One of the reasons George Carlin is, in my estimation, one of the greatest comics of all time is because I keep going back to his work. This time, his bit where he tells us to be suspicious when people keep adding syllables to existing terms to diminish the impact. How “shell shock,” a powerful phrase, eventually become “post-traumatic stress disorder.” There was this term “shell shock,” and it is highly evocative. It’s direct, and the alliteration is powerful. It brings to mind the horrors of war.
Then, it became “combat fatigue” on its journey to PTSD. It immediately starts to lose its force. But, people might argue, it is a more accurate term. Shell shock is very specific, referring to those soldiers suffering the constant shelling of World War I’s trench warfare. Shell shock wasn’t fitting! And it wasn’t clinical! There are other ways to experience mental distress in war other than “shell shock.” And post-traumatic stress disorder describes even more forms of distress than combat fatigue! Shell shock, a hard-hitting term, well, it has to go. It’s not accurate or clinical. Part of the problem is that it brings to mind the horrors of war. Post-traumatic stress disorder is better and less emotional. It also makes it easier to send people into nightmares because it’s also been sanitized.
Speaking of Neil Gaiman, I was reading “We Can’t Save Neil Gaiman” by Joseph Kugelmass, and he writes, “One thing, however, is clear. Gaiman will not be serving jail time, paying fines, or suffering other legal repercussions for his indiscretions. That’s good, because most of the allegations describe him acting in ways that are unseemly, even shocking, but not explicitly against the law” for his “serious acts of sexual misconduct.”
Hmm. Writers are supposed to prize simplicity and accuracy in word selection. Could a person change “sexual misconduct” to something that is clear and emotionally relevant? I can! Replace “sexual misconduct” with “rape.” Sure, it makes the rest of the article nonsense. If Gaiman is a rapist and not, uh, someone guilty of sexual misconduct (but I could think of no simpler term for a person who does “sexual misconduct,” there is no one word to describe someone who does sexual misconduct,) the whole tone of the article must change. Words have power, which someone who read Gaiman’s work would certainly know since he goes on about it time and again at immense length. And, for the life of me, I can’t think of a better word than rapist to describe someone who sticks his fingers into his unpaid nanny’s asshole. But, alas, rape is a crime, and we’re here to muddy the issue, dammit! Gaiman’s not a rapist, he’s indiscrete! He’s just a guy who does some sexual misconduct! What’s the big deal? (1)
And like “post-traumatic stress disorder,” sexual misconduct is longer and vaguer, yet also somehow more precise. After all, Gaiman isn’t only a rapist. Since he traveled with his unpaid nanny and raped her in different places all over the world, he’s also a human trafficker! After rape and human trafficking, his other crimes – like not paying his nanny, sexual harassment in the workplace, shit like that – seem trifling. But they are also crimes by straightforward readings of the law, but it should be a surprise to no one that such readings change according to the race, gender, and status of the attacker and defenders. If a poor black guy shoved his fingers in the asshole of a rich white woman, the guy would be in jail, even as we speak, and facing a very long prison sentence.
So, yes, sexual misconduct also includes crimes like rape and trafficking, but without the specifics, the term is fuzzy, legalistic, which provides a space for people to diminish the horror of what happened to Gaiman’s victims… much like post-traumatic stress disorder, while more clinically useful also acts like a muffler for all those guns and bombs that shred soldier’s souls, or perhaps the horror of shell shock isn’t the damage taken, but the damage done – firing all those guns and bombs into other people. You can really think about how shell shock applies to war, both literally and metaphorically, in ways that “post-traumatic stress disorder,” a clinically useful umbrella term, does not allow. Shell shock is a gut punch. PTSD? No so much. Ditto “sexual misconduct.” Perhaps a useful term in a legal context, but by using it, you can diminish what Gaiman did from monstrosity to banality, from crimes for which he should spend the rest of his sad, rapist life in prison to a bit of public shaming before his comeback. (Louis CK still headlines shows in front of packed audiences, and Donald Trump is in the White House again. Gaiman will come back.) It also means that he will likely continue raping women because these guys don’t stop just ’cause they’re caught. He’s still got adoring fans, and those that remain will likely be even more adoring. (He wants to be called master? Yeah, he’ll get that.) You’ve got to stop them. You’ve got to restrain them.
For me, with these stories, the bigger story is how society falls on its face to minimize the crimes of rich men, particularly if they’re white. We, as a society, have allowed our language to be colonized by tricksters – by lawyers, public relations goons, and social media memes – which means we have allowed our souls to be colonized, our thoughts regimented, and thus controlled.
If Kugelmass wants to truly honor the stories of the women attacked by Gaiman, he should call a spade, a spade. He should call Gaiman a rapist, acknowledge what happened to his victims was rape, and acknowledge it is a crime. Then, because he won’t face legal punishment for his actions, the horror of his deeds will be properly multiplied.
But, boy, George Carlin was one funny guy!
(1) And, to be clear, Kugelmass isn’t the bad guy here. The article is “pro-Gaiman.” Kugelmass is simply accepting the discourse about Gaiman: he’s a lousy lover, a cheater, a cad, but “just” those things to talk about how we don’t take the victims seriously and about how “canceling” Gaiman our society is play-acting justice, allowing other predators to get off scot-free. (See? I’m not against the language moving on! “Predator” is a good term for these serial rapists. They’re dangerous as poisonous snakes.) The problem is rather more Orwellian than that, Orwell being Carlin’s unindicted co-conspirator in comedy. Carlin is so funny, and Orwell is so disturbing because they expose how language is unexamined by the people who use it, perhaps, particularly by the people who use it professionally. Society would never come up with “sexual misconduct.” Natural language likes punchy, to-the-point words. You need doctors and lawyers to come up with post-traumatic stress disorder and sexual misconduct to replace natural language terms like “rape” and “shell shock” and force them into society, where writers like Kugelmass repeat them because, as Orwell observed, when you’ve got words to write, falling into such terms without thinking becomes very easy. When you’ve got to fill column inches or pad out a speech, terms like “post-traumatic stress disorder” and “sexual misconduct” are always at hand, premade and ready to go, and our heads are filled with other people’s thoughts and purposes as a result. This isn’t to say that Kugelmass gets a pass for his lousy writing – and his editor is equally to blame, I’d’ve sent that shit back covered in red – but that he’s just using the language as given, which is the problem. These terms muddy our discourse, they coarsen our writing and speech, and give a sense of weight to nonsense.