Some people think Hillary Clinton’s remark about “basket of deplorables” was a strategic mistake. Others are making the argument that she was setting a trap for Trump, forcing him into the position of having to defend racists like David Dukes.
On CNN, Pence was asked if Dukes, the former KKK leader and a Trump supporter, was a deplorable. Pence said the Trump campaign was “not in the name calling business.” That’s a laugh. Name-calling seems to be an obsession with Trump. His behavior has been, um, deplorable.
Well, this is nothing new. Name calling has always been a part of politics. According to Wikipedia, “Name calling is a cognitive bias and a technique to promote propaganda. Propagandists use the name-calling technique to incite fears or arouse positive prejudices . . . “ There is nary a politician alive who has not engaged in it. From what I’ve read name calling in presidential elections used to be much worse, but I don’t recall that in my lifetime. I have not seen nothing like the 2016 election.
Name calling is actually a form of bullying. And it’s not just politicians. People everywhere, young and old, from the schoolyards to the boardrooms engage in name calling, perhaps not always directly or consciously or with malice. This is an important issue given that racial slurs have become more prevalent than ever in American society.
In trying to stem the use of racial slurs and name calling, I think we may be going about it the wrong way. We want to prevent people from name calling, but we need to also toughen our skin so that names won’t hurt or cause outrage. They’re just words. We can also try to diminish the power of certain words.
Nagarjuna told us that words are only signs, dependent designations ( prajnaptir-upadaya ), and names nothing more than derived names (upadaya-prajnapti). They exist as convention designations and have no real substantiality.
As I mentioned once before, legendary outlaw comedian Lenny Bruce used the N-word 22 times in a routine. At the end of the bit he said, “Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.” He went on to say that if you used the word repeatedly until it “didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.”
Lenny’s point coincides to some extent with the Buddhist teaching on this subject. In his essay on Nagarjuna, German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote,
The final step is to perceive the untruth of all signs and hence of language. Once it is understood that a word is a mere sign without any real meaning, the word disappears and that is deliverance. Consciousness, which created suffering by shaping emptiness into many worlds, is carried back to its source.
The aim of all true thinking is a return from the unfolding of thought to nonthinkng. What happened through the unfolding of thought can be undone by better thought in the dissolution of thought.”
Clinton is right, of course. Many of Trumps supporters are worthy of strong condemnation. But then, they feel the same way about us. Liberals, left-wingers, extremists, tree huggers destroying America . . . It all depends on your view . . . and hopefully you recall from previous posts Nagarjuna’s injunction about the emptiness of views.
