If violence is the first refuge of the incompetent, as Isaac Asimov once said, then the landscape of recent American political rhetoric is evidence as to just how much the US has become prisoner to George Bush and his fellow war mythographers, writes Colum McCann
Each day and night of the ongoing competition for the heart of American voters is shot through with the language of war, as if only war, and its various atrocities, can handle the current American state of heart.
The character of this particular election - the spotlights swinging toward Hollywood celebrities, the rock stars decked out in red, white and blue, the gaudy theatre-front bunting, the sly waves to the glassed-in VIP rooms - has all the character of the cheap box-office event. That's to be expected. The American political stage at election time has always had the whiff of a nerdy knees-up.
What is more chilling, particularly in the recent wake of the Democratic National Convention, is the easy way in which violence is invoked so that war, and its history, are reduced to trivial linguistic entertainment.
In recent years a particularly insidious assault on language, from the war-fields to the corridors of power, has been apparent. An aggression of cynicism became an exercise in "shock and awe". Weapons were suddenly "smart". Reporters were "embedded". There was the truly incredible idea of a "no-contact" war.
Civilian deaths, including of children, from point-blank rocket-launchers were labelled "killing the vehicle". Fire could be "friendly". There was a supposed "coalition of the willing". A territory was "secured" for "freedom". And "freedom", in George Bush's limited vocabulary, became a word that could mean anything at all.
The soundbite heroes kept coming up with new labels, so that a war on Iraq became a "war in Iraq", which at the same time was a "war on terrorism", which, in turn, became a "war on terror", a far more easily manipulated and manipulative term.
Just this week when new "orange-level" threats were announced, the TV anchors sounded like crude extras on a Wag the Dog soundstage. New "battlefields" were being opened up in New Jersey (Fox News), Wall Street was a "red-zone" (ABC) and Washington DC became part of the "ever-present battlefield" (Fox).
Language as a weapon is as old as language itself, of course, and the manipulation of language is to be expected, but not necessarily always embraced. In present-day America most of these new terms are attributable to the administration's speech writers (certainly not to Bush himself), military spokespeople and lapdog media which choose not to question the modes of delivery.
But there is a sense that the ongoing language of war contributes to a corruption of a national identity - any national identity - and in the States these days even talk of peace has taken on the linguistics of the warrior. Up came the presidential nominee at the recent Boston convention with his battle face on.
You could sense that a Vietnam veteran was stepping on stage. He saluted. He looked the camera straight on. His face gave way to a smile. "I am John Kerry," he said, "and I'm reporting for duty".
Earlier the aptly-named Louise Slaughter stood onstage with 41 other members of the House Congressional Democratic Women's Caucus saying she and the other troops were ready for battle. Wesley Clark dredged up a drumbeat of militaristic jingoism. Others talked about the "battle for peace".
When the Democrats had finished their product launch, even the Halliburton PR men might have stood aside and applauded.
Of course, on the Democratic side, all of this is deemed necessary. They have suffered for years from the stereotype of being soft on defence (which they have seldom been) and now they have chosen to fight fire with fire. Kerry, the war hero, became a rocket-launcher on Democratic shoulders.
Einstein once suggested that a country cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war. If so, neither can a country talk peace with the rhetoric of violence. Language, like the past, grows gradually around us. If we allow it to, it can become us. And when we allow it to become corrupted, we embrace that corruption.
When war is used as a campaign tool it cheapens the actual terror of war. It becomes trivial and ordinary, a White House thesaurus. Damage is done to a broad mass of people who actually are much more interested in peace. An infantilisation of a nation's character takes place. Suddenly all Americans appear to be shouting for blood. Not only does the grim sequence of over 900 American deaths so far get relegated to the "in-brief" columns, but nobody in American politics - nobody at all - talks about the 11,000-plus Iraqi civilians who have died so far, not to mention the Afghans or the British or the Bulgarians or the Spanish, or any other nationality for that matter.
The problem in all this trivialisation is that we can no longer be shocked and awed, and our empathy gets packed off to the political orphanage where we get the job of making voodoo dolls out of other human beings.
When we become prisoners to a jumped-up rhetoric it becomes easy to stir up simplicities. Every brown man is a rogue at the airport. Every Muslim is in opposition to democracy. Every American is a war-monger. Every satellite photo of an oil barrel is really a cocktail of chemicals.
This is not just a matter for poets, although it should certainly be part of their concern. This use of language for political punditry, when it becomes part of the everyday landscape, hides the actual atrocity of war and propels us towards progressively deeper international chasms. The mythographers cannot conceive a language of peace, which somehow becomes romantic and sentimental. Empathy doesn't go down well at the cineplex. Grief is a thing for the children's playground.
And all the while contradiction - the pure essence of politics, indeed language itself, poetry - gets relegated to the dead man's bin. Where far too many have already been.
Colum McCann, the author of Dancer, is based in New York