(November 13th, 2015) Paris, France, along with the entire world watching, was violently terrorized by radicals. After recently reading an essay by George Orwell titled, "Politics and the English Language", originally published in 1946, I noticed Orwell was on to something. The author notes in his essay the abundance of cliched, trite, jargon and excessive emotive vocabulary particularly found in political writings, news pieces infiltrating the mainstream media's messages. Linked here in its entirety, it is a thought-provoking read 70 years later. Powerful, meaningful language does not lose potency (poignancy) with time.
The following poem was composed by using the text of a CNN article and omitting all excessive, (what could be construed as) vague, or frivolous, emotive words. Those eliminated, discarded words (sometimes strings) are presented in order here, in the form of a poem.
Blunting the News
The prevailing emotion is now fear.
Fear that anywhere and anyone could be a target.
A sudden noise, the air is thick with sirens.
Controlled suspect terror
took the lives.
The French capital is in a somber mood.
Dozens, tripling France’s ability to bomb,
sweeping powers were
rallied with massive demonstrations.
A celebration of diversity,
a coming together of faiths and ethnicities,
most cultural, but fractious.
A dozen leapt.
The landscape has changed.
Tens of thousands
of would be abandoned,
blighted by conflict, trekked.
Vast and also shown ever greater
ambitions beyond.
Now sounds much more menacing,
Erosion of trust.
Quiet, some in tears, queued
A subdued, eloquent, leading, loose, inflicted, sophisticated
and presumably financed and infiltrated.
Shocking display, young, wage, more disturbing still
at least four plots this year alone.
Candid about the security situation,
clear, have chastened.
Palpable episodes will follow
promised after months later.
Anxiety has been heightened the by comments,
according to United States officials, equipped concern,
exploiting products, reforms of intelligence, bear fruit.
The threat is immediate.
External borders, deflecting blame,
criticizing the border controls of others,
senses an opportunity, will bring terrorism.
Hoping to benefit mentality regional
sense of siege, perhaps best demonstrated by the declaration
passed almost unanimously, gives, allows,
invariably in the blighted banlieues that ring many towns.
Especially the young, divorced and disowned by society,
inhabit a world, become radicalized, shabby
neighborhood, placed whole, an hour’s drive away
looks down on the world’s media.
Holds surrounded, representing liberty, equality and fraternity.
The second time this year flowers are being laid-
perhaps ideals.
“…modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”
-George Orwell
Image of painting by Édouard Manet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, At the Cafe, circa 1879.
