Modified On August 13, 2012
Joe Queenan is a wickedly funny satirist. His latest musings have found a home on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. He somehow managed to find humor in the Obama administration’s overhaul of the language used to refer to various elements of the war on terror– or should we say, “overseas contingency operations.”
He does what any good satirist does, he beats the premise to death:
Central Asia is not the only place where the coarse terminology of the past is being phased out. In Darfur, the words “ethnic cleansing” are no longer in use, either by rebels nor by the government itself. Instead, the practice of targeting a particular tribe or sect or ethnic group for extinction is being called “unconditional demographic redeployment.” In much the same spirit, the archaic term “genocide” — so broad and vague as to be meaningless — has now been supplanted by “maximum-intensity racial profiling.”
“We’ve got problems here, sure, just like any other society,” explains a high-ranking Sudanese official. “But we’re not talking about Armenia 1915. We’re not talking about the Holocaust. The Eurocentric term ‘genocide’ gives people the wrong idea. And it really hurts tourism.”
If you think it wouldn’t work as standup, you would be mistaken. We saw a CSPAN presentation of Queenan at a book signing and his material (which was basically just his written stuff… spoken) elicited lots of guffaws from the assembled.