The Literary Supplement 2015

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW LITERARY SUPPLEMENT SPRING 2015

LANGUAGE AND POWER

THE NEW HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW. ON SCREENS NEAR YOU. HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

From The President The Harvard Political Review has long dealt in the currency of ideas.

For the past 46 years, the HPR has consistently delivered incisive political analysis. We have dedicated ourselves to addressing and highlighting the ideas that underlie events across Harvard’s campus, the United States, and the world.

With the third annual Literary Supplement, we take this tradition further. Featured here are pieces of cultural criticism, narrative nonfiction, and reflection that seek not only to analyze various intellectual trends and their functioning, but also to trace the path from the genesis of these ideas to their positions in today’s world. The articles presented are sustained meditations on the theme of language and power and in-depth analyses of the relationship between two concepts central to politics and our intellectual lives. And, in keeping with the tradition of the HPR, the insight found in this Literary Supplement is unrivaled in novelty and depth.

-Priyanka Menon President

From The Editor Truth is a slippery thing. Truth, as it turns out, is not chiefly a matter of fact, but a deeply subjective endeavor. One need only delve into the matrices of the United States’ own obscured histories—Native American expulsion, African American slavery, Japanese internment, Vietnam, Iraq—to realize this. Abroad, a good number of Frenchmen still object to Bastille Day. Villages and academic halls alike are battlegrounds of Armenian history. And, as David Remnick said of writing on Israel and Palestine, “The pitch of the battle is something to behold.”

Our thesis is audacious: no story is settled. And language is the deepest source of this subjectivity. Language is remarkable: it can compel us towards one truth or another; it can be morally thick; it can be damning.

If power is claim to the truth—and to how we think about the truth—then language is its modus operandi.

Surely, this discussion has no end. As long as language only approximates our pasts, “the truth” is unattainable. At most, we are asymptotic.

But we need not despair: if we admit that language dictates the way we perceive truth, we are reclaiming, not forfeiting, our agency. Language is a choice; we can take its direction towards truth as a responsibility.

Truth is a slippery thing. But it is there.

-Nancy Ko Senior Editor, Books & Arts HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

Contents CHAPTER 1 Olivia Herrington

AMERICAN VOCABULARY 4 THE FALL OF FOLK American Protest in Search of Anthems

Kaipo Matsumoto

8 SHIFTING TONGUES Colonial Legacies and the Hawaiian Language

CHAPTER 2

MINDS AT HOME

Matthew Disler

14 CREATING THE NAVAJO CLASSROOM How Students Are Overcoming Assimilation

Hana Connelly

19 THE ODYSSEY AND THE RAMAYANA Expanding the Horizon of Western Canon

Aisha Bhoori

24 SHEPHERDING VIRTUOUS WOLVES How Language Has Shaped the Liberal Arts

CHAPTER 3

LEXICON OF WAR

Sarani Jayawardena

34 THE METAPHOR AS WEAPON Why the Rhetoric of Battle Has No Place in Public Policy Discourse

Alexandra Grimm

38 WAR OF THE WORDS The Sexualized Language of Violence in the Vietnam War

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CHAPTER 1

American Vocabulary

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The Fall of Folk American Protest in Search of Anthems Olivia Herrington She went to Sarajevo during the civil war, singing while the bombs fell.

She called an album “Where Are You Now, My Son?” after a twenty-minute song filled with confusion, mourning, a mother’s cries, the sound of death. She called it singing, but the lyrics were moans and the music was air raid sirens, parts of it accompanied by her poetic commentary, all of it recorded in the bomb shelters and war-torn streets of Hanoi. In her “Song of Bangladesh,” she condemned the “laws upon which nations stand, which say to sacrifice a people for a land.” Joan Baez refused, at age sixteen, to leave her classroom during an air-raid drill. She staged sitins at armed forces induction centers to protest the Vietnam War. She said in a 1967 Pop Chronicles interview, “I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, thousands attended Baez’s concerts—people who sought a better tomorrow or who wanted her voice to wash away their cares. She numbered among a host of folk and rock singers, whose ranks included the likes of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, that expanded the genre of protest music and thereby aimed to spark or join in political and social activism. Even this year, when Rolling Stone asked its readers to name the nation’s greatest protest songs, nine of the 10 chosen belong to the folk and rock musicians of these decades. Two of those are the work of Young or of a band of which he was a member. Four are Dylan’s.

Though it is natural for fame to die out over time, those earlier activists possess few modern equivalents. The Vietnam-era folk singers’ sentiment of solidarity is echoed in occasional concerts to support Haiti after the 2010 earthquake or Oklahoma after tornadoes in 2013. But it seldom fills the entire oeuvre of today’s most renowned American artists. Young did produce an album protesting the Iraq War, but he—like so many who still sing for social change—belongs more to the 1970s than to the 2000s or 2010s. Bands such as the Rolling Stones, Green Day, and Pearl Jam also sang against the war, but only as transient parts of their careers. They are not known for their protest songs.

Who now stands for the “weary mothers of the earth” and imprisoned immigrants? Where are the widespread outcries against environmental concerns? Baez, Dylan, Seeger, and Odetta sang in war and sorrow, directing their songs toward particular events when compelled by them. Their message never wavered in the 1960s and did not return to normalcy between the peaks of the world’s pain and outrage.

But modern songs of idealism are forgotten until another tragedy again calls them to

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mind. We still need champions for these causes, leaders in their tradition to remind us that the fight for equality is ongoing. We still need singers to voice the interests of the downtrodden.

Much of these singers’ popularity has not survived the generations. Baez produced eight gold albums in the United States, releasing the last in 1975. Odetta, a singer and legend of the civil rights movement, slipped out of the public eye in the late 1960s. Even then, Americans were beginning to move on from the era in which Rosa Parks had expressed faith in the meaning of Odetta’s blues, ballads, and folk music. Occidental College professor Peter Dreier names six singers among the 20th-century activists in his book The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, but just one 21st-century musician in his 2012 Huffington Post article “50 Young Progressive Activists Who Are Changing America.”

Pete Seeger, integral to protest music since the 1940s, sang at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan when Occupy Wall Street demanded economic equity there in 2011. So did Baez and others belonging to her generation of musical political activism. And so did Tom Morello, the only 21st-century singer Dreier mentioned. But although music was significant to the Occupy protestors’ efforts, its energy failed to catch hold. It did not unite activists because, as sincere as these singers were, they could not identify a single, central goal for the movement. In an interview with The New York Times, British critic Dorian Lynskey pointed out that it was much more difficult to sing about “a financial crisis where the villains are obscure and the solutions are obscure.”

Today, Baez, like Young, continues to fight for these causes but seems unable to stir a larger movement. For now, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are among America’s most renowned activist singers: “Same Love,” their single supporting gay rights, topped charts after its 2013 release. Some of the duo’s other songs, such as “Stay at Home Dad” and “White Privilege,” also possess a socially conscious, progressive bent.

Still, the absence of protest songs, and of the direct political engagement that accompanies them, has been notable. Perhaps the change is a societal one. Current movements have often migrated from the public sphere into the private, exploring, for instance, the personal pieces of gender equality that Macklemore does in “Stay at Home Dad.” An article by David Bauder of the Associated Press, for one, attributes the change to a increasingly private experience of listening to music: people spend more time wearing headphones now and less time enjoying songs together.

Such an explanation might account for some part of the transition. With protest music, context matters, particularly in America’s recent decades. The singers who popularized protest songs in the 1960s and 1970s identified with folk music, a genre reliant on group engagement.

Their relationship with activism also went both ways. Harvard Kennedy School professor Timothy McCarthy pointed out in an interview with the HPR that in the 1960s and 1970s, protest achieved an “incredibly visible and public” prominence never matched before or after. He believes it is unsurprising that artists responded to this trend. Protest music was not merely a fringe effort with which a few singers engaged. It was a phenomenon integral to popular culture.

In other words, Baez, Dylan, and Odetta were able to perform at the March on Washington in part because, well, the March on Washington existed. Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, an iconic folk group of the 1960s that also performed on that day, later noted the event as the moment when she herself realized the power of song. The protest music that became the group’s focus grew out of that oppor-

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“But modern songs of idealism are forgotten until another tragedy again calls them to mind. We still need champions for these causes, leaders in their tradition to remind us that the fight for equality is ongoing. We still need singers to voice the interests of the downtrodden.”

tunity. “Now music began to inspire America, tweak its conscience,” she recalled in a 2014 PBS Documentary. “I remember being up on the steps of the Lincoln monument and I truly believed at that moment that it was possible, proof-positive possible, that human beings could join together for their greater good … It changed the way we saw the world and our role in it.”

The music industry deserves some blame for protest songs’ devolving potency.

In the 1970s, it exploited protest anthems’ popularity, encouraging their decline into folk rock and psychedelic music’s meaninglessly general complaints about life, said contemporary historian Jerome Rodnitzky in Essays on Radicalism in Contemporary America. Watching the fade into hazy frustration, he commented that such a shift “destroys specific political protest. By saying everything, it must in effect say nothing.” In the 21st century, the music industry creates an equally great and entirely opposite obstacle to protest music’s fame. At least in the opinion of Peter, Paul and Mary’s Peter Yarrow, it now rejects the radical messages it once helped popularize.

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“The bean counters took over,” he told The New York Times in 2011. “The bottom line is music has been destroyed by the all-mighty dollar.”

If the collapse in protest music’s popularity did not result from changes in society, however, it did reflect them. In the 1960s, folk music was the music of college students. Rodnitzky notes that the genre was central to young people’s lives on politically active campuses. As those students aged, the Vietnam War drew to a close, the civil rights movement lost Martin Luther King, Jr.’s powerful leadership, and protest music felt less relevant.

To some degree, the hip-hop revolution of the 1970s and 1980s took folk music’s place. Though much of the revolution’s beginnings gave way to less politically motivated music, that influence has lasted. It is capable, still, of sparking social change.

In McCarthy’s words, hip-hop is a “sharp, in-your-face representation of protest.”

Yet rap’s politically active side has been hidden in recent years, dwelling in the shade of the genre’s most prominent songs, which frequently focus more on “sex, partying, consumerism, violence, and self-promotion,” as Forbes’ Ruth Blatt phrased it. And the American audience has shown little interest in rap musicians who devote themselves to protest songs. Jessica Disu, or FM Supreme, is a rapper and peace activist known in Chicago for her efforts to curb gun violence, but she lacks nationwide fame. Awkword is another socially conscious rapper with scant support; to his disappointment, his 2014 release of World View, an album whose proceeds went entirely to charity, went relatively unnoticed.

The outcry following the events in Ferguson, Missouri this year may be reigniting musical political activism that draws on both the hip-hop and folk traditions.

Tom Morello is one of a group of artists responding to the August shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. He released his protest song “Marching on Ferguson” this October, its title hearkening back to the March on Washington. Folk singer Ezra Furman’s “Ferguson’s Burning” draws evident inspiration, in terms of sound and message, from the legacy that Dylan built. Musician Questlove (Ahmir Khalib Thompson) urged fellow hip-hop singers to create protest anthems addressing the events in Ferguson, and many rose to the challenge. D’Angelo, also a hip-hop artist, dedicated his December 2014 album Black Messiah to “the people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen.”

This variety in musical forms fits with McCarthy’s understanding of a striking aspect of the #BlackLivesMatter protests following the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others at the hands of law enforcement officials. This is a “movement that is far more democratic” than past movements, McCarthy remarked: because it represents more than “one voice,” its music “may itself have a kind of democratic ethos.” He expects that, as the movement continues, its musical force will grow but will not claim a single figurehead in the style of hip-hop’s Tupac or folk’s Baez.

Events like Garner and Brown’s deaths recreate the anguish of the 1960s and the sense of injustice that drove the civil rights movement. But today’s responses have the potential to unite music with protest and recall the aspirations that pushed society closer to equity. Such movements provide an energy that has been too often lacking in the last decades, an opportunity to demand change of the magnitude that the 1960s and 1970s activists effected.

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Shifting Tongues Colonial Legacies and the Hawaiian Language

Kaipo Matsumoto With the sun making its way over the Ko’olau Mountains and onto the shores of Waikiki, it is a perfect day in tropical paradise. As she leaves behind the local island pidgin dialect of her home, a young girl catches a streetcar to school, where she will learn not only to dress like her American classmates but to speak, read, and write “properly” as well. The image of paradise, so often seen through the lenses of tourists’ sunglasses, hides the political and cultural trauma that has faced native Hawaiians for the past 50 years.

Sitting in my grandmother’s Honolulu home 70 years after the fact, I ask her about her high school days during the 1940s. “Did anyone in high school speak Hawaiian?” As she recalls her days at St. Andrew’s Priory School, an Episcopalian school for girls, she speaks only of English classes, one for grammar and one for literature. English was by law the standard of learning in Hawai’i at the time.

“It was like [the Hawaiian language] never existed. When I look back, quite a number of us were Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian. Out of 60 girls [in the graduating class], most of my friends were all part-Hawaiian.”

The common narrative that emerges as many Hawaiian families recount this era is similar to my grandmother’s. How could the once-thriving indigenous language of Hawai’i come to a seeming nonexistence even amongst the aboriginal people themselves?

While the Hawaiian language is extant today, it is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss its nature as a critical element of islands’ culture without acknowledging its history of suppression. From the 19th century onward, both the indigenous culture and the polity of the Hawaiian Kingdom were correspondingly under fire from foreign powers.

THE ANTI-HAWAIIAN CAMPAIGN My alma mater, The Kamehameha Schools, speaks to this dynamic. Upon its founding in 1887, its first principal, William Oleson, banned the use of the Hawaiian language. In a 2004 speech, former Kamehameha teacher Kawika Eyre described

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the nature of the linguistic oppression at the school’s Kaiwi’ula campus. “The anti-Hawaiian campaign at Kaiwi’ula was relentless,” he said. “Non-stop. For decades.

Every teacher was to be a teacher of English. Every incentive was offered, every tactic tried: slogans, ‘Better English Weeks,’ ... off-campus passes, free periods ... [even] an ‘English holiday’ for anyone caught not talking ‘native’ for a month.” This was but one of the first institutionalized means of oppression against the Hawaiian language, one that preluded the eventual banning of Hawaiian in all Hawai’i schools.

While this campaign against the Hawaiian language was considerable, it was but one aspect of the way in which native Hawaiians were disenfranchised in their homeland. They were also losing their nation on the political front.

Oleson’s pedagogical actions at Kamehameha regarding the Hawaiian language were consistent with his political actions that same year. He was part of the committee that penned the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, a document that restricted the monarchy’s power and instituted property and income requirements to vote, largely excluding native Hawaiians. The Constitution was then forced upon King David Kalakaua under duress, marking what some call the beginning of the insurgency against the Hawaiian monarchy. What Eyre describes as an “anti-Hawaiian campaign” at Kamehameha had political parallels in the government sector as well.

The Bayonet Constitution of 1887 allowed the legislature and monarch’s cabinet, largely made up of non-native businessmen and lawyers, to override the monarch’s executive decisions. Additionally, the new constitution instituted voting requirements: $3000 worth of property and an annual income of $600. This excluded many native Hawaiians and much of the local Asian population, while granting suffrage to American and European resident aliens that met the property and income requirements.

The committee pushing the Bayonet Constitution was known as the Hawaiian League, a group of mostly Americans and Europeans that sought to suppress the native vote and increase their political power for their own economic interests. The motive? Sugar. American sugar plantation owners and exporters could maintain their economic leverage with their upper hand in voting power.

Political restructuring in favor of American businessmen and cultural suppression were two central colonial tactics that have left haunting legacies today. As Oleson’s actions at Kamehameha and with the Hawaiian government suggest, there was no difference between the dispossession of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the suppression of the Hawaiian language.

In 1893, a group of foreign conspirators—some of whom had been integral players in writing the Bayonet Constitution—overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani. The event is often seen as the apex of political turmoil in Hawai’i. With the help of U.S. marines, this group, known as the “Committee of Safety,” seized control of the government, imprisoning the queen and proclaiming an end to the Hawaiian monarchical system. Imprisoned in her palace, Lili’uokalani abdicated her throne to a provisional government in the hopes that no Hawaiian blood would be shed. But in 1896, the newly-proclaimed Republic of Hawai’i banned the Hawaiian language in all schools.

Two years later, the United States declared Hawai’i annexed by joint resolution, and the laws of the Republic of Hawai’i—including the ban on the Hawaiian language—were applied to the new Territory of Hawai’i. The outlawing of the Hawaiian language in the school system would last until 1986. Further, the monarchy never returned, and the American occupation persisted.

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The late 19th century saw a dramatic rise in the number of Christian churches and schools in Hawai’i. St. Andrew’s Priory in Honolulu (pictured) was one of the earliest schools at which students were required to speak English at all times. Hawaiian was banned in all Hawai’i public schools in 1896.

“THEREFORE, DO NOT BE AFRAID”: LANGUAGE AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE This is a story of the adversities that accompany cultural oppression and political injustice, but this is not entirely a story of victimization. Hawaiians used the language as a powerful tool to counteract the political and cultural injustices they faced at the turn of the 19th century. Hawaiian-language newspapers played a significant role in publishing anti-annexationist sentiment. In 1895, there were as many as 13 newspaper presses publishing on a regular basis.

The newspaper Ke Aloha Aina, privately owned by James Kauli’a, a prominent anti-annexationist, printed and disseminated a speech Kauli’a had given at a rally: “No laila, mai maka’u, e kupaa ma ke Aloha i ka Aina, a e lokahi ma ka manao, e kue loa aku i ka hoohui ia e Hawai’i me Amerika a hiki i ke aloha aina hope loa.”

“Therefore, do not be afraid, be steadfast in love for the land and be united in one thought, to protest forever the annexation of Hawai’i to America until the very last Hawaiian patriot.”

Many Native Hawaiians employed their language as a means of active resistance.

For example, in the 1897 Ku’e Petitions, 38,000 out of 40,000 total native Hawaiians, signed a petition in opposition to annexation. The petitions, presented in Hawaiian and English, were used in an appeal to the U.S. Congress, but to no avail.

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The Hawaiian language would also become a key focal point in the revitalization of Hawaiian culture and the growing Hawaiian sovereignty movement born out of the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. While there were key individuals that fought for the survival of the Hawaiian language in the early 1900s, such as Mary K. Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, it was not until the latter half of the century that institutional victories began to take place for Hawaiian language. The Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s brought about a sense of empowerment for native Hawaiians through the revival of Hawaiian music, dance, voyaging techniques, natural resource awareness, and a growing Hawaiian sovereignty movement, all of which inherently involved a return to the Hawaiian language in some capacity.

Perhaps the largest language revitalization effort was that of Aha Punana Leo, a preschool immersion program that was founded in 1983 in the hopes of returning the Hawaiian language to the classroom as a mode of instruction. Yet no bill allowing Hawaiian language education in grade schools was passed until 1986, after several years of advocacy. In the wake of Aha Punana Leo’s work, elementary, middle, and high school immersion schools arose in the 1990s. Now, as Hawaiian makes its way into primary, secondary, and higher education, many are hopeful that the language will not only survive but also permeate everyday life.

The Hawaiian language seems more present than it was when my grandmother went to high school, but its future is uncertain. As professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai’i Hawaiian Studies professor C. M. Kaliko Baker states in an interview with the HPR, “It is not that the language is no longer dying, it is that the language is just not dying as quickly.” Today, out of Hawai’i’s population of roughly 1.4 million, only a quarter of Hawai’i’s 1.4 million people speak a language other than English. Of those, about six percent speak Hawaiian, compared to the hundreds of thousands that once spoke the language fluently in the 19th century.

The struggle to ensure the survival and growth of the Hawaiian language remains an uphill one.

Most recently, Harvard’s undergraduate foreign language requirement has been at odds with the Hawaiian language. In 2012, Leshae Henderson, a fluent Hawaiian speaker and alumna of the Kamehameha Schools, entered Harvard as a freshman.

Having taken six years of Hawaiian language during her time at Kamehameha, she hoped to test out of the college’s foreign language requirement, a common procedure done by those proficient in another language before entering Harvard.

Despite repeatedly appealing to Harvard’s administration, Henderson was denied the opportunity to test out. One justification was that the language did not have a significant body of literature despite the large archive of Hawaiian language newspapers from the 1800s.

When I entered Harvard College a year later, I too inquired as to how I could fulfill my language requirement with Hawaiian. I was informed that Harvard could not identify a university-affiliated individual to write and administer a proficiency exam. In several instances, however, Harvard has provided language instructors for individual students in languages not regularly offered at the College, including Danish and Indonesian; thus the school would seem to have sufficient resources to cater to students from any number of linguistic backgrounds.

Yet another year passed. We garnered support from Harvard alumni and offered suggestions to help the College produce a Hawaiian-language proficiency exam.

Only after collaborating with linguistics and language professors from Harvard and the University of Hawai’i, respectively, did the administration allow for the fulfill-

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ment of the requirement with Hawaiian.

The university’s reluctance to grant credit for the Hawaiian language did more than create friction with current students; it resonated with a genealogy of historical oppression in educational institutions. The university’s resistance spoke not only to elements of cultural stifling but also to the language’s inextricable significance in past political tumult. If anything, this most recent altercation with the Harvard administration has turned a spotlight to the warranted an enduring effort to keep the Hawaiian language off the list of extinct languages—a list that, according to John Wilford of The New York Times, grows by about one language every two weeks.

The stubborn fight to sustain indigenous languages, from the Maori in New Zealand to the Wampanoag in Massachusetts, is a reflection of why these languages are so significant. According to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis of linguistic relativity, different languages indicate differences in experience and thought. As such, the nonreversible loss of indigenous languages is a tragedy that represents the death of unique worldviews.

Similarly, says Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania English professor Frederick White, “Such language loss represents burned bridges to cultural knowledge and practices that, once the language is dead, can never be recovered.” This irretrievable loss of language is critical to indigenous identity and culture, which is simultaneously tied to political well-being. The Hawaiian language, as a paramount component of Hawaiian identity, has been central to its survival.

After returning home, I was again sitting beside my grandmother as she said, “I wish I could have learned Hawaiian back in my day.” She knows, sadly, that it is too late for her generation. But the fight is not over for the tongues of Hawai’i’s children.

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CHAPTER 2

Minds at Home

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Creating the Navajo Classroom How Students Are Overcoming Assimilation Matthew Disler Growing up near Bowl Canyon on the Navajo Nation Reservation, Damon Clark ‘16 would play cowboys and Indians. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be the cowboy, because the cowboy kills the Indian,” he says. “You know who wins, and you know who loses.”

The cowboy-Indian divide is not so black and white now as it was when Clark’s great-great-grandfather, Chief Manuelito, led a guerrilla war in the 1860s to oppose the U.S. government’s forced relocation of the tribe. Clark firmly considers himself Navajo—“I know how to introduce myself, I know the history, I live the culture”— but he is not fluent in the language. Neither are many of his peers: of the 300,000 Navajos in the United States, almost half do not speak Navajo at home. And this challenge is not confined to one tribe. At the Ivy Native Council Summit in Brown University in October, for instance, only two out of 125 attendees were fluent in their tribal language.

For Native American communities, the language issue compounds other obstacles that they feel are chipping away at their heritage. Eighty-eight percent of self-identifying Native Americans live off reservations, and only a quarter speak their traditional language at home. Added to that is the hefty challenge of economic development and education in communities that, on average, are significantly poorer than non-Native America. Teachers and administrators who are attempting to retain native language programs face members in these communities who view embracing English as the key to socioeconomic success and students who are indifferent about learning their traditional tongue. This divide points to a larger question: without the Navajo language, what does it mean to be Navajo? *** These issues of language and identity have become even more salient in recent years. Recently, Lucasfilm released a Navajo version of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and Disney announced plans to release a translation of Finding Nemo. In October, the Navajo Nation Supreme Court disqualified the presidential candidacy of Chris Deschene, a highly educated lawyer, engineer, and veteran, on the grounds

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that he was not fluent in Navajo. (A legislative move to retroactively change the language requirements for presidential candidates was vetoed by the current president, Ben Shelly.)

The difficulties facing Navajo language education have remained fairly consistent since the revival of interest in indigenous culture and activism in the 1970s as part of the civil rights movement and the passage of the 1972 Indian Education Act and the 1975 Indian Self-Assistance and Education Assistance Act. According to Dr. AnCita Benally, the education program manager at the Office of Standards, Curriculum, and Assessments Development at the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education, many community members believe that classes about Diné (the Navajo word for the Navajo language and people) are irrelevant or even counterproductive. Such people, she says, believe that “academic achievement ... [can] be achieved only with English.” Frequently, administrators and teachers think that teaching the language is pointless, and parents argue that cultural education should be taught at home or left by the wayside. “And so people are assuming that if there is a lot of Navajo language and culture education, it will interfere with the academic success,” she concludes.

At home, though, many parents either continue to emphasize English, or they are unfamiliar with Navajo themselves—a product of similar emphasis by their own parents and schools. Shelly Lowe, the executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program, explains that her parents’ generation was taught to prioritize English. “My grandparents’ generation would still speak to them in Navajo, [but] the expectation was, ‘You speak English, and that’s important.’ So when my generation came along, we were primarily and only taught English in a lot of cases. Even though we knew and listened to our parents speak to our grandparents in Navajo ... we were spoken to in English.” This prioritization had a self-perpetuating effect: as more and more Navajos became used to English in business and daily life, it became the de facto necessary language for economic success.

This vicious cycle is compounded for those Native Americans who live off reservations. In more urban or heterogeneous areas, the forces of assimilation are even stronger: children attend English-speaking public schools with peers whose cultural backgrounds are strikingly different from their tribal heritage. For such off-reservation Indians, the pragmatic benefits of English are even more striking, and the need for their native language seems all the more unclear.

As a result, most school-age Navajos—especially those that don’t speak Diné at home—are apathetic towards learning their tribal language. In Dr. Benally’s view, they’re “more interested in music and texting their friends and that kind of stuff,” but music, texts, movies, and websites are all in English. Those that are about to graduate or attend universities often experience renewed interest in their heritage, but by then they are making up for lost time. “Once they get into college, a lot of them finally realize what they don’t have.” *** Dineé Dorame, Yale University senior from Albuquerque, N.M. experienced this pattern. Her mother’s fluency in Navajo had a limited effect, and her interest in learning the language only began near the end of high school. “I just never really picked up on it as a kid because she thought it was much more important for

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The memorial to Navajo code talkers remembers the Navajo U.S. Veterans who used their native language to translate and transmit secret military messages during World War II and the Korean War. The Navajo code is the only spoken military code never to have been deciphered. me to be fluent and able to study in English,” she explains. Dorame became curious about learning Navajo at the same time as she considered applying for the Chief Manuelito Scholarship. (Clark’s great-great-grandfather is now the namesake of a middle school in Gallup, N.M. as well as a scholarship that provides college funds for high-achieving Navajo students who have also completed Navajo language and government courses.) Thus, she enrolled in an approved Navajo class at the University of New Mexico.

But the course would introduce new hindrances. In short, the entire classroom structure—the textbooks, the rigidity of the curriculum, the heterogeneous and confusing mixture of Navajo and non-Navajo students—resulted in class that was both ineffective and ultimately disappointing. “Oftentimes, native languages aren’t meant to be taught in that environment,” she believes. “Many native languages incorporate cultural values within the language, so it’s really hard to teach it within this Western education structure.” It is difficult for a large classroom setting to replicate the experience of learning a language in daily life through discussions, songs, and stories.

But in cultures where the oral nature of the language is so important—and where these community discussions are important in teaching other traditional practices, beliefs, and values—stripping this aspect from the curriculum often results in a truncated education.

At Yale, Dorame enrolled in a Directed Independent Language Study program,

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which paired her with another student and a certified Navajo teacher twice a week.

The small size allowed for greater flexibility while avoiding the pitfalls of the larger, more impersonal University of New Mexico class. (Most universities, including Harvard, do not teach native languages, often because of a lack of qualified teachers, funding, or student interest.) When it comes to native languages, she maintains, “[Native language programs] weren’t mean to teach through textbooks. They’re meant to teach through oral histories, through your ways of living, through prayer, through song. That is part of your language-learning experience.” *** Dorame’s story points to the dual challenge faced by Navajo students. First, there’s the issue of community support: if children, parents, and teachers are unconvinced that schools should provide language instruction, then the programs are dead in the water. But even if everyone agrees that Navajo education is an important part of the curriculum, there’s still the question of how to implement the new programs in the most effective way possible.

The first task, then, is one of persuasion, where advocates like Dr. Benally argue that traditional school subjects like math, science, and history can be taught just as effectively in Navajo as in English. However, even where Navajo language courses are implemented, students often graduate with mediocre results. Dorame notes, “One problem we’re finding in these schools is that students go through the program and then feel like they haven’t learned very much. I think a lot of that has to do with the way we’re structuring the program and the way [schools] are teaching it.” The challenge lies in implementing curricula that avoid the pitfalls of Dorame’s University of New Mexico class by making the language engaging and meaningful.

In order for language to play a role in identity, it seems that language courses must speak to students’ sense of identity in the first place.

Increasingly, schools are attempting to fill the native language education gap.

The Department of Diné Education, for instance, trains language teachers and develops standards, curricula, and assessments for the Navajo language and culture courses at the 32 schools on the reservation funded by Bureau of Indian Affairs grants. In Flagstaff, Arizona, Puente de Hózhó Bilingual Magnet School offers immersion programs from kindergarten through fifth grade in its Spanish/English and Navajo/English programs. In Albuquerque, the Native American Community Academy (NACA) offers courses in Navajo, Lakota, Tiwa, Tewa, and Zuni, as well as Native American literature. NACA also helps spread its model of community-oriented language and cultural education through the NACA-Inspired Schools Network, which currently includes three partner schools. One of those schools, Dream Diné, opened this summer in Shiprock, N.M., in the heart of the Navajo Nation Reservation.

Kara Bobroff founded NACA as a charter school in 2006 after discussions with over 150 community members revealed that the public school system was insufficiently addressing the cultural needs of Native American students. “Preparing students academically for college, making sure they have a secure identity, and [ensuring] that they’re healthy were the three things that continued to come up in the conversations,” she recalls. The charter school incorporates these goals into its mission, and in the classroom, students actively discuss issues of identity as seen through literature, history, and contemporary issues in their communities. “We don’t really have a set way of saying, like, ‘This is how you have to think about your

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tribal identity!’” she says, laughing. “We want our kids to understand that they are the drivers of their identity.”

Once schools like NACA implement programs to ensure native language and cultural education, the next task is to acquire consistent funds and high-quality teachers. New Mexico’s Indian Education Act supports charter schools throughout the state, but for many grant schools, it is difficult to ensure funds. Historically, federal grants have operated on fairly short timeframes, so recipient schools have had to continuously apply for scarce funding. This summer, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held hearings on language education grant reform. Although two bills passed the committee that would facilitate and finance grants in the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, both have been held up in the Senate since July.

Teacher training is an equally hefty challenge. “In the past, people have been assigned to teach Navajo language and culture just because they’re Navajo and they can speak Navajo. And not all of them are able to teach, because they don’t know how,” explains Dr. Benally. This problem is even more imposing for smaller tribes, where the number of native speakers is swiftly decreasing. Therefore, the Navajo Nation has initiated teacher-training programs, and schools like NACA send their instructors to places like the Lakota Summer Institute in North Dakota. The Department of Diné Education has also released textbooks and curricula for use in grant and charter schools. However, there’s still the ever-present difficulty of making language education effective and meaningful for students like Dinée Dorame and Damon Clark, who exist at the intersection of cross-cutting cultural boundaries, assimilating forces, and traditions. The task exists in every classroom to foster the bond between language and culture—so central in the lives of older generations—for Navajo youth. *** Damon Clark is growing out his hair to remind himself of his heritage. “You see these elders with long hair, and you aspire for that,” he says. He is acutely aware of the ways that Navajo culture is threatened: on and off the reservation, in and out of school, “you face that fact that you’re in assimilation.” For many Navajo today, the solution is to be proactive in sustaining the language in the classroom.

And there have been definite, if limited, successes. Before she hangs up, AnCita Benally mentions a story told to her by a colleague who went to Albuquerque for a meeting. In the schoolyard, he noticed that two young girls were playing with each other in Navajo. “In 60 years, maybe these two little girls will be in their seventies, and they will still have the language,” she concludes. “So we get surprises.”

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The Odyssey and the Ramayana Expanding the Horizon of the Western Canon

Hana Connelly

Traditionally, school districts carefully and conscientiously compile reading lists from the “Western canon,” whose most ubiquitous works include the Odyssey and the plays of William Shakespeare. The existence of such a canon allows students across all of America to share a common literary heritage; most incoming freshmen at any university could bond over the experience of having fumbled through reading Romeo and Juliet aloud in class or grasp the significance of a Gatsby-themed Freshman Formal.

However, school readings change over time and can diverge significantly. In 2013, all students entering ninth grade at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts were required to read The Contender by Robert Lipsyte, which follows the trials and tribulations of an African-American high school dropout as he copes with the drug use and violence around him by training to be a boxer.

Meanwhile, students in nearby Melrose read The Warrior’s Heart: Becoming a Man of Compassion and Courage, a memoir that details the journey of a high-achieving Jewish student named Eric Greitens as he trains to become a Navy SEAL. Though these two school districts’ choices for summer reading may emphasize different kinds of struggles and identities, they are united in their emphasis on more modern settings than those in most “classics.” Furthermore, neither of these books can yet claim to be part of the Western canon: The Contender was written in 1967, while The Warrior’s Heart was published only two years ago. This shift toward more recent literature in high school curricula is a national trend. For most students, these books are more immediately understandable and relatable than those that comprise the Western canon. But introducing more relatable material necessarily excludes the older books once regarded as seminal to an English student’s development. When we teach The Contender to the exclusion of Lord of the Flies, or The Warrior’s Heart instead of the Odyssey, is this a mark of cultural progress or a sign of literary decline?

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Homer, the ancient Greek author of Iliad and the Odyssey, is an archetypal figure in the traditional notion of the Western canon. The implication that this geographically limited and necessarily outdated list of works carries greater cultural influence and artistic merit than present-day counterparts from a wider range of cultures has been the subject of increasing debate.

WHAT IS THE WESTERN CANON? In 1994, Harold Bloom wrote in The Book and School of the Ages that the Western canon could be reduced to a fixed list of authors, which he categorized by the different “ages” into which they fit. This list focuses on those authors who had the greatest impact both on their era and on future writers. For example, Homer’s Odyssey features prominently as an influential ancient text that directly inspired other great works, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bloom’s complete list is expansive and even touches on literature that falls outside the traditional conception of the “West,” such as the Epic of the Gilgamesh or the works of Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.

However, Bloom’s list of the 26 authors whom he believes to be “central” to the canon strays only as far as Chile, with the inclusion of the poet Pablo Neruda. Bloom also grounded his concept of the canon in a thorough rejection of the many multicultural authors who were coming to prominence in his day, whom he dismissed as part of the “school of resentment”—a style of literary criticism that surfaced in the 1970s and focused more on political and social activism than on the pure “aesthet-

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ics” that Bloom most admired. In a 1995 interview with Eleanor Wachtel of Queen’s Quarterly, Bloom harshly condemned this approach to literature: “But unfortunately what is called ‘multiculturalism’ in the United States never means Cervantes. …

It means fifth-rate work by people full of resentment, who happen to be women, or who happen to be Chicano or Puerto-Rican, or who happen to be African-American, and they are by no means the best writers who are African-American, or women, or so on.”

Part of the tension between Bloom and the “school of resentment” may be explained by Bloom’s conception of the canon as an exact list of authors. While this definition is certainly precise and easy to work with, it can also be logistically difficult, oddly specific, and problematically exclusive. According to Harvard professor Homi K. Bhabha, the canon should not be reduced to individual authors in this way.

Instead, Bhabha says, “The canon is a whole way of thinking about literature and culture. It’s a way of answering the question: what are works of enduring value, irrespective of the time they are written?” Of course, the question of “enduring value” is equally subjective and difficult to address, and it does not solve the divide between Bloom and the “school of resentment.” While Bhabha’s definition of the canon is conducive to greater interpretation, it makes it impossible to definitively praise or condemn more modern writers, whose lasting importance can only be proven with time.

What should the “canon” be, if it should exist at all? Today, we are inclined to want to redefine it to include authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Chinua Achebe, who represent perspectives we have come to acknowledge as vital. How can we be empathetic, understanding, and informed citizens of this multicultural society without having struggled alongside Janie Crawford of Their Eyes Were Watching God or without having stood with Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart?

But such a shift toward more recent texts is a conscious choice that carries several political consequences worth examining. The humanities have historically been important precisely because they help set the tone for a country’s cultural dialogue, values, and politics. For many students, the books that they read in school form the majority of their exposure to literature and can stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Historically, there has always been a dynamic and confusing relationship between the Western canon and its political implications, In his World Literature Today review of Bloom’s The Book and School of the Ages, Leslie Schenk points out how intricately tied to historical context the canon is: “What I do find argument with is how ramshackle and makeshift, when all is said and done, our Western canon turns out to be … too many worthies are omitted not for lack of merit but on the basis of time and chance or geography, or on the choice and deficiencies of translators.” Much of the “canonicity” concept is based on an author’s fame—but fame is fickle, often unpredictable, and not necessarily the best measure of a book’s merit or even impact. Schenk specifically mentions Stendhal, whom he believes to be one of “the greatest novelists of all time,” and bemoans that he is so thoroughly overshadowed by inferior authors like Charles Dickens.

Schenk also pulls us away from our preoccupation with what constitutes the “Western canon” to reflect on the complete lack of a “worldwide canon.” Bloom focuses primarily on arguing the merits of preserving the ancient, classical texts that comprise the Western canon instead of refocusing on the more recent, multicultural literature that “the school of resentment” championed. However, neither Bloom

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nor his critics bother to consider how we should approach the ancient, foundational texts of non-Western cultures. Bloom does give cursory mention to some of these texts, such as the Koran or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but he ignores most Asian or African literature. As Schenk laments, the concept of a “Western” canon necessarily excludes works that have profoundly shaped other parts of the world, like the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji or the Hindu Ramayana. In a world that has become so interconnected and traditionally Western, countries once self-regarded as superior must face a new reality. And now, we find ourselves having to reconsider the limits of the Western canon.

How do we come to terms with the limits of the Western canon? Given its fraught history, does it represent such a fundamental bedrock of the humanities that we should continue to prioritize it? Should we keep only select parts in order to make room for texts that expand our gaze beyond the West? Or should we take the radical step of scrapping the entire Western canon altogether, in favor of texts that better reflect our modern, liberal values?

THE FUTURE OF THE CANON When speaking with the HPR, Bhabha warned against one possible approach: “In America, when there was the sense that demographic plurality was important—which it is—we suddenly taught many ethnic authors. But these writers should be read for what they are, not for the fact that they represent a particular ethnic point of view. No writer wants the burden of their ethnic identity.” Following this reasoning, Chinua Achebe should not be remembered chiefly as a Nigerian novelist; his Things Fall Apart speaks to human relationships and the destructiveness of colonialism everywhere. By defining authors primarily by their “diversity,” we risk missing the most important purpose of literature—to transcend political, cultural, and historical boundaries by exploring universal questions that point us to the heart of human values. As Bhabha explains, great authors do not aim to represent their ethnic identities, but rather to represent human experience in general.

Lindsay Johns, who works closely with disadvantaged students in Peckham, England and has written about his own opinion on the importance of the classics, suggests another issue with this approach to literature. He explained to the HPR, “I’m tired of patronizing liberals who say you have to give ‘kids in the ghetto’ literature that relates to them and assume that they can’t enjoy Homer or Dante. The Western canon is everyone’s birthright regardless of their religion, background, et cetera. The canon, for better or for worse, addresses the fundamental bedrocks at the heart of the human condition, irrespective of race.”

As Johns points out, tailoring reading lists to be more “relatable” to students does them a disservice and ignores the universality of great literature. Of course, it may take a few extra steps to help students to recognize the common struggles of love, jealousy, racism, and sexism that are contained in a play like Othello. However, this extra effort is worth it if it means that these students will gain access to a great piece of literature.

Literature emphasizes the pervasiveness of many aspects of the human experience while simultaneously exposing us to different viewpoints and pushing us to find new ways to think about our lives. If we believe that the importance of literature lies in expanding our thinking, then we should actively work to preserve the teaching of the Western canon, which affords students an opportunity to think far

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beyond their own time and place and pushes them to relate to universal values that lie hidden beneath the challenging language of these texts.

However, with this goal in mind, we should also strive to expose students to the canonical works of cultures that fall outside of the West. Reading the Odyssey alongside the Ramayana would not only enlarge students’ understanding of history and different forms of literature, but also could help them to understand the universal themes for which the canon is designed. By grounding the teaching of history in canonical works while also expanding the scope of these works beyond the West, we can best help students to uncover the many threads that tie all books, and all people, together.

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Shepherding Virtuous Wolves How Language Has Shaped the Liberal Arts Aisha Bhoori A throat clears, a voice murmurs. The hurried words beat against my eardrum in staccato indignation, toppling, as notes often do, into and through each other. I fear that I’ve misheard.

“Can you repeat that?” I ask into my cell phone.

William Deresiewicz replies, “Homi Bhabha is a malevolent buffoon.”

Bhabha, director of Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center and known as a cerebral post-colonial theorist, moderated “20 Questions,” an on-campus forum with Deresiewicz to discuss the latter’s infamous Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. “[Bhabha’s] treatment of me is a violation of the principles on which he stands,” Deresiewicz continues, contrasting Bhabha’s dedication to the liberal arts with the hostile reception the author received on campus. The tension between Deresiewicz and Bhabha points to growing factions within a community of academics that is trying to validate the humanities. Perhaps this division was best demonstrated when faculty on the event’s panel defended Harvard’s emphasis on training future leaders—training that, Deresiewicz believes, comes at the expense of students’ souls.

“What gives me pause, and what gives other people pause, is when you go on to fault us for failing to ensure that all of our students develop souls, and that they do so on a four-year schedule that might be better called ‘No Soul Left Behind,’” stated panelist and English professor Amanda Claybaugh to Deresiewicz.

The audience—consisting primarily of Harvard affiliates—jeered at this allusion to Congress’s 2001 No Child Left Behind mandate. Deresiewicz shifted in his seat and gave a tight-lipped smile.

“What happens when you try to institutionalize what should be a fundamentally individual process?” she asked. “If we make it clear to our students that what we’re trying to do is help them build souls, does soul-building become yet another box to check for them?”

During the past six months, universities have speculated about Deresiewicz’s suggestion that parents should not send their children to Ivy League schools. Are his claims retaliation against being denied tenure at Yale? Are they deliberately con-

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troversial to increase book sales? Regardless of his potential motives, Deresiewicz’s claims should prompt us to examine education’s original purpose. Are universities responsible for building students’ souls? Or does it suffice, as Professor Claybaugh implied, to expect that students do so independently, on the periphery? The answers may lie in the philosophical lexicon.

CIVITAS, LIBERATE OUR ANIMUS, PLEASE Marble and upright, three columns pierce through the atmosphere with stony indifference. They are as strong and broad as Atlas’s shoulders. They will not shrug.

They adorn the porch of a thatch-roofed building, home to wooden boards covered with layers of wax and instructions for enkuklios paideia, “education in a circle.” A young boy, his olive skin paled by a sickly hue, stands near the boards as the instructions demand. Metal rod in hand, he inscribes summaries of the texts from which his teacher reads aloud.

Aristophanes’ comedies, the Stoics’ self-discipline, Virgil’s verses. Three hundred and sixty degrees of what will become the Western canon seared into the fatty fiber of the wax, into the class’s collective consciousness.

After his teacher pauses from reading, the boy begins to recite what he has been writing. His voice is confident, even entitled. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: the boy’s father is, after all, the empire’s leading rhetorician. Still, the other students furrow their brows, pierce their lips, and strike their palms—clapping hesitantly at first, but with increasing force—as they come to accept that their peer can give life to the dead’s thoughts. The boy’s confidence is so surprising, in part, because it belies a heart that pumps blood too feebly to enliven his limbs, cheeks, mouth.

It promises a future of oratory that will likely not arrive.

How tragic, the teacher silently muses, that the boy will die so young. He has such a way with words. *** Nearly three decades later, Seneca the Younger rests limp in a bath. His limbs are dark brown leather, cheeks charred, mouth blistered. Gaping slits zigzag across his wrists to form a crossword puzzle.

The young boy-turned-statesman has severed his own veins.

Minutes before, the Roman Emperor Nero, accusing Seneca of conspiracy against the government, forced his former tutor to commit suicide. Seneca submerged himself in burning water and grabbed a blade. The teacher’s predictions are, for better or worse, correct.

Yet, while Seneca’s body erodes, his words remain: like the texts solidified in wax, they are written into the larger pedagogical narrative. *** The narrative begins, ironically, with a mathematical concept. “Education in a circle,” as its name suggests, emphasizes interdisciplinary knowledge. The Hellenistic Greek model consisted of the Quadrivium (the four scientific artes of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy) and the Trivium (the three humanistic artes of grammar, rhetoric and logic). A pupil of “education in a circle,” Seneca learned both

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the Quadrivium and the Trivium. After a brief stint replacing his father as the Roman Empire’s designated rhetorician, he sought to instill in others his own passions for reading, speaking, and writing.

His first student, however, was also his last. Nero was ambitious, bright, tyrannical, and, above all, Rome’s future ruler. Seneca was well aware that his lessons would leave impressions on the vulnerable and powerful mind of Mark Antony’s grandson—impressions that would shape his governance. It was while instructing Nero that Seneca attributed to education a specific purpose: civic virtue.

You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Hence you see why ‘liberal studies’ are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study,—that which gives a man his liberty. … If you inquire, ‘Why, then, do we educate our children in the liberal studies?’ … Because they prepare the soul for the reception of virtue.

In the above excerpt from Moral Letters to Lucilius (65 A.D.), Seneca defined the education he gave Nero as liberalia studia: liberal studies. Though he kept the interdisciplinary nature of “education in a circle,” he expanded its function for the student as a Roman citizen. By rejecting “money-making” and “profit-bringing occupations” as ephemeral uses of the mind, Seneca distanced education from socioeconomic goals. Nero is rich enough, his rationale may have been. He should occupy his mind with philosophical enlightenment rather than monetary pursuits.

Seneca’s mention of the “free-born gentleman” instead linked education to its linguistic derivative, libertas: freedom. This term, however, denoted a class restriction. Nero is rich enough, Seneca’s rationale may actually have been. He can afford to occupy his mind with philosophical enlightenment rather than monetary pursuits.

While the “free-born gentleman” was “worthy” of liberal studies, the Roman slave was not. As a result, he was forced to engage in technical skills through an “apprenticeship.” Seneca’s words reflect a narrow interpretation of membership in the citizenry. Yet it also highlights his concern for the citizen’s interior. (Nero’s, unfortunately, may have been too marred for redemption.)

Seneca plainly identified the purpose of liberal studies: to “prepare the citizen’s soul for the reception of virtue.” During Seneca’s time, every facet of the citizen—including his soul—was under the dominion of his legal guardian: the civitas, or state.

Therefore, by aligning the phrase liberalia studia—instruction for citizens— with animus, soul, and virtus, virtue, Seneca implies two responsibilities for the state: it must provide pre-professional training to sustain servitude; and it must provide liberal studies to sustain free citizens, like Nero, as they develop virtuous souls.

Seneca, it appears, mandated that no citizen’s soul could be left behind.

THANK LEWIS ALMIGHTY, WE ARE FREE AT LAST! Ripped notebook pages, abandoned poems, and scribbled margins tower on a black cherry desk. Underneath the pile is a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

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Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide when he was suspected to have conspired in an assassination plot. Romans believed a warm bath increased the rate of blood loss.

Upon dictating his last words to a scribe, Seneca entered the bath and drew his blood.

The clutter, desk, and glasses belong to Professor C. S. Lewis, who is running late. A stoic man, waiting for Lewis in the navy armchair across from the desk, is growing impatient. He sighs, adjusts his legs, and takes a long drag from his pipe. A blue halo shrouds his vision but when the vapors dissipate he sees Lewis, disheveled and breathless, walk through the doorway.

Lewis is grateful to see his friend and fellow author, J. R. R. Tolkien. It has been a long, arduous day. His students, he worries, aren’t fully appreciating British literature. Close-reading Hamlet with them is as soul-sucking as the poison that slew Gertrude. Tolkien forgets his slight annoyance at the tardiness, reassures Lewis with a coarse pat on the shoulder, and accompanies him to the reserved seminar room in Magdalen College. It is Thursday night, and, as tradition dictates, time for the Inklings, Oxford’s informal literary circle that discusses narrative fiction.

For the next few months, the Inklings transition in focus from fantasy to reality: Lewis’s developing philosophical treatise, inspired by his classroom woes, becomes their primary concern. They debate the educator’s role, revisit the Greek canon, and add numerous documents to the pile on the black cherry desk until it is nearly toppling. Prodded by Tolkien to publish the stacks of lined paper, Lewis sends a bound manuscript to Oxford University Press. In 1943, The Abolition of Man lines library shelves. It is, remarks contemporary professor Peter Kreeft 50 years later, “one of the six books to read to save Western civilization.”

What does our savior proclaim? Lewis’s doctrine, drawing heavily from Saint Augustine’s outlook on education as a spiritual journey, is a defense of natural law and value theories in education. According to natural law theory, the moral standards governing human behavior are universally recognizable by reason. Value theory also upholds this universality; all humans, it proposes, have inherent systems of moral classification. Together, the two theories advance the notion that every

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individual is capable of developing virtue. This development, however, requires an impetus: education.

Through both philosophical constructs, Lewis revised Seneca’s original mandate for the state—specifically its “citizen” qualifier—by removing the socioeconomic restrictions previously associated with liberal studies. Observing education’s capacity to transform “any student” from an “unregenerate little bundle of appetites” into a “good man,” Lewis dismissed citizenship status as irrelevant. Every person, if properly taught, is capable of reason—and, therefore, of freedom. Every student, if properly taught, is capable of distinguishing between good and bad. Just being human is qualification enough to be “worthy” of Seneca’s freedom. Lewis, accordingly, made the state accountable for all souls’ moral welfare: if all souls are free, he maintained, then all souls deserve a liberal education. And a liberal education is a moral one.

A pre-professional education, on the other hand, is an immoral one. Or so Lewis argued. Like Seneca, he objected to “profit-bringing occupations,” especially those that were highly specialized. “If education is beaten by training,” he warned, “civilization dies.” But his objections to “training” slightly differed from that of Seneca. For the latter, a pre-professional education—an “apprenticeship”—did not fully “engage” the mind; it was consequently inferior, even reserved for the slave.

Lewis agreed with this. But his understanding of the slave was far more expansive.

Training, he thought, was a kind of intellectual servitude. In “aim[ing] to make not a good man, but a good banker, a good electrician, or a good surgeon,” it focused on the wrong “good”—a bad “good,” if you will. Obtaining careers replaced the pursuit of virtue as education’s purpose, and with that, the state instilled its citizens’ souls with degraded values.

Lewis’s understanding of intellectual servitude penned a climactic chapter in the pedagogical narrative: he wasn’t just concerned with what was being taught, but how it was being taught. For this reason, he also criticized a more insidious training, that of rote memorization: The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

The inclusion of the “English prep” textbook was not arbitrary. “English prep” was the moniker British students gave to Martin Ketley and Alex King’s 1939 The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing. In fact, “The Green Book,” as Lewis referred to Control of Language, appeared in many university-level courses, including Lewis’s own: “English Language and Literature.” Given that Lewis lamented the power of a textbook used in his own classroom, the above excerpt can be read almost as instructions for educators—Lewis included—to instruct beyond the textbook. Help students realize that “ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake,” the directions could begin. Second, help students question the assumption that what they read is infallible. Finally, the final step may caution, help students recognize that controversy adds complexity and nuance.

“The soul grows by learning,” Lewis noted in his chapter “Men without Chests,” quoting Saint Augustine. How were students’ souls free to learn—to grow—if they

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were motivated only by work in textbooks like Control of Language? Lewis seemed to ask. How were they virtuous, for that matter? Freedom was a prerequisite for virtue, so it wasn’t enough for the state to provide a liberal arts curriculum if it didn’t also provide a way for students to engage with their education and grow. Education needed an intermediate between the state and the student’s soul.

LIBERAL STUDITAS The Yard is void of tourists in September 1846. John Harvard’s left shoe has not yet grown gold enough to entice crimson-clad visitors. Leaves escape trees like droplets, forming a red and orange sea for students to part. The sun beats down on Harvard Hall, and its penetrating rays pour through the window panes into a room where Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz speaks, in hushed awe, about magnolias converting light into sustenance.

Agassiz is new to the faculty. The baby-faced European’s arrival, about 100 years before Lewis’s publication, signals Harvard’s institutionalized focus on the student’s soul, which comes in the form of geology and zoology courses, not the typical “English prep” courses associated with liberal studies. It comes because Agassiz’s approach to science diverges from the contemporary one.

He relies heavily on language. For instance, during every lecture, Agassiz urges students to “soar with Plato” so they can grasp the “intellectual and moral qualities which are so eminently developed in civilized society.” The verb “soar” evokes images of flight, and rightfully so. The freedom promoted by liberal studies should enable a mental flight from pre-professionalism and textbooks and towards “intellectual and moral qualities.” There is a relationship between intellect and morality, Agassiz implies: with the former, you can get the latter.

It’s not to say that Agassiz neglects geology and zoology. These are, after all, the subjects that Harvard hired him to teach. At the end of each lecture, his students still leave with notes about “Comparative Embryology” and “Deep Sea Dredging.”

Yet contained within these notes are references to works such as Ralph Cudworth’s 1678 The True Intellectual System of the World and John Norris’s early 18th-century An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intellectual World. By supplementing science with philosophy, Agassiz makes liberal studies relevant to all academic disciplines. And perhaps most importantly, he makes himself one of the educational intermediates that Lewis would imagine. *** Twenty-three years later, Agassiz’s former student, Charles W. Eliot, clutching The Republic, retreats into an alcove. The busts of past deans and portraits of dignified alumni peer down at him in solemn expectation. Filling the gallery next door, rows of anxious students bow their heads over course books in an assembly line of memorization. If only facts could travel, like product parts, in a progressive succession from one student’s mind to another. A floorboard loudly creaks as a student attempts to tiptoe towards a nearby bookcase. His fellow workers trace his steps with critical, narrow eyes. The assembly line is disrupted, and the student treks the walk of shame back to his desk.

Though the Gothic library will be demolished in 1913 for stately Widener Library, Gore Hall is, in 1869, the work location of choice for faculty and students

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In 1846, Harvard President Edward Everett used the image of Gore Hall when designing the seal for the newly incorporated City of Cambridge. alike. Eliot lounges, rear against crimson carpet, back against painted wall, and opens the philosophical dialogue. The old print’s stale odor agitates his nose with each turned page, but he continues turning. He has soared with Plato. He wants every Harvard student to do the same.

A few months prior, the Harvard Corporation invited Eliot to become the university’s 21st president; at 35, he also became its youngest. With signature briefcase and weathered copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in hand, he left his employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for a new office across the river.

It is only a matter of days until he will occupy this new office and deliver an inaugural address.

Eliot has spent far too many solitary hours determining the speech’s content and structure. His eyes, groggy and strained, have scanned the university archives for lecture transcripts, the philosophy department for annotated readings, and his own correspondence for phrases to recycle. Every research session ends with him returning to a letter he had earlier written to his cousin, Arthur T. Lyman: The Puritans thought they must have trained ministers for the Church and they supported Harvard College—when the American people are convinced that they require more competent chemists, engineers, artists, architects, than they now have, they will somehow establish the institutions to train them. In the meantime, freedom and the American spirit of enterprise will do much for us, as in the past.

Back now beginning to ache from the stiff wall in Gore Hall, Eliot places a weary palm on the bald patch forming near the bottom of his gelled, brown locks. What words can adequately convey his new vision—his “spirit of enterprise”—for Harvard? *** Eliot’s 105-minute address, published in abridged form as a two-part article in

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The Atlantic Monthly called “The New Education,” used a war metaphor in place of flight. But Agassiz’s lofty sentiment still remained.

“We are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral,” Eliot noted, “and for this fight we must be armed.” Proper armor, he specified, was realizing “education’s ultimate utility.”

This last phrase was an important addition to the pedagogical narrative’s glossary, because it signified a divergence in applied ethics. Eliot agreed with Seneca about education’s theoretical function to hone free, rational, and virtuous souls. His question, instead, was of application: what was the most morally correct action to take in order to hone free, rational, and virtuous souls?

A Transcendental Unitarian, Eliot’s explanation of “ultimate utility” was unusually spiritual. While he did subscribe to John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism—maximizing pleasure for the greatest number—he did so with a twist. The pleasure he sought to maximize included fulfillment, human dignity, and self-reliance. Basically, moral development. To Eliot, applying “ultimate utility” at Harvard translated into courses that would “reveal to [the student], or at least to his teachers and parents, his capacities and tastes … his way to happy, enthusiastic work … to usefulness. For the individual, concentration and the highest development of his own peculiar faculty, is the only prudence.”

Eliot’s syntax ushered in a transition from earlier pedagogical traditions. The possessive pronoun “his” modifies nearly every noun. It’s not just “capacities and tastes,” or the “way to happy enthusiastic work,” or “usefulness,” or “peculiar faculty.” It’s his “capacities and tastes,” his “way to happy enthusiastic work,” his “usefulness,” his “peculiar faculty.” Never before had the liberal studies taken such a keen interest in the student as an individual. A nondescript and abstract “higher” faculty had always been the concern. When Seneca wrote of “occupy[ing]” the mind and “engag[ing] it permanently,” he referred to all free men’s minds at once. But, Eliot realized, no two students’ minds are alike.

Returning to the question—What is the most morally correct action to take that hones free, rational, and virtuous souls?—it is clear that Eliot provided an answer: an action that facilitates the “highest development of [one’s] own peculiar faculty.”

Simply put, students should pursue what they are good at because what they are good at is good for their souls. Eliot had essentially laid the foundations for a Harvard that left no soul behind—and no individual talent behind, either. *** It could be argued that Eliot’s “own peculiar faculty” mantra was immoral. That it bordered dangerously close to the “training” that Seneca and Lewis so detested.

This is partly true.

Eliot’s earlier letter to his cousin Arthur championed an institution that would train, among other professions, “competent chemists, engineers, artists, architects.”

And the “highest development of [one’s] own peculiar faculty” certainly reads like a jargon-heavy call for specialization. And it is, in a way. Students perfect a specific discipline so they can embark upon specific—and useful—paths. The adjective “highest,” though, differentiates Eliot’s vision from mere “profit-bringing occupations.” It suggests that the specialization helps fulfill a higher purpose to which Eliot alluded at the end of his address:

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[F]or the State, it is variety, not uniformity, of intellectual product, which is needful. As a people, we do not apply to mental activities the principle of division of labor; and we have but a halting faith in special training for high professional employments. … What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? … This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and in the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.

This emphasis on the state’s need for a “variety” of “intellectual product” indicates that education has evolved into a sort of social contract. Previously, Seneca had acknowledged the state’s obligations towards the citizen’s soul. Lewis pointed to the state’s obligations towards all souls. Adding to his predecessors, Eliot recognized the individual soul’s obligations to the state. Specialization’s higher purpose, therefore, was to facilitate collective development. Education’s “ultimate utility” lay in this mutually beneficial relationship.

It’s no surprise that inscriptions of Eliot’s writings decorate Harvard. “Enter to grow in wisdom,” the outside of Dexter Gate reads. “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind,” the inside instructs students before they try to disentangle their feet from ivy and leave the Yard, though remnants of woody evergreen will forever stick to the soles of their Converse. Eliot made Harvard what Agassiz had been in the classroom: the intermediate between state and soul.

THE SHEEP WHO CRIED WOLF In Book 1, Chapter 3 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle introduces readers to the concept of telos, a good’s purpose, goal, or final end. Education’s telos is to actualize an individual’s capacity for intellect and liberty. To understand education’s end is to understand that “the end we are seeking is what we have been doing,” as Aristotle elaborates on in the Nicomachean Ethics.

That is, education’s end is attained through its pursuit. The means is the end.

As such, education’s telos is not to mass-produce “excellent sheep,” but rather to shepherd virtuous wolves: unrestrained by academic fields or career paths and free to graze on vast knowledge to nourish their animi.

And so, to Professor Claybaugh, I say: language matters.

How we talk about education confers meaning and purpose. Harvard’s tacit mission statement, as instituted by educators like Agassiz and Eliot, is embedded in a philosophical lexicon that values soul-building. Given this legacy, perhaps Harvard could do more to avoid producing graduates whom Deresiewicz labels as “smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost.”

To Deresiewicz, I also say: language matters.

You sat at the heart of the Ivy League establishment, in the fires of academia’s most urgent debate, and students whom you critiqued took you seriously. So seriously, in fact, that you prompted a reflection that resituated your assertions within a long intellectual tradition. But perhaps our unspoken conversation—as an excellent sheep meekly crawling toward Wall Street, should I say “transaction”?—is incomplete without reciprocal reflection. Reflect on the words you use to describe students similar to those you used to teach.

In other words: would an excellent sheep, meekly crawling toward Wall Street, cry wolf?

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CHAPTER 3

Lexicon of War

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The Metaphor as Weapon Why the Rhetoric of Battle Has No Place in Public Policy Discourse Sarani Jayawardena

Hitler titled his autobiography Mein Kampf for a reason. In one word, he could crystallize his hate-filled ideological ramblings into a single, identifiable, and compelling concept: battle.

Yet phrasing a political philosophy with the rhetoric of battle is not limited to the likes of Hitler. Politicians then and now, respected and unknown, American and foreign, have described their policies and visions in the vocabulary of war. The phrase “the War on [insert noun]” has become a crutch for U.S. politicians seeking support for their policies. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty. In 1970, Richard Nixon declared a War on Crime. In 1971, he called for a “full-scale attack” to “conquer” the drug problem—and the media titled it the War on Drugs. In 2001, George W. Bush launched the War on Terror. These campaigns shape the lives of American citizens and the discourse in American media. Likewise, accusations that leaders and parties wage a War on Women, or a War on Jobs, or even a War on Christmas dominate partisan back-and-forth.

Politicians rely on metaphors to describe their plans and rally support because they are effective. By creating an analogy between two concepts, metaphors provide frameworks in which issues can be viewed. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their work Metaphors We Live By, argue that “[m]etaphors may create realities for us.” A metaphor is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that sculpts our perceptions of an entity and shapes our actions towards it.

As a result, a metaphor eases comprehension for the consumer of information.

It has the ability to condense a multi-faceted issue with innumerable qualifications and clauses into a single idea. It can reduce a problem with various political, social, economic and cultural roots and implications to a simplistic contest of good versus evil. A binary definition of right and wrong can appeal to the primeval part of our souls, telling us what must be done to protect our tribe against predators in the world outside. We do not require an understanding of the complexity of any issue, because a metaphor provides us a with a paint-by-numbers outline.

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METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING The war metaphor’s effectiveness stems from its nature and impact on any society that engages in it. A war’s commencement is the ultimate instigator of populist support. Consider any classic posters from the World War era: “We can do it!,” “Do your bit! Save Food,” “It’s your duty! Enlist today.” Warfare, if spun correctly, has an almost unique ability to unite a population, imbue it with patriotism, and spread a culture in which there is unquestioning acceptance of a dominant authority.

First, a war creates the perception of a common enemy that must be fought. This foe is a danger not just to one segment of society, but to its entirety. The external, evil “Other” serves as a rallying point towards which we can hurl our insults and our hate. It can be demonized, caricatured, and despised, because it is not of our ilk. Yet the creation of a “Them” necessitates the formation of an “Us.” We cannot hate the people who hate us if we have no conception of who we are as a group. In the United States, for example, the War on Terror frequently defined “Us” as Americans, fighting against the specter of radical Islam. The war mentality thereby facilitates the unification of disparate groups under one banner. In an actual war, this manifests as national unity.

Patriotism and nationalism then sustain the united identity fostered by war rhetoric. Patriotism is critical to maintaining a fighting spirit, and its growth happens naturally. U.S. imports of American flags in 2000 valued $747,800. In 2001, that number rose to $51.7 million. The emergence of a dangerous enemy after September 11 instigated a surge in national pride. This occurs because, just as people cast the threat as an evil entity, they cast themselves—and their nation, party, or race—as glorious defenders of a greater good. They clamor to do what they can to protect the continued safety of their homes, families, culture, and values. The contest becomes one to ensure their survival; the threat, of their imminent destruction.

Drunk on this patriotic spirit, citizens give their leaders their unquestioning support. George W. Bush’s famous 92 percent approval rating in the four months following September 11 is typical of this phenomenon. More perturbingly, citizens also display much more willingness to forgo rights and forgive the various sins of the government. They accept authority figures more easily and may even transfer more power to them through long-term states of emergency, which can seriously jeopardize the democratic process and allow for the jettisoning of rights. The population makes a bargain: we, the people, will give up some of our freedoms, and you, the government, will win back our security.

TOO MANY: “A NETWORK OF ENTAILMENTS” Yet the use of the war metaphor in descriptions of national public policy is dangerous: it commits the double sin of too many and too few implications. This is the “network of entailments” described by Lakoff and Johnson: unanticipated but unavoidable implications that a metaphor creates. These inferences shape how we interpret the past, understand present events, and formulate future policy.

With the metaphor of war, the network of entailments can include an external enemy, a threat of destruction, a group of allies, and the need for sacrifice. Whether or not they exist in reality, specific components of war become central figures in the public consciousness. Whatever the policy may actually relate to, it becomes organized under the structure of an Us, a Them, a Strategy, and a Result—preferably a victory. The problem is that, ultimately, public policy does not equate to warfare.

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In 2003, the USS Rentz detained five suspected drug traffickers carrying 37 kilograms of cocaine in the eastern Pacific. The suspects allegedly set fire to their ship in an attempt to destroy the evidence on board.

Although war may be a useful metaphor, it is not a particularly apt one.

Consider the War on Crime, declared by Richard Nixon in 1970. The campaign’s aim was—and is—to reduce criminality and make American society safer.

Yet thinking of crime in terms of a war creates a fundamentally different response from thinking of crime in terms of a social problem that must be overcome. A 2011 Stanford University study showed that people support greater law enforcement if crime is describe as a “beast” preying upon a community, but more social reforms if crime is portrayed as a “virus” infecting a city. The change in metaphor can provoke a change in Strategy.

The creation of an Us and a Them in the War on Crime has more serious consequences, as well. In theory, the lines should be drawn purely based on one’s adherence to the law: the Them should be any criminal, and the Us should be any law-abiding citizen. However, in reality, those in power undertake the declaration of war. The Us, therefore, represents the social group that holds influence in a society and that controls public discourse: usually, politicians and the media. In American society, most of these politicians and media leaders are rich, white, and educated.

Even in the comparatively diverse 113th Congress, 94 percent of the Senate is white, the median net worth of a congressperson is a staggering $1,008,767, and 93 percent of House members have a bachelor’s degree. African Americans own almost no full-power television stations. Therefore it becomes easy to view the Them—the criminals—as people of color, immigrants, the poor, and the uneducated.

The difference in metaphor also frames the question of desired Result: eliminate, or rescue? We embark upon war with the joint aims of victory for our own side and the extermination of our enemy. A social reform, on the other hand, aims to address a problem’s root cause and solve it. When we treat crime as a war that must be fought, criminals become an external enemy to be destroyed. If crime is treated as a societal problem necessitating social reform, criminals can be perceived differently: perhaps as people who have made bad choices due to high-pressure socioeconomic situations and who can be rehabilitated as law-abiding citizens.

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PEACEKEEPER OR SOLDIER? Aside from these macro components of a war, there is the prerequisite unit on the ground: the soldier. When we apply the war metaphor to public policy, who is the infantryman? In our continuing example of the War on Crime, this would be the police officer. Yet this raises the question of what a police officer’s duties are, how they should be carried out, and how thinking of them in the light of soldiery can change those answers. It places the police officer in the role of a front linesman in a struggle for a greater good against an evil opposition force.

With this mentality, what becomes a virtue? Physical strength, aggression, the ability to kill, a fierce sense of territorial defense, obedience to authority, acceptance of a preexisting organizational culture, and a belief that you must protect your brothers-in-arms at all costs. Under this mentality, what becomes a weakness?

Compassion, a reluctance to harm, a propensity to question authority, and a willingness to point out the wrongs of fellow “soldiers.” The result? Unnecessary bullets, distraught mothers, rioting crowds, and one futile hashtag after another.

Sociologist Heinz Steinert outlines the three roles through which the state may exert the use of force: policing, punishment, and warfare. Policing takes place to keep the peace in the population. Warfare is for aggression or defense against an enemy. Application of force is a result of a failure in peacekeeping rather than as one of its features. Once you conflate the two roles and policing becomes warfare, you treat your population as the enemy, and you treat this perceived enemy with aggression rather than a peacekeeping attitude.

TOO FEW: THE MORAL REALITY Just as the war metaphor commits the sin of too many unnecessary implications, it also forgets a very important one. As University of Virginia ethicist James Childress writes, “In debating social policy through the language of war, we often forget the moral reality of war.” This forgetfulness is cruel absentmindedness. To proclaim that a politician is waging war on whatever hot topic of the day is to forget the actual brutality of war and its moral violations. It is unfair to our soldiers and damaging to our souls to equate the dangers of war with the decision of whether to say “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas” in the “War on Christmas.” War is a horrendous experience, and bandying the concept around cheapens it. It is disrespectful to those who have actually suffered in wartime, whether they are combatants or civilians.

This tendency to pare down debates of policy to these inadequate and inapt generalizations is damaging to public discourse, as well. It attempts to garner popular support for government action through appealing to the basic instinct to support your own side in a contest. It thereby does not treat citizens with due respect, which would entail giving them all the accurate information in an actually applicable framework. Hence the use of war metaphors is almost contemptuous of public intelligence, and is downright careless with the experiences of soldiers.

Using a metaphor might seem inconsequential: a simple way to describe a complicated concept. It may seem that the language used to describe a policy does not really impact its content and clauses. Yet words have power, and so one’s choice of them does matter. Because a war is not simple: it is infinitely and immeasurably complicated.

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War of the Words The Sexualized Language of Violence in the Vietnam War Alexandra Grimm A guitar warbles. Helicopter blades thud like a gentle heartbeat. Jim Morrison melodically murmurs, “This is the end,” as trees burst into hypnotic napalm flames.

For many people, this opening montage of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, is one of the most searing images of the Vietnam War. The emotional heft of The Doors’ lyrics—irrevocably linked to the burning beauty of the bombs—seems a fitting testament to the power of not just music, but language itself. Yet the iconic opening imagery of the film is not the best representation of the power of language during the Vietnam era. For that, one must look no further than a can of pears.

In the story of one Vietnam veteran, told in Mark Baker’s Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There, the soldier describes his and his comrades’ rage at encountering a Vietnamese father and daughter in possession of a can of pears. Foot soldiers, or “grunts,” survived largely on C-rations, and the author and his buddies were infuriated by the fact that two Vietnamese peasants, whom many Americans regarded as sub-human, had access to the luxury of canned fruit. As revenge, the American soldiers gang-raped the young woman and murdered both father and daughter.

This can of pears is testament to the powerful internalization of sexualized language that fueled American ideology during the Vietnam War. During this era, American English was sexualized to an astounding degree: policymakers, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, vulgarly used metaphors of hetero- and homosexual conquest, while soldiers used phrases such as “cocksucker” nearly indiscriminately.

The impact of such highly sexualized language cannot be overstated, as it became intertwined with, and helped breed, ideas of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and American exceptionalism.

THE “AMERICAN FIGHTING MAN” In order to understand the way in which the language of Vietnam was infused with sexualized power, it is necessary to have a sense of the larger narrative into which such language fit, namely the idealization of heroic American masculinity predicated on violent and virile heterosexual prowess. This conception of American manhood arose in part as pushback against politicians of the 1950s who had been “soft” on communism. Democratic policymakers, especially, felt responsible for the “loss” of China to communist forces, and they consequently harbored an

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almost pathological desire to fulfill the role of vital American frontiersman: tough on communism, fiercely protective of democracy and freedom.

During the Vietnam War, the idea of being an “American fighting man” was a central concept of the Code of Conduct for Members of the U.S. Armed Forces and revolved around the idea of the strong American male body as the protector of American ideals. Sylvester Stallone’s turn as protagonist John Rambo in Rambo: First Blood Part II shows this concept on painfully obvious display. In the film, Rambo undergoes torture at the hands of Soviets in league with the communist North Vietnamese. Stallone’s muscular, glistening body—practically a caricature of masculinity—serves as a barrier between the communist enemies and important U.S. Army information. Rambo’s willingness to suffer such bodily harm demonstrates his fulfillment of American manhood.

This concept of manhood focused not only on the male body as the protector of American ideals, but also as the active and often violent enactor of American values.

On a macroscopic level, the result of this conceptualization of masculinity was that Americans often framed intervention in terms of sexual conquest and painted any failure to uphold American credibility as a demeaning, demoralizing, and often homosexual encounter.

Perhaps nowhere is this kind of hypersexualized language on more obvious display than in the private communications of President Johnson, whose words functioned as oppressive tools of power. Johnson’s sexual metaphors demeaned women and linked true American manhood to heterosexual conquest. In 1965, for instance, he said of the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, “I’m going up her leg an inch at a time … I’ll get the snatch before they know what’s happening.”

Johnson’s use of sexual metaphor is disturbing on many levels, from its bellicose rhetoric to its offensive slang for female genitalia. The President’s self-congratulation for his metaphorical rape of the Vietnamese demonstrates how successful American foreign policy during the Vietnam Era was inextricably linked not only to heterosexual male prowess, but also to sexual subjugation of the “other.” Furthermore, the allusion to the non-consent of the Vietnamese people remains all the more nauseating given the dark shadow that mass rape at My Lai and throughout the Vietnam War casts across this period in American history. This kind of rhetoric reverberated at the level of common culture: in Oliver Stone’s 1986 war film Platoon, the soldiers openly refer to new recruits as “cherries,” further underscoring the misogyny that grew entwined with this view of masculinity.

Johnson’s sexualized rhetoric was also predicated on homophobia. In a 1965 meeting, for example, he declared, “I’ll tell you what happens when there is a bombing halt. I halt and then Ho Chi Minh shoves his trucks right up my ass. That’s your bombing halt.” Such language clearly privileges the heterosexual American man, and language that reviled homosexuality became a means of reasserting the power of heroic American manhood.

SEX AND RACE This kind of sexualized language was thus used as a means of leveraging power. But it also became a way to reinforce and underscore the intensely racialized language of this era. In Hal Ashby’s classic 1978 film Coming Home, Bob returns home from service in Vietnam to find his wife, Sally, engaged in a passionate affair with the paralyzed Vietnam veteran Luke. Ultimately, Bob drowns himself, but not

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before he holds Luke and Sally at gunpoint. In this scene, Bob calls Sally a “slope cunt.” Bob’s use of the word “cunt,” though extreme, is in line with the misogynist behavior he has demonstrated towards Sally over the entire film. Thus, the suddenly crude dialogue is cinematically underplayed in the standoff scene and throughout the rest of the movie.

Yet Bob’s use of the word “slope,” a derogatory term for a Vietnamese person, is intensely problematic, not merely because it is a disgusting racial slur, but also because it links the adulterous actions of Sally, a white woman, with the very identity of being Vietnamese. The outburst could be read as a commentary on Bob’s view of the Vietnamese as dirty, or perhaps as representative of his opinion that, since Sally has been unfaithful, she is no better than the communist Vietnamese. Regardless, this moment demonstrates that at the intersection of racialized and sexualized language, both lexicons upheld oppressive and heteronormative masculinity.

In Baker’s narrative of violence, too, racialized and sexualized languages overlap.

The narrator describes how, after raping the young woman and shooting her father “until he didn’t have a face anymore,” he and the other soldiers observed, “Baby-san, she was crying.” One of the other soldiers shot and killed the young woman as casually as he had raped her, and as casually as the author had branded her with an infantilizing racial epithet.

A CONTINUING JOURNEY Perhaps no other era of American history was witness to such intensely sexualized language used as a tool of political power. Yet this dominant narrative of masculine American heroism, framed in terms of conquest, by no means existed solely within the vacuum of the Vietnam War. Rhetoric that prizes the American frontiersman who protects the purity of American ideals continued to persist during the Iraq War. In a 2007 article in Race, Gender, and Class, Joane Nagel and Lindsey Feitz of the University of Kansas contend that this war fostered the rise of a “damsels in distress” phenomenon that framed captive white American servicewomen, such as Jessica Lynch, were framed as vulnerable and in need of rescue from the clutches of native Iraqis by brave American servicemen. The American military certainly has far to go before it can be deemed to have fully shed the poisonous legacy of the lexicon that loomed over the Vietnam era. Probing the implications of sexualized language during the Vietnam War thus highlights the disturbing reality that American society—and its rhetoric—remains influenced by heteronormativity and confining ideas of “manhood.” Contrary to Jim Morrison’s immortal words, this is far from the end.

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