Dan Fishback: Too complicated for words

Lately I have no idea what people are talking about. They toss around words, virtually pegging them at each other, lighting them on fire and hurling them through enemy windows. "War." "Nation." "American." "Patriot."

If these words are the weapons of discourse, then their force falls flat for me, because I am not satisfied with the prevailing definitions.

Activist groups across the country are protesting "war," and fighting accusations that they are "un-patriotic." Let's start with "war." What does that mean?

Exchanges of artillery certainly classify as "war." Most anything with explosions, outside of the entertainment industry, probably falls under the "war" category too. But what about military actions we can't see? What about covert efforts to dismantle terrorist organizations? Many fewer bombs here -- but is it war? Is there an explosion cut-off point, where war becomes simply "international relations?"

I'd say that all of those things, no matter how little fire or death, are examples of "war." Why not? Is it because we're fighting a "group" and not a "nation?" Well then what's a nation? Is Afghanistan a nation? It looks like one on a map. But the map betrays a complexity difficult to explain in soundbite news media.

The Taliban dominates most of the area called Afghanistan, but its claims to legitimacy are challenged on all sides. The Afghan representative to the United Nations certainly does not acknowledge the Taliban. Most political bodies in the world don't acknowledge the Taliban. They acknowledge that guy at the U.N. But does an exiled government really represent the people of Afghanistan, when it has patently no control over anything anywhere?

And within the boundaries of the place called Afghanistan, the Taliban has equally uncertain sovereignty. Composed of Pashtuns (the majority linguistic group) and foreign Arabs, the Taliban is essentially at war with the Northern Alliance, an equally thuggish coalition that represents other linguistic and ethnic minorities.

On a lower level, tribal leaders with less-disputed local legitimacy are reportedly trying to forge a network of civil administrations. These people, however, have no guns, so they are unlikely to be regarded by any international political power.

And so while they seem to have the most legitimacy -- if popular support is the hallmark of a legitimate government (which it might not be) -- we'll still probably ignore them. The people of "Afghanistan" -- the people who will die if we wage a loud kind of war -- retreat to the background of public consciousness because it's a government we wish to fight; a government that we increasingly conflate with the people (or "nation" or whatever) who they supposedly lead.

So then what are we fighting about back here? It's not if we should fight -- surely no anti-war protester advocates a complete lack of anti-terrorist action. Rather, the anti-war debate is a fight over method -- it's a fight to redefine "war" in light of no satisfactory definition of "nation."

And yet the debate always gets more personal than that. Any "anti-war" debate soon descends into jingoistic name-calling. Mere "protesters" become "dirty hippies" -- "un-American." But if "Afghanistan" is so difficult to define, what makes us think that "America," and therefore "American," and therefore "un-American" is any easier?

Granted, we aren't fighting a civil war. But in a country where my friend Liz is an "African American," even though her parents are from Haiti, and I am just an "American," even though my Russian relatives are more closely related to me than Liz's African ancestors, you can see how popular phrases like "American spirit" and "American patriotism" can be just a bit baffling.

You can call that protester over there "un-American" -- you're right, he's "Latin-American." And that one over there, she doesn't even get a hyphen -- she's just "Asian." And that brownish girl over there -- she came over from Trinidad when she was two, but she hasn't gotten her citizenship yet. American? The guy in the Starbucks across the street looks pretty American, but he's actually British.

And what about American spirit? Is it the spirit of democracy? Tell that to voters in Florida. The spirit of freedom, maybe? Tell that to nine Virginia men recently arrested for having consensual homosexual sex.

I'm not trying to defame and vilify. America is certainly not one of the more repressive political entities in the world. It is proudly among the freest. But let's be humble about its flaws. Let's not toss around our country's name like a monochromatic shield of godly virtue. Let's acknowledge when our vocabulary lacks any apparent stability or meaning.

The coming struggle will take whole phrases and sentences, even paragraphs and essays, even books to explain. And even then we won't get it right. So let's not throw words at each other. Let's decipher them.

Dan Fishback is a junior English major from Olney, Md.

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