Kirmizi_ada

California just decided to make itself into a live microphone to the rest of the world on what constitutes a legitimate public relationship, and high school students here in the Middle East don't and won't be using the term "civil unions" any time soon. The symbolic value of "marriage" is concrete and binding in this part of the world, even if the debate about nuptual terminology may seem like yet another airy culture war over there in America. On a planet where words fly from hemisphere to hemisphere faster than fighter jets, it is a rite of parochial cowardice for any state government to re-label things just because the previous label was too sacred for prime-time. If my husband or wife is a gorgeous, towering glass of pulpy-fresh juice made from orange trees that I tended, what kind of insanity would it be for me to allow them to be called Orange Drink on a government document?

What "civilunions" offend against is not one's sense of equality before the law, but rather one's perception of reality in the world and in language. (Writing it without the space demonstrates the underlying silliness.) After eight years of rhetorical violence coming out of my government, I will use the plainest, most historically accurate, and most unequivocal term for my relationship that I please until someone carts me off for it.

If queers and African Americans are going to have a sit-down about Prop 8, maybe they could start by talking about how the state has described both groups throughout the arc of their histories, how it has settled on brutal metaphors like the three-fifths compromise, how little girls grew up comparing the skin on their arm to a brown paper bag to see whether they were "dark" or "light," about how wayward sissies and farm-bred tomboys burst out of their labels only to be fed Latinate monstrosities like "domestic partnership," "civil unions", "gender dysphoria" and "sexual orientation." Maybe Black and queer people could come to some shared observations about how it feels to lie repeatedly about oneself in someone else's made-up language, just because everyone else is afraid of the words that come naturally to you and your friends.

Being precise in one's use of language has never been seen as a right, and it probably never will. It is, however, a spiritual imperative—good for the spine, shoulders, and stomach alike—one that all oppressed people deserve to insist upon. So unless California wants to be renamed Occidental Contiguity, it should get its hands off my vocabulary until death do us part.

Who will read to us at the Inauguration of President Barack H. Obama? A bold healer, an arresting critic, someone for whom words are sacred and magic creatures?

No ma'am, not yet. We want to hear—at long last and in public— from the consultant who gave us "energy exploration," "climate change," "the death tax," "the surge," "religious liberty", and "weapons of mass destruction." Using Roman Jakobsen's writings on "poetic language" and Roland Barthes on "myth," Frank Luntz has earned a great deal of money nationalizing a poetry of cynicism and emotional bankruptcy. He has used his PhD from Oxford to export the nihilism of neo-conservative think tanks into the compulsory lexicon of American public life. He has rewired the cortex of the imperial spokespersona—crafting policy language that makes poor people into greedy loafers, racism into a clerical error, crude oil into a global elixir. No wonder John McCain always had such a hard time deciphering his own tele-prompter.

Sad as it is, Frank Luntz is the poet laureate of our decade. So it's time he gets up out of that consultant's chair and read us his collected works from start to finish. For instance, he could remind us of his 2002 memo to President Bush about how "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

As these, his last words, echo across the National Mall, millions of faces will stare blankly back. Then, as Luntz walks off the stage, we can all swear in President Obama, unclench our fists and listen. To Jorie Graham or Ntozake Shange, Anne Carson or Yusef Komunyakaa. To a fearless and venerable tender of words—for a new era that is not up for sale.

[Join Facebook group: Luntz for PLOTUS]

I’ve been working on this novel—called Tending—for a while. The prose scampers out of my imagination without much protest. The characters do the things they do in other novels—lift things, apply things, wait for things. It’s all been pretty hum-drum and lovely thus far.

Just this morning, I had to notice that I was neglecting the premise of the thing, the reason I set out to write it. This negligence roughly corresponded to a much broader, holistic negligence of mine, as far as memory is concerned. I had decided to write this particular novel as a kind of mnemonic device about the 2000s—this decade distinguished by the fact that it has, even after eight years, no name, and that you can stare at “the 2000s” on paper, know what it means, but be fully unable to pronounce it aloud. What other word in current usage has that property? I wondered if, early on, there had been a tacit agreement not to name it since, by 2003, we were already hoping this wayward shuffle of years would quickly find the door.

Sitting down to write, and expecting the history of this decade to present itself to me like so many bottles of acrylic paint, I was stunned to realize that it would not do so. That I could not remember in what year and in what season I first heard the names Lindy Ingram, Natalie Maines, John Walker Lindh, Benazir Butto, and Frank Luntz—these unredeemed captives of a KKK frat party gone planetary. Like a stoic teenager, I could only remember the most recent impact; the shame of the one that struck four or five episodes prior no longer registered. I stopped remembering to ask why this all was happening.

When the word came of the Nazis defeat on the Eastern front, neighbors of the philologist Viktor Klemperer began talking to one another differently—trying on tones, syntax, and lines of articulation that had been kept under the floorboards for ten years. Going through the brackish ritual of remembering, they traced how they had become subsistence subjects—cyclical, timid, robbed even of their hunger. I hope the characters in this novel can do the same for me, to tell me what condition of body and mind I was living in from age 24 to 32.

Maybe they will also be able to figure out how to pronounce “the 2000s,” and let me know.