VIOLENT PROTEST: A DEBASED LANGUAGE

WORDS, like trees, bend with the prevailing winds. In the climate of opinion of the past few years, the word dissent has undergone a decided transformation. For most of U.S. history, it clearly meant speech--the unorthodox opinion, the challenging idea. Then, during the 1960s, civil rights protesters took to the streets to fight segregation, and the word became associated with demonstrations as much as with speech. As protests have continued to broaden and increase, dissent has come to be used to describe and defend a wide variety of physical acts, including violence toward property and even toward people.

The explanation many protesters offer for their switch from verbal to physical dissent is that no one pays attention to words alone any longer. However eloquent it has been, however imaginative its uses, language has not succeeded in eliminating racial discrimination or ending the war in Indochina. So the protesters have resorted to what Social Psychologist Franklyn Haiman of Northwestern University calls "body rhetoric"--sit-ins, lie-ins, marches--and more and more bodies have started colliding. Such public confrontations are an expression of gathering frustration over a society that no longer seems to respond to more traditional forms of dissent.

Communication of Feeling

This argument contains a measure of truth. It is also true that in many cases the massed forces of dissent--as at most of last week's rallies mourning the Kent State four--have demonstrated a commendable restraint in not letting verbal protest build into violence. The fact remains, however, that all too often these days dissent is a matter of arson and rock throwing. The reason may be that protesters have despaired of the efficacy of words before they have really mastered them. It is significant that this generation of dissenters has failed to produce a literature, or even a polemic that is likely to endure. On the contrary, it has been persistently, even proudly, nonverbal. It has emphasized a communication of feeling rather than of words. The vocabulary of protest, often weighted down with an outmoded Marxism, is relentlessly conventional and conformist. The same phrases --"up against the wall," "get the pigs," "tell it like it is" --are endlessly repeated, less for their intrinsic eloquence than for their emotive and symbolic value. And that sort of thing gets tiresome; to borrow from the jargon, it "turns people off." Even the most outrageous obscenities lose their impact when they are used ad nauseam.

There is often a disconcerting inexactness about today's rhetoric of dissent. To denounce the Establishment in blanket terms makes little sense in a society composed of several establishments, each with its own ideology and set of mores--many of them surprisingly competitive. "Power to the people" is an admirable democratic slogan--except that, as used presently, what it really seems to mean is power to the leftist radicals who seek to control any revolution in America. It is verbal overkill to describe every mild demurral by whites against the most bluntly radical of black-militant demands as nothing but "racism." And the case for political dissent is weakened when almost any attempts, however peaceful, by college authorities to restore law and order on campus are automatically condemned by militant radicals as proof that the U.S. is a "fascist Amerika." Taken at face value, many protest slogans suggest that the dissenters have seriously misestimated U.S. society and its possibility for evolutionary change.

The ultimate debasement of language, of course, is violence.

Except for protesters who simply want to destroy--and there are more than a few--most dissenters turn to violence in a desperate effort to communicate their profound feelings of grievance. Yet surely this is too crude a way to get their message across. A bomb, for example, lacks specificity; its meaning is as scattered as its debris. Some people may interpret such an act as a signal to pay more attention to the protester and his cause; many more are likely to read into it a need to make life a lot tougher for the protester. Violence is, essentially, a confession of ultimate inarticulateness.

Throughout history, dissent has been more effectively expressed by the word than by the weapon. The French Revolution was betrayed by the ruthless masters of the Terror THOMAS PAINE who silenced all opposition with the guillotine. The enduring importance of the revolution lies, rather, in the principles enunciated on its behalf by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who bequeathed the notion of human equality to the modern world. During its bleakest hours, the American Revolution was resuscitated not so much by brilliant military strategy as by brilliant words--those of Tom Paine in the "times that try men's souls." Even less persuasive and more recondite words can have an impact that dramatic acts do not. Wrote Lord Keynes: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas."

Debasement of the language cannot be blamed on protesters alone. The news media, the advertising agencies, the Government--even President Nixon himself--have all helped flatten and attenuate the English tongue. When radicals misuse language, they are only applying the lesson they have been so well taught by their society. That lesson has been reinforced by philosophers now in fashion--Marshall Mc-Luhan, for instance, who says that pictures are more important than words and contemplates a society of inarticulate tribal emotions based on instant sight and sound. Or Herbert Marcuse, who teaches that protesting words are as empty as air in a technological society where power is concentrated in a few hands. Such a contempt for language makes people impatient with the orderly processes of thought. No sooner is something glimpsed or considered than it is demanded. Not only is dialogue destroyed, but so is rationality, when protesters insist upon immediate capitulation to their "nonnegotiable demands." This is what infants demand --and totalitarians.

Example of Agnew

Reactionary as the thought may seem, words are still as powerful a force as ever, when they are cogently used. It was, after all, language alone that catapulted Spiro Agnew from a political nonentity to a national figure with an enthusiastic personal following. Agnew, to be sure, can be accused of appealing to the raw emotions of the body politic in his now-famous attacks on "effete snobs" and "tomentose exhibitionists." On the other hand, a protester would have a hard time telling the Vice President that mere speech is not capable of stirring people. Unwittingly, he has shown his antagonists on the left that it can still be done.

During a period of national turmoil and self-doubt, it is all the more imperative for protesters to put down their rocks and find their voices again. As a commentary on the Kent State tragedy, President Nixon's remark that "when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy" is callously inadequate. His warning, however, carries the weight of history: in a general unleashing of violence, dissent is the first casualty. Today the nation is in considerable need of healing, as well as elevating, language; often in the past that need has been filled by protesters whose perspective on society matched their passionate commitment to its improvement. Now is the time for dissenters to assert their own dignity and maintain their tradition by upholding the ultimate value of the word.

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