'Tar baby': a lesson in etymology

The “tar baby” snafu by Tony Snow*, the new White House press secretary, at his first televised press briefing, ruffling some feathers in racial terms, confirms what many already know: English is a dynamic language. Illustrative examples of this dynamism that readily come to mind are: the lexical fall from grace of “Negro”; the 360-degree turnabout of “liberalism”; the judge-made augmentation of “free speech”; and now the creedal brew of “terrorism.”

The disuse of “Negro” is the result of the embrace of “Black” as the ethnonym for Americans who are of African origin although “African-American” remains in contention for the representation of what used to be the Negro. Even then the debate is still on as to whether Black, either as a noun or adjective, should be in capitalized form. (But “gay,” which has displaced “homosexual,” is still preferred to be in adjectival form as in “gay person” presumably to disabuse it of a largely sexual context.)

Early (or classical) liberalism is the philosophy which promotes the view that the individual should be free (liber) from the coercion of the sovereign power (or other individuals or groups) to realize his full potential whether in the political, social or economic realms. Adam Smith first articulated this thinking in the Wealth of Nations in which he advocated for economic pursuits free from government interference. The twin brother of liberalism is democracy which allows the people a certain degree of control over their chosen leaders through enumeration and separation of powers and the acknowledgement of certain fundamental rights as further limitation of those powers; thus, the coined words liberal democracy. Unbridled economic freedom has unfortunately resulted in the concentration of economic powers in the hands of only the few, a development that has been perceived as a threat to those individual rights and liberties which are essential in a democracy. This realization has given birth to modern liberalism (somehow the opposite of classical liberalism) which calls for government intervention in the economic sphere for the general welfare. Modern liberals have now appropriated liberalism whereas classical liberals have acquired the appellation of conservatives.

While first grappling with the “low-value” (e.g., lewd, libelous and fighting words) and “high-value” (e.g., deliberative expression) theories of free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court now considers burning of the flag as constituting “expressive conduct” and exhibition of hard-core pornographic films as protected communication within the conception of free speech under the Bill of Rights. Today, constitutional debates on free speech run into more than one-quarter of constitutional law case books and are unlikely to abate.

“Terrorism” is still defined by Webster’s New International Dictionary as “a mode of governing . . . by intimidation” or “any policy of intimidation,” implying clearly that states are capable of committing terrorist acts. However, CIA’s Counterterrorist Center defines a terrorist act pursuant to Title 22 of the US Code, Section 2656f(d) as a “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience,” thus potentially excluding state actors from the definition. The current pejorative meaning of terrorism directly linking it to Islamism or to extremist contrarian tactic against the advance of liberal ideology is therefore of recent concoction.

By some broad strokes, there could be three political conceptions of terrorism: 1) insurrection against a legitimate government; 2) a policy of violence or acts of intimidation by a government in violation of human rights; and 3) warfare in contravention of universally accepted rules of engagement (See Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 16-17).

On the first conception, is a government that has cheated its way to power in a rigged election a fair game to a Lockean right of revolution? On the second, is the recent spate of violence (murders and assassinations) in the Philippines involving for the most part journalists critical of the Arroyo government and left-leaning activists considered terrorism by a state actor? When the justifications for waging a war are based on “sexed up” intelligence, is the resulting violence within the acceptation of the third sense?

In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown has given a parallel discourse in etymology. The root word of “pagan” according to Brown “actually reached back to the Latin paganus, meaning country-dwellers. ‘Pagans’ were literally unindoctrinated country-folk who clung to the old, rural religions of Nature worship. In fact so strong was the Church’s fear of those who live in the rural villes that the once innocuous word for ‘villager’ -vilain- came to mean wicked soul.”

Today, “America paganism” is less related to lack of religiosity than to evangelical faith in market sovereignty, which hearkens back to classical liberalism.

Well, “snafu” is good English only in the abbreviated form. Otherwise, it’s just another tar baby.

* Tar baby is an American colloquialism which means a “sticky situation so difficult to extract one’s self from”. It has also been used as a pejorative term for very dark skinned people. During the press conference, Tony Snow employed the term apparently in the first meaning as an analogy.