There exists an unscientific attitude toward language that results in doctrinal disagreements. We must understand that problems are formulated in words, and that a change in the attitude toward language can help us become understanding listeners. Alfred Korzybski said, “A person tends to see the world as conforming to the words he has been taught to use about it.” There is a system of semantic principles to guide us in the everyday thinking, talking, listening, reading, and writing that leads us to our actions. Let’s examine the following story:
Once upon a time, there were two public institutions of higher learning, separated by a great bay but connected by a great bridge. The differences and the commonalities between the two sites of education were also greatly exaggerated.
Institution A considered itself a center of research and a factory for knowledge. Its president had said as much, that what the automobile had done for the first half of the twentieth century, the university could do for the latter half. The factory model of the university didn’t go over too well with the students, who protested that they were free individuals who would not be cranked out like cloned widgets on a production line. One of the institution’s most famous students had spoken passionately about how it was time to put one’s body on the gears and wheels to stop the machine. Students didn’t want to be the end product machined from a blueprint they did not believe. The factory model was probably the wrong model to choose, especially since most of the students were the children of middle-class professionals or had those sorts of hopes for their educations.
While Institution A was located in a nice white neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods were communities of colored people, mostly black and yellow. Families from these neighborhoods sent a few students to the university, but other colored students came from across the state. Colored students didn’t want to be factory products either, but they didn’t mince words about the blueprint or being free individuals; they simply wanted to control the production itself. They wanted their own classes, their own professors, their own rules, and more of themselves at the university. They argued that their history of slavery, genocide, and racial prejudice gave moral imperative to their demands, and that a public institution of learning should provide an equal opportunity for education for all citizens, regardless of race, class, or creed. And they were going to get it by any means necessary.
One day, a famous black author and leader of a black organization came to teach at the university. He aroused a crowd of students into shouting Fuck the Governor! Fuck the Governor! To anyone who wanted to throw bricks into the gears, this was a splendid brick. Institution A decided that this man would not continue to teach at the university. His rally was not the entire reason for his dismissal, but it was a convenient rallying point. The colored students organized a protest against Institution A to push for control of their education. They organized a strike to stop the work of the university since, after all, it was a factory, and they were the worker-products. The colored students were a very small minority on campus, but the white students, the faculty, and even the staff also joined the strike. After fifty-three days of striking and four hundred arrests, including violent encounters with local police, sheriffs, and the National Guard, involving rocks, fruits, mace, tear gas, and billy clubs, Institution A agreed to establish a department of ethnic studies.
Establishment of the department came with some fanfare and a budget just substantial enough to create a sensation of power and competition, creating political fissures between black, brown, yellow, and red students and faculty, throwing into contest what had once been idealized as a rainbow of colored solidarity. The radical white students who had wanted to throw their bodies against the gears and the black leader who could rally thousands of students to yell Fuck the Governor! had fallen away, leaving the work of education to the bureaucrats and the folks who needed the jobs. Despite these difficulties, Institution A survived this period of turmoil.
On the other side of the bay, Institution B considered itself a teaching college, a middling institution in a tiered system that kept the research factory on top and the two-year technical college on the bottom. Institution B was the meat in the sandwich positioned to provide the middle management, midlevel professionals, the credentialed workers of the great society. This was part of the Master Plan. The idea that there was a master plan planned by masters outside the college didn’t go over too well with the students, who protested that the plan was really much broader and began in grammar school when children were placed on tracks that headed to one of the three tiered educational institutions, to a possible fourth (prison) or fifth institution (military), or to none at all. If Institution A invoked the automobile, Institution B invoked the train. The Master Plan was a great train system chugging students along predetermined tracks. The train model was probably the wrong model to choose, especially since many of the students were the children of laborers who laid tracks, built cars, loaded cargo, harvested or cooked food, cleaned compartments, and mined the fuel.
While Institution B was located in a nice white neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods were communities of working-class white and colored people—black, yellow, and brown. Working young adults from these neighborhoods attended the college, and more came from across the state. Colored students didn’t want to be part of any master plan either, especially if being colored might put you on a particular train from the very beginning. And they weren’t interested in sharing; sharing had only gotten them nine hundred black students in eighteen thousand. They wanted to make their own plans. They wanted their own rules, their own classes, their own professors, and more of themselves at the college. They argued that their history of slavery, genocide, and racial prejudice gave moral imperative to their demands, and that a public institution of learning should provide an equal opportunity for education for all citizens, regardless of race, class, or creed. And they were going to get it by any means necessary.
One day, a black instructor at Institution B, who was also a leader of a black organization, gave a speech. He said that Institution B was a nigger-producing factory and called upon students to Pick up the Gun! to defend themselves against a cracker administration. While this may have been a passionate cry to revolution, Institution B decided that he should be fired from teaching at the college. His speech was not the entire reason for his dismissal, but it was a rallying point, and eventually the colored students organized a protest against Institution B to push for control of their education. They organized a strike to stop the work of the college since, after all, it was a train station, and they were the worker-passengers. The colored students were a very small minority on campus, but the white students and the faculty also joined the strike. After 137 days on strike and nine hundred arrests, including violent encounters with local and mounted police and tactical squads involving rocks, bombs, arson, and billy clubs, Institution B agreed to establish a department of ethnic studies.
Establishment of the department came with some fanfare and a budget just substantial enough to create a sensation of power and competition, creating political fissures between black, brown, and yellow, throwing into contest what had once been idealized as a rainbow of colored solidarity. The radical white students who had opposed the Master Plan and the black teacher who rallied students to Pick up the Gun! had fallen away, leaving the work of education to the bureaucrats and the folks who needed the jobs. Despite these difficulties, Institution B survived this period of turmoil.
These are textbook cases with semantic morals. In both cases, students got what they wanted: a department of ethnic studies. But it wasn’t about what they wanted—it was about how they went about getting it. In this sense, it was all about words.
Reread the stories about Institutions A and B. Instead of worrying about whether colored students had equal access to higher education, ask yourself the following questions:
1. What is the significance of comparing Institution A to a factory or Institution B to a train station, and how do these comparisons influence the actions of the students?
2. What do you think about the provocative comments made by the black leaders to students at both institutions?
3. Is it possible or reasonable for students to go on strike?
4. Why does the narrator use the word black instead of Negro?
5. Considering the disagreements between the students and the institutions, was the violence incurred necessary?
6. Was the conflict between the students and institutions a war of words?
Jazz was our acting president’s great passion. In his twenty-part jazz seminar, he spoke about the sources and characteristics of jazz, from the blues, through bebop, boogie-woogie, and gospel, to the California-New Orleans revival. Everyone had forgotten that he played the harmonica.
They only remember that he hoisted himself onto the back of a truck parked at the gateway of our once peaceful college and tore out the wires to a sound system. The truck was being used as a stage for ranting and epithets. Free speech, his tam-o’-shanter! He surprised them by climbing onto that truck, yelling, “Don’t touch me! I’m the president of the college!” He jumped up and down and mimicked their ridiculous chants: On strike! Shut it down! On strike! Shut it down! He had a plan to beautify the campus, plant flowerbeds and pipe in swinging music on the intercom. He might have piped in his entire twenty-part jazz seminar, complete with musical examples. Instead we got this mindless ranting.
One of his colleagues yelled out his name, attaching it to General Tojo. He peered through those thick black horn-rims into the crowd. A sansei student had a sign with his caricature that said, “Tojo is alive and well and living under Mt. Tam O’Shanter.” He had spent his life’s work in general semantics, articulating a theory of language to fight precisely this sort of fascism. He fired that colleague Chen on the spot. Later he had to capitulate. He told Chen he had meant to say “Shame on you!” but after all, didn’t he understand his fury?
Someone had ripped his tam-o’-shanter from his head. He saw it spinning in the air, tossed from hand to hand. This was typical of the disrespect he had to contend with. As he said, the leadership of the SDS and the BSU had shown themselves to be a gang of goons, gangsters, conmen, neo-Nazis, and common thieves. And he was Tojo?
This was precisely the sort of semantic error he tried to point out in his comments to the faculty senate when he said, “I wish to comment on the intellectually slovenly habit, now popular among whites as well as blacks, of denouncing as racist those who oppose or are critical of any Negro tactic or demand. If we are to call our college racist, then what term do we have left for the government of Rhodesia?” He must have heard someone yell out, “Racist! Racist!” He continued, “Black students are again disrupting the campus. A significant number of whites, including faculty members, condone and even defend this maneuver. In other words, there are many whites who do not apply to blacks the same standards of morality and behavior as they apply to whites. This is an attitude of moral condescension that every self-respecting Negro has a right to resent, and does resent.”
As a self-respecting minority himself, he felt he could speak for the Negro. And this was not the first time. In one of his many books, he devoted an entire chapter to the subject: “The Self-Image and Intercultural Understanding, or How to be Sane though Negro.” The tenants of this chapter were simple. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro accompanied by a sense of inferiority, he will act obsequiously, and the white person he encounters may act with superiority. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro accompanied by a sense of defensiveness, he will act counter-defensively, and the white person may act offensively. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro as a simple statement of fact, then he will act naturally, and the white person may act naturally too. Therefore, the power to determine the outcome of a meeting lies with the Negro. Now the Negro might say that he is acting naturally, but how do you know you are acting naturally? The secret to acting naturally is exemplified in the famous person, a movie star or prime minister, who forgets he is famous and acts naturally. To act naturally, you have to forget that you are Negro. Why shouldn’t this be possible—our acting president himself was able to forget he was Japanese. White people are ignorant and require psychotherapy to get over their obsession with skin color; so, the Negro must act as the white person’s psychotherapist. Granted, this will be accepted in small steps, but the basis for happiness is minimum expectations. In the long struggle for equal rights and opportunities, because of the strong moral sense of the nation as well as economic and practical necessity, segregation must eventually end. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy of political democracy, and communication is the first step.
However, psychotherapy at the impasse of the current breakdown in communications was no longer possible. Didn’t the faculty realize, as our acting president did, that the SDS had assumed tactics similar to those of the Nazis of the thirties, intending to disrupt democratic institutions and bring down the political structure? He characterized the BSU leadership as actuated by self-hatred, strutting about self-consciously behind dark glasses, playing Black Panther, stalking in gangs, scaring little girls. This behavior, he said, would have been simply pathetic if knuckleheaded whites didn’t take them seriously. He never took them seriously. He recognized the primitive and animistic notions embedded in their language that prevented them from comprehending civilized paths to a democratic society. This was what he had characterized as the “Jim Crowing of the mind.” Segregation was not a physical condition but a mental condition. He knew they were all flying high as kites on dope.
He only took this job on the condition he be allowed to call in the police. He testified to Congress that to restore proper order during campus unrest, troops should be sent in early, and lots of them. He personally addressed the police himself as they entered the campus, advising them to ignore the students’ bad words and to smile. Bad words, he said to them, can’t harm you, and shouting them allows the students to blow off steam. Cursing has a therapeutic effect. However, if arrests were necessary, they would not be made in vain, for he would offer no amnesty to students. He further offered his knowledge of general semantics, saying some people, as the result of a childhood experience, cannot help being frightened by the mere sight of a policeman. Similarly, some people automatically become hostile at the words un-American, Nazi, or Communist. This is the unfortunate business of being blinded by prejudice and living in the delusional world of abstractions.
Ten thousand letters came to his desk supporting his decisive actions. The governor himself saw him on television and announced to his cohort, “I think we’ve found our man.” Our acting president was not only exhilarated by this response, but also by the confrontation itself. It was a rollercoaster he rode with the excitement of a child born again.
Although no one took his dismissal of Chen seriously, it was cited as a further example of our acting president’s autocratic highhandedness. During the strike Chen used a café in North Beach as his classroom. The Brighton Express on Pacific Avenue was a popular café and hangout for the bohemian crowd. A nisei woman named Joanna ran the café. In the past, when the president enjoyed the local jazz scene, on occasion he too frequented the café. Joanna, always good-humored and friendly, called him “Professor.” One supposes she called Chen “Professor” too. During the strike, they were all teaching their classes off campus somewhere, in their homes or in churches. This business with the strike was nonsense. No student wanted to lose a year of coursework. No teacher wanted to waste his time on a picket line.
Students gathered around a couple of tables, and Chen began his lecture, “Mao Tse-Tung on Literature and Art.” “Comrades!” he both addressed the students and quoted from Mao. “You have been invited to this forum today to exchange ideas and examine the relationship between work in the literary and artistic fields and revolutionary work in general . . . This,” he said, “is how Mao addressed the Yenan forum twenty-six years ago on May 2, 1942.”
One of Chen’s young protégés, Paul Wallace Lin, sat among the students with a notebook and fingered the pages of Mao’s talk.
Chen moved around the tables confidently. Two or three patrons were huddled in the corners with coffee, reading their newspapers but still listening to Chen. Even Joanna was seated among the students. “It’s important to consider the date of this talk. May second, two days before the May Fourth movement anniversary. As we have previously discussed, on May 4, 1919, a student uprising in Peking and Shanghai protested the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty marked the end of World War I but also relinquished previously held Chinese territory to the Japanese. This was the beginning of a Chinese nationalist movement driven by Marxist antifeudal, anti-imperialist political forces.”
Paul nodded and underlined student uprising. His father had been a student then too.
“And 1942. The United States had just entered the war against Japan, a war the Chinese had been fighting already for five years. Mao identified the principal enemy of this period: Japanese imperialists.”
Paul scribbled the dates into his notebook. Imagine Professor Chen pontificating on Mao, adding fuel to the fire already destroying our campus.
Chen continued, “Taken in this context of war, Mao continues . . . ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people, there are various fronts, among which are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts. To defeat the enemy we must rely primarily on the army with guns. But this army alone is not enough; we must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy.’” Indeed. But to be fair, Chen never had the teeth for violence. He would never have jumped on a truck and yanked out power cords and destroyed equipment. He was much too refined. He really believed in the cultural army, in liberation by means of the pen. So he continued.
“I realize, considering the violence we have sustained in recent days under the severe measures of the current administration—”such an oblique reference to our acting president—“it would seem to some that the gun might be the more appropriate tool. I want to make it clear that I am not advocating the gun. We are here to discuss contemporary Chinese literature, but we cannot examine that literature without also examining the political and social context that drives its formation during this time period.”
The students loved Chen. Suddenly his knowledge of the Chinese revolution and his Marxist point of view were in vogue. They sat around him mesmerized, as if he were Confucius himself, Chinese wisdom coupled with his contemporary knowledge of revolution. They all wanted revolution, but they didn’t know what revolution was. Paul, for example, wanted revolution, and he wanted this revolution packaged in the poet intellectual. But was he listening when Chen again quoted Mao? “Many writers and artists stand aloof from the masses and lead empty lives; naturally they are unfamiliar with the language of the people.” The language of the people was exactly the language our acting president had spent his life studying. Unlike Chen, he knew this language and how the common understanding of this language controlled society.
Accordingly, what Chen was not telling his students is that any war of words will ultimately be resolved in society’s decision to define those words. Art and literature. Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution defined those words in the service of a political agenda. Poetry for the Marxist-Leninist must be written for the proletariat. Everything that Chen loved about art and literature had to be destroyed or changed. He knew this, but he didn’t tell the students.
Chen’s class was over. Students paid for their coffees and mud pies and wandered out, back to the picket line or to the next noon rally. Paul remained behind.
“Where’s Yat Min today?” Chen queried, using Edmund’s Chinese name.
“Working. Always working. He sent his apologies, and here’s his paper.”
Chen nodded. It was a thick treatise written entirely in Chinese. “Since he’s mastered two languages, maybe he should study a third.” Chen said this as if thinking to himself.
“Right. I’ll let him know.”
“It’s not necessary. He’ll figure it out for himself.” He packed his papers away in his briefcase and announced, “Do you have some time for a short walk? It’s just down Montgomery.” As they passed out of the café, he asked, “Did you know the Brighton?”
“No.”
“Maybe not. Your father used to hang out here, but then after your mother died, I guess he never came around again. Do you know Janis Joplin?”
“Not personally.”
“She was here the other day. Everyone’s been here. Now you too.”
They walked down Montgomery to Washington and stared at a parking lot. “Remember what I said about the Monkey Block? It used to be right here. There was a huge building, four stories, occupied most of the block. Your father lived here. It’s where he painted his best work. Where he met his friends. He knew everyone. William Saroyan, Diego Rivera, Kenneth Rexroth. Well, Rexroth is still around anyway. When Rivera came to paint his murals with his wife, Frida Kahlo, your father got the Chinese Revolutionary Artist Club together to host them. He was going to name you Diego, but your mother favored Paul. It was Paul for Paul Cézanne and Paul Valéry. Painter-poet. They had romantic hopes for you. You know, he knew Valéry in Paris.”
“What about Wallace?”
“Wallace? Middle name? Must have been Wallace Stevens. Your mother studied him at Stanford. It was her thesis.”
Paul shook his head because he didn’t know any of this. Chen could have been making it all up. The building was a parking lot, gone, Chen said, for about ten years now. All Paul ever knew during his years growing up was this parking lot. And there was more history before that, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. The names read like his American literature textbook. A history of artists and writers had been swept away, and now Chen was saying his father had been the rare Chinese American artist to add his name to the Monkey Block.
“Chinatown is just over there.” Chen pointed. “One day, your father went inside and closed the door.”
“Why? I don’t understand. I didn’t even know.”
Chen was silent for a moment. “I didn’t consider that. Of course, nothing was ever different for you. You never saw the change.”
“I feel I knew someone different. I know the paintings. Found all of them. I put them up, but I don’t know the person who painted them. I found his old easel and a box of dried-up tubes, but I never saw him paint.”
“You know, Valéry was a poet, then one day he quit, just like that, and never wrote a thing for the next twenty years. I think your father admired that sort of resolve to find another path. Does that make sense?”
“Maybe.”
“Some of those men at the funeral know your father’s past. They were in the artists’ club, but they might not admit it today. People like Rexroth and the North Beach crowd didn’t even know he died. For them, he disappeared.”
Chen crossed the street and Paul followed. They walked in silence over to Kearny, weaving around the old Chinese and Filipino bachelors emerging from the pool halls, barber, and cigar shops. “Like this building, this International Hotel.” He pointed to the sign on the central door and gestured up. “Occupied the entire block. The Monkey was taller, another story higher, and a more beautiful, stately granite structure, but like this, with businesses below, offices, restaurants, and when your father was there, the general motley crowd of bohemian types.” They turned the corner at Jackson to get a sense of the size of the building.
Some Chinese kids were hanging outside a storefront, smoking in a group. “Hey, Paul,” they nodded in recognition. He knew them from the Y. Now they were hanging out at Leway’s, playing pool after school every day.
“Hey,” he answered coolly.
“You at State now?”
“Right.”
“Cool, man. Heard it’s tripping there.”
“Yeah.”
“I could do that. Cherry bombs. Shit.”
The group all simultaneously puffed into the air and laughed.
Paul shrugged and walked on. “Back to my history lesson,” he prodded Chen, who had conveniently become momentarily invisible.
“I lost touch with your father for a while after your mother died. But he promised to raise you. And I suppose the Monkey Block didn’t seem like a place to raise a child. Not that you were living there. He had already given up his studio. He was probably under investigation by the FBI. You were born right in the middle of those years when Joseph McCarthy was active. Remember, your father had a history in Paris with Chou En-lai, and he was friendly with all the wrong people: Rivera, the revolutionary artists’ club. They had us all running scared.”
So this was the avuncular role Chen took on with his friend’s son, now his student, as if he could retreat into a romantic past, escape the revolution that threatened his bourgeois intellectual role. In any case, Paul was about to live his own youth.
Paul met his friend Edmund. “Are you thinking about learning a third language now that you’ve mastered English and Chinese?”
“I’m working on Mandarin. Does that count?” Edmund spoke with a Shanghai dialect.
“I guess so.”
“Our acting president is going to be honored by the Japanese American Citizens’ League at a banquet on the wharf. We’re going out there to protest. Coming?”
“I’ve got to work that night.”
“Right.”
“I’ve started writing articles for the newspaper East West. If you take notes about the protest, I’ll write the article. We can share the byline.”
“Good idea.”
As it turned out, Paul’s notes were interesting but useless. Edmund Lee discovered that the banquet he was waiting tables at that evening was the very JACL banquet in question. Paul covered the one hundred protestors on the cold, wet wharf outside the restaurant that evening, and Edmund listened to the president’s speech and briefly interviewed him in the kitchen as he snuck out the back and up to a waiting helicopter on the roof to avoid the angry hubbub. Only Japanese Americans would go to so much trouble to avoid conflict. Edmund thought if it were the Chinese, the Six Companies would have just hired their goons to take care of business.
Edmund listened to the president’s speech with interest, scribbling notes at intervals and stuffing them into his white coat pocket. It all made beautiful sense. For example: What kind of language we speak largely determines the kinds of thoughts we have. He went on to explain that the informal and formal structures of our language determine the way we interpret our experiences and therefore the way we act in any given circumstance. Edmund thought about himself, his accented English and the Shanghai Chinese that ran under and around his speech and writing. How was this speech controlling his thinking and actions?
The president looked out on his Japanese American audience and gave the example of his Meiji Japanese immigrant mother. “Shikataganai,” he intoned, for example. All the nisei nodded and thought about mama. “‘It can’t be helped.’ Or, ‘don’t cry over spilled milk.’ The sanseis who are out there rabble-rousing against me hate this idea of shikataganai. They have their points to make, but they don’t understand the source of strength that this idea comes from, the ability to endure suffering and sacrifice. Our parents, the issei, interpreted it to mean endurance, but we nisei probably interpret it to mean don’t cry over spilled milk, so let’s get on with it and move to the next thing.”
The audience murmured approval. They fancied themselves a bunch of positive pragmatists. How else could they have come so far?
“But the sanseis,” he continued, “interpret shikataganai to be a show of weakness. You hear it from the students all the time. They say, We don’t believe in shikataganai; that’s why you all got sent to camp, because you gave in.’ But you all know it’s not so simple. Well, what is shikataganai anyway? It’s just a word, or series of words, and we’ve got to communicate better with each other about what we mean when we say or think it. And until we have this honest exchange with our children, when we really listen to each other, we won’t bridge the gap that is growing between us.”
Edmund bused some abandoned dessert plates and hurried back to fill the glasses with ice water. He could sense the approval of the nisei as they stirred the cream into their coffees. They were willing to take a little browbeating from the president. After all, here was a very reasonable man who wanted communication and exchange, and they should follow his example. Obviously those sansei on bullhorns out there were incapable of listening.
Edmund did everything slowly and carefully and obsequiously, nodding graciously to every guest like an invisible immigrant. No one suspected he was a brilliant student in Chinese studies at the president’s college. He was going to make himself necessary as long as possible. Meanwhile, Paul was outside chanting to keep warm, leafleting the tourists and standing next to the signs that said, “We Orientals may look alike, but we don’t all think alike.” Someone had created a life-sized puppet complete with tiny mustache, tam-o’-shanter, glasses, suit, and tie. The puppet was held aloft in the air with poles and entertained the crowd with foolish antics while someone screeched into a bullhorn: “Don’t touch me! I’m the president!” And the crowd answered in unison: “No! You’re a puppet! You’re a puppet!”
Inside, the president was explaining something he called time-binding. “Time-binding is what distinguishes human beings from other living things. Plants,” he said, “survive by their ability to energy-bind, that is, a system for taking energy from the environment to feed their organisms. Animals survive by the hunt, or their ability to move around to get their food; this is what we call space-binding. But humans are unique in that we survive by our ability to time-bind, that is, by using and controlling time.”
About this time, Edmund slipped around the tables and poured coffee, as if coincidentally to nudge a few from nodding off to sleep. They gratefully brought the cups to their lips and regained their alert and interested composures. Edmund rushed back to fill his carafe with hot coffee and jotted time-binding into his notes.
“What are you doing?” another waiter queried.
“Getting more coffee,” Edmund parried.
“We get paid by the hour for this. No tips.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a goddamned banquet. Relax.”
“Right.” Edmund rushed back to hear more about time-binding.
“Humans,” the president continued, “have created language to communicate, to pass on vital information to each other and to the next generation. That’s how we survive over time. This time-binding capacity is another name for our ability to create society and civilization.”
One JACLer waved Edmund over and asked for an ashtray. Edmund returned with the ashtray, popped a lighter from his pocket, and lit the man’s cigarette.
“For example, the JACL is a society of citizens that depends on communicating your purpose and your history. This, I agree, is the difficult task ahead.” Outside, the president’s puppet was going through the motions of ritual disembowelment while the crowd chanted, “Haya-kiri, haya-kiri, haya-kiri . . .”
The JACLer puffed in the air away from the half-eaten slices of apple pie and nodded appreciatively to Edmund.
The president adjusted his bifocaled vision, scrutinizing his crowd in various dispositions of alertness. “You of the Japanese American Citizens League have an important history and mission to communicate. If the youngsters outside could hear your brave history and mission, they would join your ranks and extend your proud history.” This comment brought about some grunting and scattered clapping. The youngsters outside had gotten their puppet into a kneeling position with a knife stuck in his belly.
Inside, the president continued. “If you fail to communicate or become stagnant in your thinking, if you lose your ability to think toward the future, this league is doomed to pass away without change.” He paused to let the doom of it all sink it.
Edmund jotted down with some glee: Nisei dinosaurs. Extinction.
“But”—the president wagged a telling finger—“I know that the JACL is an association that knows great change, and you have not and cannot be afraid of change. After all, you survived World War II.” More grunting and clapping. “But think about one of the reasons you survived the war—”
Edmund panned the room, wondering what these second-generation Japanese Americans could be thinking.
“English,” the professor announced. “As nisei you were able to speak English and communicate your concerns to the American government. The English language: a small thing we take for granted, but a key to our survival. Your ability to communicate effectively in English binds you to your American citizenship.”
Outside, the poor puppet protested, “Ouch ouch!” while the crowd cried out the Japanese translation, “Itai itai! Aiyaiyaiyai, itai yoooo!”
Someone tilted his head toward Edmund, to which Edmund responded while trying to keep an ear on the president’s speech. “Do you speak English?” the nisei asked Edmund.
“Pardon me, sir?” Edmund tried a British accent on the man. It was a reflexive response, a haughty survival tactic learned on the job. Edmund caught himself; maybe this guy had taken the president’s words to heart and wanted to bind his English to their shared American citizenship.
But the nisei replied with controlled agitation, “Ah, the toilet, the men’s room?”
“Yes sir. Right this way, sir.”
Edmund ushered the man out. Beyond the doors of the banquet hall, the ruckus was a low roar. Police were stationed at the entrance, and clients slipped in and out with amused babble or testy exchanges, the din rising and falling into the foyer. Edmund thought he saw Paul with his picket sign but ran back to hear the president’s closing remarks.
“Now I’m not talking about change for the sake of change, but about progress, progress that is a forward-thinking process of time-binding in which we pool all of our technical and intellectual resources and support the freest cultural exchange between all races and creeds and classes for the purpose of solving the world’s problems.”
At this moment, the puppet sewn from rags was splitting its guts. Long red ribbons sailed into the foggy night, flung across the wharf with spraying clouds of sparkling crimson confetti. The poor puppet heaved his entrails over the dancing protestors in a bizarre display, an Oriental Mardi Gras.
As the JACLers rose to applaud their speaker, Edmund ran into the kitchen, positioning himself at the salad bar to accost the acting president as he moved quickly along with his entourage.
“Sir, Mr. President.” Edmund stood in the narrow aisle and called out like a reporter.
The voice, coming from the bins of lettuce and tomatoes, caught the president’s attention. Who was this young waiter?
“I listened to your speech with great interest.” He fumbled quickly with a pertinent question. “I was thinking, won’t it be necessary to promote a civilization of people who speak multiple languages in order to translate and exchange ideas and technology?”
“An excellent question. Who are you?”
“Edmund Lee. I’m a student at your college.”
The president nodded to his nisei bodyguards. “This is what I’m talking about. Intelligent and hardworking students like this young man. Studying by day, working by night. That’s what we’re about, not that minority of rabble-rousers.” He patted Edmund on his padded white jacket shoulder. “Ed, come to my office and we’ll talk about your question. But tell me just one thing: what did you learn tonight?” He began to walk on, pushed along by his bodyguards.
Edmund, following, ventured awkwardly, “Well, I think you said that the winning civilization will be the one that keeps its history going.”
They climbed the stairs to the roof, and Edmund could hear the deafening roar of propellers. The president placed his hand over his tam-o’-shanter and looked back at Edmund, yelling something incomprehensible, his mouth a grin and a grimace at the same time, then ducking away into a whirring fog, tiny bits of crimson confetti glinting here and there.
“Fuck,” Paul exclaimed. “I can’t share that byline with you.”
“Why not?”
“I was outside. You were inside.”
“So? That’s the beauty of it.”
“My participation is about ten percent. The whole article is yours. And besides, who reads his work? Now you’re inside his goddamned head.”
“Pretty weird, huh?”
Paul read from Edmund’s draft. “‘To paraphrase the president, he states that conflict is essential to growth, but unresolved conflict over time results in emotional disturbance (i.e., you become crazy) as one’s self-concept departs from the reality of the self. Your territory separates from your map.’” Paul looked up from his reading. “What’s this map/territory thing?”
Edmund’s face scrunched up. “It isn’t very clear yet, is it? O.K., it’s like the territory is the real land and the map is just a representation. So you got a map in your head about yourself, but there is the real you or self that is the territory. So this conflict he’s talking about is when the territory is changing but the map stays the same. It’s this disconnect between the two, between the abstraction and the reality, that causes one to be insane.”
“That makes sense,” Paul nodded. He was thinking about how he himself could be defined as insane, but he read on: “‘The man’s entire body of scholarship—ideas that can be said to be largely utopian—has been demolished by his actions. His map is that he’s an effective communicator, a great scholar applying his theories to active duty. His territory is that of a convenient minority banana used by the white power structure. Even if that’s an exaggeration, his recent displays of buffoonery and arrogant affectations take on that role. He’s abandoned his principles of human dignity and self-concept to play the fool. So even by his own terms, he’s insane.’”
Edmund started to pull his jacket on. “I’ve got to revise this for the paper. What do you want to do?”
“It’s not my article, Edmund.”
“Yeah, I better take full responsibility. Probably nobody will read it anyway.”
“It’s brilliant, really. Only you would do that sort of homework.”
“I’ve got these photos that Professor Chen took that I’m going to use. He’s got the students being handcuffed, lines of police with batons, injured students, blood on the concrete, teachers marching with armbands, paddy wagons.”
“Talk about the territory,” Paul scoffed.
“Exactly.” Edmund stood in Paul’s living room, staring for a long moment at an oil portrait of a mustachioed man in a suit and tie, his tilted head and ochre colorings against the brushstrokes of an olive green background.
“Paul Valéry, a French poet,” Paul commented, mystified as Edmund that this canvas left by his father should be his personal window.
Edmund adjusted his jacket and stuffed the article into its deep pockets. He muttered a partial thought, “The winning civilization—” opened the door, and left.