The Museum of Lies and the Orwellian language of mountaintop removal mining
The Museum of Lies and the Orwellian language of mountaintop removal mining
Anyone who thinks that words don't matter must have missed some of the bitter disputes over mountaintop removal mining coming from West Virginia in recent years.
Towards the end of the Bush administration, attorneys for the Corps of Engineers, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Dept.'s Office of Surface Mining argued in federal courts that mountaintop removal mining did not require a site specific permitting process under the Clean Water Act because -- get this -- there was “minimal adverse impact” on the environment.
Of course, if you happen to use millions of tons of explosives and then argue that there are minimal environmental impacts, you could strain what is generally called credibility.
To uphold the government’s postion in the Ohio Valley Environmental Coallition v. Bulen (pdf) case, the appeals courts found they were under credibility stress. One judge actually admitted during oral arguments had been that the Bush administration was presenting a “nonsensical argument.”
Interesting word, ‘nonsensical.”
Blow the top off a mountain, bring a hundred million tons of rock crashing down into the valleys, kill every living thing in sight, poison the water and foul the air. And then argue that there is minimal impact?
"Nonsensical,"
Yes, but then, the word "nonsensical" hardly seems up to the task, does it? It's more like one of those Alice-in-Wonderland words, sufficient for regular smoke and mirrors public relations and a government’s day-to-day deceptions, but it hardly carries the frieght on this one.
In fact, it's sort of hard to find the right word. None of these seem to really do the concept any justice: ambiguity,deceit, defamation, dishonesty, duplicity, distortion, equivocation;exaggeration, fabrication, fairy tale,fallacy, falsehood, falsity, fib, half-truth,humbug, jive, libel, mendacity, misconception, myth; misinformation, misrepresentation, misstatement prevarication, slander. story, tale, untruth, whopper ...
For a lie as big as this one, nothing shy of George Orwell comes close. War is peace. Love is Hate. Mountaintop Removal Mining has minimal impact.
Stand on a roadside and look out over hundreds of miles of lifeless devastation. Witness the black gunge coming from the faucets down in the miserable trailers in the leftover ravines. See the cancer victims and their hollow eyed children. Observe one of the most diverse forest cultures in the world blasted to hell on an accountant's whim, for an executives greed, and without the slightest care for the future.
Minimal impact? The unmittigated gall... The breathtaking arrogance... The sheer Orwellian dimensions of this grotesque deception ...
As Orwell said:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
Nothing could be more schizophrenic than to claim that death is life, and whether we specifically mean humans or a complex ecosystem makes little difference in the long term. Future generations will depend on ecosystems now being destroyed. It's only a matter of time.
Thus the Great Lie of the Bush Administration's environmental policy deserves a featured position in history's Museum of Lies.
Put it close to the Great Southern Lie about happy slaves being "almost like family" ... Locate it down the row from “We only want the Sudetenland” ... Or across from the "light at the end of the tunnel", where a president is winning the hearts and minds of a people ... Or somewhere near the exhibit on how "torture protects Americans" ...
Put it in the place where the sun doesn’t shine, as a centerpiece in the museum of the world's most magnificent and monumental lies, in the doomed gray city located somewhere on the wrong side of history.
LINKS
George Orwell's Politics and the English Language, 1946