DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 4/19/04

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DP'S POLITICAL LEXICON

fallen (past participle) -- euphemism for "killed in action" In his press conference on 4/13, Bush assured the country that "We will finish the work of the fallen" in Iraq. The usage is meant to give the impression that people who have been torn to pieces by bombs and bullets have actually just stubbed their toes and will soon be up and about. C. S. Forester's Captain Horatio Hornblower, who suffered from vertigo, once had to undertake an operation that involved climbing an enemy ship's mast in the dark and working his way out along a spar from which he knew the footropes would have been removed. Instructing his subordinates on how to handle things if he should be killed, Hornblower found himself using the standard formula "if I fall" and then realizing with a start that in this case it had a horrible and perfectly literal applicability. Ordinarily, like vaseline on a camera lens, it produced an agreeable and slightly romantic haze over the battlefield. "The fallen" was bad poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries and should have been permanently laid to rest by the mass slaughters of World War I. In reviving it, Bush's speechwriters were banking on the sedative effect of sentimental language. Headline writers at the NY Times evidently found the phrase so moving that they were soon using it themselves over a story about the relatives of those killed: "Deadly Week Ends in Tears For the Fallen" (4/15).

Those who want to know more about "the fallen" can consult the frequently-updated site

As of today, it records 702 Americans whose families have been notified of their deaths. About 27% of them are black or Hispanic and just under 3% are women. Alphabetically, the list runs from Sergeant Michael D. Acklin II of Louisville, KY, who died on November 15 in a helicopter collision over Mosul, to Lance Corporal Robert P. Zurheide of Tucson, AZ, who stopped an insurgent's bullet in Anbar Province last week. Since April 1, there have been 101 deaths, making April, with 11 days still to go, by far the worst month of the war--at least for Americans. The figures include only members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines; "independent contractors," who have been dying frequently of late, probably appear somewhere as red ink on their companies' books. The most poignant feature of the list is the ages of those on it. One hundred twenty-seven of them did not live to see their twenty-first birthday. If we are fighting a crusade against evil, it is a children's crusade.

In a Times Op-Ed on 4/18, British historian Niall Ferguson takes issue with the recent assertion by Ted Kennedy that Iraq is "Bush's Vietnam." The numbers, so far anyway, support Ferguson: we have considerably fewer troops in Iraq and have suffered considerably fewer deaths there than we had at a comparable point in Vietnam. But Kennedy wasn't talking about numbers: he was talking about the delusion of omnipotence and the punishment it invites. In this delusion, Bush is fully the equal of Johnson and Nixon. It is a terrible thing for the fallen to have fallen for.

[Political Lexicon, an occasional Dead Parrot feature, investigates the often euphemistic language that politicians and the media use to blur the outlines of real-world issues.]

THE MILITARY MIND

On 4/17, the U.S. command in Iraq closed large sections of the country's two major roads (Boston Globe, 4/18). According to the announcement, "If civilians drive on the closed section of the highways, they may be engaged with deadly force. Safety and security of public travel is the primary reason for closing these sections of highways."