Words Are Arrows
Flying from your brain to mine or mine to yours, words pin meaning to the world by the path they take and in how they land.
Yesterday I asserted this idea about words because of how I struggled while floating in the empty distress of what might be called “culture” when watching a few hours of basketball. Everything I heard in that public square left me adrift.
Admittedly, coming to you a few days before 2022 to report that television (or public culture) is empty and is corrosive in its emptiness hardly offers a new idea. As insights go, this one is as fresh as the claim the earth is not flat. “Within the context of no context,” to quote the title of George Trow’s great essay on all this, is where we have been living for the past fifty years at least.
Still, time in space where words can point to things (at best) but can never pin anything down does not get any less weird just because it is common. I expected the emptiness of my time in T.V. land when I started watching the game yet like someone in a flight simulator, the surprise is not to go nowhere, it is to reach for the air sickness bag.
People my age grew up when there were but three channels. The relative accuracy or objectivity of CBS, NBC, and ABC News in the years before cable television can be debated, but having only these sources meant the world we took in through T.V. offered a common text. That this text relied on white men telling us what mattered only hints at how exclusionary the narrative was, but that narrative itself had value was clear. Words could point from something to something else such that Walter Cronkite could call out Vietnam and The Watergate hearings could undo Nixon.
We could still assume the fake was not false and could thus distinguish a truth from a lie.
Let me explain that.
Words can serve the function of making meaning because they themselves are fake.
2+2 = 5 is false. 2+2 = 4 is true. Yet the symbols in the first equation are no more “real” than those in the second. They are all just pixels on a screen. Fake. Not real.
“We hold the truths to be self-evident” is made up of symbols just as fake as those that makeup “I alone can fix it.” Someone who takes you to a movie theater and says, “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening” is offering a form of truth, even if what you watch on the screen is a documentary.
Someone saying that from the screen itself thinks the opposite of “true,” is “fake.”
But the opposite of “fake” is “real” rather than “false” or “untrue” which stand in opposition to what is “true.”
All news is fake. Some of it is true, some of it less so.
This has some bearing on American culture at the moment, I think.
But more about that another time.