CT Blue

Today I stumbled upon this article in the Progressive by Connecticut's own Jonathan Pelto, detailing the way in which the proponents of public school privatization are buying political influence. Now, Jonathan is not particularly popular with some of the elected politicians I know, but despite his sometimes abrasive way of writing, I like him because he's about 95% right, which puts him only slightly behind me. There is a vast right wing conspiracy out to destroy the public school system; hand our tax money over to the plutocrats; disempower teachers thereby driving the good ones out of the profession; and eventually restrict decent real education to the rich, while doling out job training to the rest of us. Unfortunately, there are plenty on the nominal left that have joined the right in this push; one of whom is our otherwise fairly good governor. Jonathan's article is well worth reading.

But I come not to praise Pelto, but to pick a nit. Jonathan's article contains some good examples of the left's tendency to ignore or buy in to the manipulation of language by the right. Here's an excerpt from Pelto's piece:

Raimondo, who as Rhode Island’s state treasurer won national acclaim from conservatives for successfully dismantling the state employee pension fund, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors associated with funding the education reform movement and profiting from the charter school industry. Her running mate, Cumberland mayor Daniel McKee, one of the state’s most vocal supporters of charter schools, was elected lieutenant governor with help from many of the same donors.

Now, Pelto doesn't exactly play softball when writing about these people, but he does something the right would never do: buy in,-if not entirely, far enough- into their own characterization of their “reform movement”. The right is always eager to call what it does “reform”, because the word has a positive connotation. While one might argue that the term is value neutral, it doesn't resonate that way, and in fact, isn't even defined that way. Here are the first several definitions from Webster's unabridged:

1 obsolete : RESTORE, RENEW
2 a) : to restore to a former good state : bring from bad to good
b) : to amend or improve by change of form or by removal of faults or abuses
c) : to put or change into a new and improved form or condition
3 : to put an end to (an evil) by enforcing or introducing a better method or course of action or behavior<~ the abuses of political patronage>
4 : to induce or cause to abandon an evil manner of living and follow a good one : change from worse to better<~ a drunkard>

People on the right may call themselves “reformers”, and they may call their attempts to divert our taxes into their own pockets “reform”, but that doesn't make it so, and we should avoid using the term to describe them. Even while criticizing, we legitimate them when we allow them to pick the words by which they will be described. We seem to be amazingly blind to the emotional power of language, so we constantly cede the linguistic high ground to the forces of darkness. Education reform? Why not call them the public school destruction industry, or something similar. If a reader is already on Pelto's side, his use of the term “reform” won't matter, but it may very well make it harder to persuade the undecided or the “low information” reader who might be puzzled at the fact that Mr. Pelto is against “reform”. Who knows how much harm has been done to the cause of abortion rights by the fact that people who believe in abortion rights have allowed the right to get away with calling itself “pro-life”. We seem to be Alices while the right is Humpty Dumpty to the core:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”