military gear on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Later, at a press conference, he goaded, “Bring ’em on.” All through American history, slogans have played a part in war. In “The Spiels of New York,” published in the New York Folklore Quarterly in 1953, folklorist Benjamin Botkin argued that this form of speech fits firmly within the canon of American folklore, part of a “folk tradition of ‘expansive utterance’ and spellbinding [rhetoric] from the tall talk of the backwoods boaster to the sky-painting oratory of the demagogic politician and patriot.” But sloganeering has played a special role in the Bush administration. It has produced a lexicon of slogans and lingo, a kind of “slingo” plucked not from the poetic utterances of soldiers in battle, but created top-down by media gurus such as Roger Ayles, Karl Rove, and Republican pollster Frank Luntz. I’m reminded of the traditional Hasidic saying, “Not only what they say isn’t true, but the opposite of what they say isn’t true either.” Soon after 9/11, carefully honed slogans were foisted on the media and passed into common usage. These began with the “War on Terror,” a shrewd and flawed phraseology. By definition, terrorists are not part of formal governments and must be hunted down, yet the phrase suggests the necessity of a war against nations and was used to justify conflagrations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. A few years after the war began, the New York Times reported, “The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. . . . In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation’s senior military officer have spoken of ‘a global struggle against violent extremism’ rather than ‘the global war on terror,’ which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.” General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed Rumsfeld’s sentiment: “If you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.” He suggested that “the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that terror is the method they use.” This prompted Fred Kaplan to ask in the online magazine Slate, “Are they so enraptured with PR that they think a slogan and a strategy are the same thing and that retooling the one will transform the other?” As the action in Iraq commenced, media-savvy spin doctors selected a title for the devastation the military would wreak: “Shock and Awe.” During World War II, the Japanese were charged with war crimes for subjecting American prisoners of war to waterboarding, a form of torture designed to elicit information. The current administration is intent on showing that waterboarding is not a form of torture. To do so required a new term, and the Republican sloganeers found it: “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Occasionally, prize slogans have come back to bite the Bush administration. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was an ingenious phrase created to suggest nuclear capability, but to leave an out for a variety of other kinds of biological and chemical weapons. Yet, when none were found, the clever phrase came back at them as “Weapons of Mass Distraction” and “Weapons of Mass Deception.” One goal of the current administration is to subvert oral tradition in the political arena by issuing daily “talking points,” a series of bulleted arguments that everyone in the administration who talks with the press, as well as talk show hosts like Don Imus, receive and then “spontaneously” utter. The goal is to provide “message discipline.” The end result is to manipulate oral tradition so that it behaves like mass culture, like advertisements that emanate from a single source. For instance, in early 2007, when Democrats in Congress were seeking to defund the war effort, dozens of administrative spokespeople, including radio personalities, regurgitated this talking point: Democrats favor the “slow bleed.” During the 2004 election, the term “flip flop” was used in similar fashion. These slogans pass into the watercooler conversations of ordinary Americans as part of their political lore. Seeing a John Kerry bumper sticker on our car on the highway, a Republican once put his hand out the window, held it flat, then turned it upside down. That we knew what he meant was a sign of how effectively the term had passed into common usage. While battle cries and slogans are certainly part of American folklore, it’s unclear whether the slogans created by media experts in political campaigns as “talking points” should be considered folklore or anti-folklore, an effort to subvert the process of oral culture. But democracy as it was envisioned by the founding fathers was based on word of mouth, with many different sets of notions reaching any one individual. Democracy has always relied on a rich oral tradition and culture. People receive and utilize a wide variety of information from newspapers and television, over the clothesline and at the watercooler, to make up their minds. But if these messages all originate from a single source as talking points, oral tradition is undermined, democracy diminished.

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