Our president once affirmed with manly assurance, "I don't do nuance."
Nonetheless, in spite of himself, and certainly to the distress of his handlers, he dabbled in it recently. On the second day of a convention that would climax with a senator betraying his party to bludgeon a colleague, Bush unaccountably acknowledged that the "War on Terror" might be unwinnable.
Not surprisingly, the Kerry-Edwards team pounced on the president's quickly disowned misstep. Eager to seize any opportunity to appear more firm and forthright than the administration, the Democrats insisted the war was indeed winnable. In the process, they missed a chance to stand up for a much-maligned word.
"Nuance" has come in for a battering lately. The president flogged John Kerry with it at a rally last month, claiming his opponent had "found a new nuance" by which he approved going to war in Iraq. Kerry appeared the same day in Las Vegas and made it clear that it was possible to agree something needed to be done about Saddam but to disagree that a unilateral invasion was the right thing to do. Not much of a subtle distinction, but even nuance has surrendered much of its ambiguity these days.
It does not help that the origins of le mot du jour are, yes, French. Old French, no less, as in "Old Europe." Its ancestor, nuer, also serves up the French word nuage, or "cloud," which hints at its primary meaning, "shade." And, when you think about it, shade allows us to perceive shades that both glare and darkness conceal. Nuance unveils the tones and values between black and white. Thus it is a term more familiar to the world of culture than to the world at large. Art-lovers and concertgoers lean forward to discern it in a painter's pearlescent flesh tones or in an orchestra's treatment of a symphonic passage. Through the centuries, nuance has found tragedy in the flaws of a hero.
Dragged unwilling onto the political stage, however, the word has taken on a connotation closer to its root. For those who insist on an us-and-them world, nuance is the obscuring fog that liberals, intellectuals and other assorted Francophiles cast over the simple dualities of right and wrong, good and evil.
Columnist Kathleen Parker invoked the word no fewer than three times to ridicule Kerry in a column, run by the Review-Journal, of course, defending Zell Miller's blustery speech at the Republican convention. Miller's appeal to "Bubba" voters, according to Parker, left "the girlie men to fuss about the nuances of terrorist sensitivity." Clever phrase, that; at once wielding the other noun used regularly to club Kerry and conjuring the convention's other hit speaker, California's Terminator-in-chief.
But if you read Parker carefully, you find nothing to substantiate Miller's attack, or his support of Bush. It was entirely about how the speech played out there, where nuance is a nasty cloud in a summer sky. Miller, she wrote, "spoke to deeper truths that many Americans feel even if they haven't been able to articulate them precisely. The world changed on September 11, 2001, and the old default modes no longer work."
Ah, there it is, the ritual evocation of 9/11, along with the nuance-free, and entirely unexamined, premise that "the world changed." Leave alone for a minute that the administration projected war in Iraq before 9/11; that the war has done nothing to eliminate terrorism but instead has spawned more of it; that even hawks must admit the administration poorly planned and prosecuted the war. Let us consider how the world changed.
It did not, really. Terrorists have been killing Americans, and others, for several generations. Three years ago Saturday, they managed to do it on a scale that staggered us. We cannot deny how horrifying it was for those who died and for those who lost family and friends that day. And it shattered the rest of us to watch those towers flame and fall, over and over.
But we have stumbled onward, albeit with a keener sense of vulnerability and those peculiar color-coded threat warnings. It is degree, not kind, that separates us from 9/10/01. It takes an appreciation of shadings, of nuance, to see that, and to temper our responses accordingly. Without question, we had to do something, and Afghanistan was a start. But we left the work there unfinished and blundered into Iraq.
In his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell observed, "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Three years later, he illustrated the point in 1984. Twenty years beyond that fictional crossroads, the administration has made boulders of gas by pinning words like "sensitivity" and "nuance" on its opponents.
Nuanced or not, Bush was right that the "war on terror" is unwinnable. It will be, certainly, if we fight it his way. "Terror" is not an enemy, it is a tactic of the hateful and desperate, and calling the struggle against them a "war" is no more likely to ensure success than it has been with "drugs." The only approach with any hope is the one that senses the many shades of global political reality, getting tough with real enemies, working with allies new and old, and exploiting possibilities to divert young minds from evil deeds.
But then we'd have to do nuance.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.