In fact, outside of election years, the entire industry of political punditry is driven by the perpetual, reciprocal struggle of one side trying to persuade an audience by using words to distort meaning while another side tries to put the words back in the context in which they are meaningful. One might even argue that this is true of the entire institution of democracy, the "currency" of which is said to be "information" ("information" being short-hand for that which is by definition without meaning and without context).
The amount of money, energy, and strategy that goes into using words to manipulate meaning, and thus to manipulate rather directly the views of people who elect our leaders to govern, boggles the mind. And while much of this process of misleading is handled by chart-wielding wonks and technocrats, narrative remains the core medium by which political ideas are bought and sold. It should go without saying that the final step in this process is real policy that affects your life in real ways. Again, we tend to be dismissive about the level of verbal bullshit and manipulation in politics; but in the germination cycle of real-life policy, it shouldn't be surprising how close together are narration and application.
The reason I bring this up is because the Romney campaign has been particularly hard at work in exploiting the inability of most Americans to understand words in context.
The first sign we got of this tactic was in a Romney campaign ad back in November. The ad depicted Barack Obama, in a speech, saying "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." In the ad and on the campaign trail after, the Romney campaign blasted Obama for saying this, criticizing him for trying to avoid talking about the bad economy and running away from the issue. Of course, the full quote from the Obama speech, which the Romney ad neglected to show was "Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.'" As we can see, the thing that Romney accused Obama of saying was actually, in context, a thing that Obama's former Republican opponent John McCain was saying; and a thing that Obama was actually criticizing McCain for saying. The Romney ad took the quote out of context to make it look like Obama was espousing an idea that Obama was actually critiquing. The ad, in short, conveyed the exact opposite meaning of the truth.
One of the things we teach in literature classes is that you don't accept the meaning nor the validity of a singular quote without doing the research necessary to place it in context. This context may be textual, as, for example, in determining that a statement is ironic rather than sincere in light of the surrounding text and events in a chapter. It may also be historical, as, for example, when we match the commentary in the text of Gulliver's Travels to Swift's critique of a group of eighteenth-century politicians.
Consider, for example, the frequently quoted poem "The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost. Certainly, if not guilty yourself, you know someone who has quoted the most famous lines of this poem as a celebration of individuality, having the guts to choose the more difficult or uncommon path, bucking the tide, being your own person, and so on:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,If we take a second look at this poem, however, and place this very famous quote in its proper context within the poem, a very different meaning reveals itself to us:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I shall be telling this with a sighAs you can see, then, the speaker in the poem tells of having taken the road less traveled by "with a sigh"; so our traveler is not a proud individualist taking the difficult path to fortune or success, but instead someone with deep regret. All of you who quote these clipped lines from this poem as inspirational lines are wrong, in other words; you're drawing inspiration based on bad reading, while those who know better rightly understand "The Road Not Taken" as a rather depressing poem that, if anything, suggests that by taking the "road less taken," you're not distinguishing yourself in a positive way, but setting yourself up for longstanding and crippling regret.
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
But do leave it in your Facebook profile.
We can turn now from Frost to Romney (never thought I'd have the chance to write those words) for the latest installment of misleading language and the inability of "readers" to properly contextualize what has been said.
Yet again Obama is at the center of Romney's attack, stating on video "If you've got a business, you didn't build that."
Of course the Romney campaign has gone to great lengths to milk this clumsy comment of Obama's, claiming that Obama is trying to discredit business owners and entrepreneurs. Romney's camp even held a business forum with a giant backdrop that says "We DID build it."
Though Obama's spoken message comes through more clearly when heard, the full text of his comments is:
"If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.Though Romney and Republicans are sloppily assuming the "that" in Obama's remarks refers to "business," such that Obama is saying to people who own businesses that they didn't build the businesses, the "that" in Obama's "you didn't build that" actually refers to the "roads and bridges" referenced in the previous sentence. Obama misspoke here in using "that" to refer to the plural "roads and bridges," and he used awkward syntax, but in context it makes absolutely no sense for the "that" to refer to anything but "roads and bridges." Obama's point here is that if you own a business, you likely didn't build the roads and bridges (and other structural and civic advantages) that aid your business.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. "
Taking the whole of these comments (especially when comparing them to Romney's nearly identical comments about Olympic athletes getting help to make it to the Olympics), it's clear that Obama's meaning is to acknowledge the ways broader society aids and facilitates individual talent and effort, even when individuals deny that they have been nurtured by such societal privileges. On a smaller scale, however, it's also clear that Obama was simply saying in those two controversial lines that most business owners likely didn't build the roads and bridges that benefit the business, not that they didn't "build" the business itself. Sure, because of the sloppy way in which Obama spoke that passage, there is some ambiguity in the lines that the Romney campaign seized on. But after paying a little critical attention to the passage as a whole, the Romney campaign's reading of it is exposed as implausible.
In the end, the Romney campaign and anyone who is unfortunately convinced by its out-of-context quotes are a bit like the misreaders of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken": an embarrassing inability to read renders the opposite meaning of what is and is said in truth. In fact, meaning isn't always as readily apparent as we'd like to think it is or should be.
