When George Orwell warned of “newspeak,” he envisioned a dystopian state in which a “Big Brother,” like Russian President Vladimir Putin, would use it as a tool to limit and control freedom of thought … and speech.
Therefore, I suspect even Orwell would be shocked and disappointed to see newspeak being used instead by members his latterday “Brotherhood” (in the relatively utopian United States, NSA spying notwithstanding) – not only to enforce politically correct speech, but also to chastise putative purveyors of political correctness for failing to tow the party line.
This, alas, is the surreal dynamic that explains why the New York Times is catching hell for daring to describe Michael Brown, quite accurately, as “no angel:”
An outrage plume is now settling over the New York Times over two words in a retrospective on the life of Michael Brown Jr., the victim of the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting whose funeral takes place today. Here’s the objection-producing [sentence], written by John Eligon:
Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life.
(Washington Post, August 25, 2014)
Mind you, the Times goes on to duly report on some of the well-documented reasons why Michael was, in fact, no angel. Most notably, it cites that he was caught on tape committing a strong-arm robbery just minutes before getting shot; that he “dabbled in drugs and alcohol;” and that he had a well-earned reputation as a neighborhood bully.
This is why the politically correct police are resorting to Orwellian doublespeak, charging speciously that the Times would not have described Michael as “no angel” if he were White.
It’s noteworthy, though, that if they’re playing the race card against this “old grey lady” of liberalism, well, they might even play it against a proud (but principled) Black man like me. Indeed, nothing betrays the inherent absurdity of their charge quite like their attempts to substantiate it by contrasting the way the Times described Michael with the way it described Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh and Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – as if it would’ve been better to describe Michael as a terrorist than as no angel.
More to the point, listening to his avengers and eulogizers yesterday, you would’ve gotten the impression that they wanted the Times to describe him as an angel, which of course is the textbook manifestation of newspeak.
But, if/when the Times caves under this “Room 101” backlash, I recommend it corrects those offending words with the two words I dared to use in one of my related commentaries to describe Michael, namely, “menacing thief:”
The more distressing absurdity for me is political activists like Rev. Al Sharpton making Michael, an alleged menacing thief, the face of the fight against police brutality – just as political activists like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made Rosa Parks, a woman above reproach, the face of the fight against segregation.
(“Why Are They Still Protesting in Ferguson? And Who Are They? The iPINIONS Journal, August 19, 2014)
Frankly, anyone tuning in to his nationally televised memorial service could have been forgiven for thinking that Michael actually belongs in the pantheon of young civil rights martyrs, alongside Emmett Till and James Earl Chaney.
Meanwhile, none of national leaders eulogizing Michael bothered to reinforce the most salient lesson everyone, especially young Black men, should learn from his death.
That lesson, of course, is that distrust of the police, no matter how warranted, does not give anyone the right to resist arrest or engage in visceral confrontations with them. Sadly, Michael learned this lesson the most tragic way. But nobody can deny that he would still be alive if he had not resisted arrest – complete with blows that reportedly landed the arresting officer in hospital.
(Incidentally, what do you suppose Rev. Sharpton and others would be saying if he had wrested Officer Darren Wilson’s gun from him, as Michael was allegedly trying to do, and shot him dead…?)
In any event, I fear the lesson too many black men are learning from this tragedy is that they can resist arrest – so long as they shout the newfangled slogan, “hands up, don’t shoot” while doing so. Clearly, this will only lead to more of them ending up like Michael.
Which is why it cannot be overstated that, instead of doublespeak that would make him a saint, those eulogizing Michael would honor his death far more by admonishing young Black men against the deadly hazards of resisting arrest and defying authority as a misguided badge of honor or rite of passage.
That said, let me end by clarifying, again, that, notwithstanding his robbery or other bad acts, the killing of Michael Brown, as alleged, was unjustified; and Officer Wilson should be prosecuted for use of excessive force. Because, no matter what a person does to resist arrest, a policeman cannot shoot to kill if that person relents and no longer poses any threat of bodily harm. Period.
Related commentaries:
Why are they still protesting…