A prose cadence, sinuous and archaic, can be seen making its way through the newspaper chat columns:
(Martin Luther King) "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."
Is that MLK we hear, declaiming to the masses? Or is it a portentous pretender? The answer seems to hinge on that last negation, which punily, and belatedly, qualifies what has come before it. "Not even an enemy", we would say, but only after we've crossed off a host of other possibilities: Not eunuchs, not New York cabbies, not card-carrying scientologists, not taxidermists, segregationists or theologians, not Iraqi-war veterans or Bin-Laden sympathizers...not even an enemy! No, that last phrase surely ruins everything; imagine instead the sentence without it:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is more in tune with the "I-have-a-dream" MLK, the one given to a certain endearing sententiousness. The sentence could be made even better, of course, by interposing a "single" between the "of" and the "one", but it is easier to make it worse:
"I'll mourn the loss [...]"
This sounds like a private decision rather than a public haranguement, and quite spoils the effect. Even worse would be the replacement of "thousands" by "millions":
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is no good. The word "millions" has been appropriated, since the late '70s, by the culture at large, and is now a vulgar---vulgar in the sense of common---placeholder for anything big; it also calls to mind millionaires, the prices of certain extremely expensive houses (like that of my advisor, for instance), the net worth of Jim Carrey, and the number of poor people in the world. On the other hand, "thousands", though actually smaller, is notionally larger; the medial diphthong "ou" contributes to the sense it gives off of a general proliferation. Note that neither "billions" nor "trillions" would work, because they exaggerate, and "tens", while interesting, has the unfortunate side-effect of being too specific. "I will mourn the loss of tens of lives---" "But not hundreds?"
There are other interesting missteps. The comma, to start with, is well-placed. Imagine if it weren't there:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is ungrammatical, but what if:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives but will not rejoice in the death of one."
There's something ineffably wrong about this. The "will" and the "not" seem to beg to be contracted into a "won't", and the sentence collapses on the resulting absurd drop in register. We also notice that there are two "wills" in the sentence, each of which depends on the other for its presence:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I'll not rejoice in the death of one."
This sounds like an Indian; a Tamilian, even. "I'll not rejoice [...]", with a nasal "no" and a hard "t"; a Tamilian on his Bajaj, holding forth to another Tamilian at a traffic signal while the Tamilian policeman, wiping, from his brow, some good old-fashioned Tamil sweat, waves them on their way. It is, in short, another absurd formulation, a fortuitous mix of high and low registers, effective as a piece of fictional dialogue, but inarguably unquotable.
The sentence, then, walks a tightrope of implications without quite falling off. Does it really belong to MLK? No, as bloggers have recently found out; the culprit was Jessica Dovey, a Japan-based teacher of English, who, while tweeting her disgust at Bin Laden's death, blended her own words of judgment with those of MLK's, resulting in a week's worth of misattributions by the general public.
It is a small and unintentional achievement that the quote was able to masquerade for so long as MLK's; I blame George Orwell, whose 1984 Dovey was reading before she found out about OBL's death and decided to reach for her Twitter app. 1984, as anyone who has read it knows, is full of ghastly, obviously-allegorical happenings. A sample from the first chapter, from the "Two minutes hate" part, reads:
"In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the
others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an
abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to
another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he
was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein
seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and
the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure
of civilization."
Reading this, and then reading about the assassination of the most dangerous terrorist in the world, is enough to set anyone on their own flights of judgment, peppered with a generous supply of "I will"s and "rejoice"s. No wonder Dovey was all shaken up, all biblical; she was responding to Orwell's rhetoric, not to Bin Laden's death.
But here's a more interesting postulate: can something of Orwell's rhythm be detected in the Dovey-authored quote? Specifically, is there something in the Two Minutes Hate section---which Dovey claims to have been reading immediately before before watching the news on OBL's death ---that is syntactically identical to Dovey's "I will [..]"? Maybe. I haven't been able to verify this conjecture myself, at least not in any detail; a perfunctory glance at the chapter in question hasn't yielded much. In any case, Orwell's first chapters are full of specificities, like those of a diligent thriller novelist; it is only later, during the final chapters, that the sententious abstraction, from which Dovey may plausibly have derived her own, kicks in. Besides, these postulates are less interesting in the phase when the postulate-er goes about his business, reporting clues and dead-ends with a poker-faced excitability that is sadly unrequited by the reader. Better to leave the entire thing hanging, as it were, by a thread of implication that the reader knows can be disentangled, if only the writer, or the reader, had the energy to do so.
(Martin Luther King) "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."
Is that MLK we hear, declaiming to the masses? Or is it a portentous pretender? The answer seems to hinge on that last negation, which punily, and belatedly, qualifies what has come before it. "Not even an enemy", we would say, but only after we've crossed off a host of other possibilities: Not eunuchs, not New York cabbies, not card-carrying scientologists, not taxidermists, segregationists or theologians, not Iraqi-war veterans or Bin-Laden sympathizers...not even an enemy! No, that last phrase surely ruins everything; imagine instead the sentence without it:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is more in tune with the "I-have-a-dream" MLK, the one given to a certain endearing sententiousness. The sentence could be made even better, of course, by interposing a "single" between the "of" and the "one", but it is easier to make it worse:
"I'll mourn the loss [...]"
This sounds like a private decision rather than a public haranguement, and quite spoils the effect. Even worse would be the replacement of "thousands" by "millions":
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is no good. The word "millions" has been appropriated, since the late '70s, by the culture at large, and is now a vulgar---vulgar in the sense of common---placeholder for anything big; it also calls to mind millionaires, the prices of certain extremely expensive houses (like that of my advisor, for instance), the net worth of Jim Carrey, and the number of poor people in the world. On the other hand, "thousands", though actually smaller, is notionally larger; the medial diphthong "ou" contributes to the sense it gives off of a general proliferation. Note that neither "billions" nor "trillions" would work, because they exaggerate, and "tens", while interesting, has the unfortunate side-effect of being too specific. "I will mourn the loss of tens of lives---" "But not hundreds?"
There are other interesting missteps. The comma, to start with, is well-placed. Imagine if it weren't there:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is ungrammatical, but what if:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives but will not rejoice in the death of one."
There's something ineffably wrong about this. The "will" and the "not" seem to beg to be contracted into a "won't", and the sentence collapses on the resulting absurd drop in register. We also notice that there are two "wills" in the sentence, each of which depends on the other for its presence:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I'll not rejoice in the death of one."
This sounds like an Indian; a Tamilian, even. "I'll not rejoice [...]", with a nasal "no" and a hard "t"; a Tamilian on his Bajaj, holding forth to another Tamilian at a traffic signal while the Tamilian policeman, wiping, from his brow, some good old-fashioned Tamil sweat, waves them on their way. It is, in short, another absurd formulation, a fortuitous mix of high and low registers, effective as a piece of fictional dialogue, but inarguably unquotable.
The sentence, then, walks a tightrope of implications without quite falling off. Does it really belong to MLK? No, as bloggers have recently found out; the culprit was Jessica Dovey, a Japan-based teacher of English, who, while tweeting her disgust at Bin Laden's death, blended her own words of judgment with those of MLK's, resulting in a week's worth of misattributions by the general public.
It is a small and unintentional achievement that the quote was able to masquerade for so long as MLK's; I blame George Orwell, whose 1984 Dovey was reading before she found out about OBL's death and decided to reach for her Twitter app. 1984, as anyone who has read it knows, is full of ghastly, obviously-allegorical happenings. A sample from the first chapter, from the "Two minutes hate" part, reads:
"In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the
others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an
abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to
another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he
was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein
seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and
the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure
of civilization."
Reading this, and then reading about the assassination of the most dangerous terrorist in the world, is enough to set anyone on their own flights of judgment, peppered with a generous supply of "I will"s and "rejoice"s. No wonder Dovey was all shaken up, all biblical; she was responding to Orwell's rhetoric, not to Bin Laden's death.
But here's a more interesting postulate: can something of Orwell's rhythm be detected in the Dovey-authored quote? Specifically, is there something in the Two Minutes Hate section---which Dovey claims to have been reading immediately before before watching the news on OBL's death ---that is syntactically identical to Dovey's "I will [..]"? Maybe. I haven't been able to verify this conjecture myself, at least not in any detail; a perfunctory glance at the chapter in question hasn't yielded much. In any case, Orwell's first chapters are full of specificities, like those of a diligent thriller novelist; it is only later, during the final chapters, that the sententious abstraction, from which Dovey may plausibly have derived her own, kicks in. Besides, these postulates are less interesting in the phase when the postulate-er goes about his business, reporting clues and dead-ends with a poker-faced excitability that is sadly unrequited by the reader. Better to leave the entire thing hanging, as it were, by a thread of implication that the reader knows can be disentangled, if only the writer, or the reader, had the energy to do so.
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