The language of brands, not principles
In an age of “alternative facts,” there is something about this week’s dreadful new language that’s not completely surprising.
“Reaccommodate,” the immortal phrase of United Airlines CEO Oscar Muñoz, was false and inappropriate in a different way than White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s historically ignorant “Holocaust centers.”
On Monday, April 10, Muñoz used the word “reaccommodate” in his first public statement after passenger videos surfaced of Chicago aviation security officers dragging a passenger off of a Kentuckybound flight at the request of United Airlines flight personnel, who wanted his seat for themselves.
“I apologize for having to reaccommodate these customers,” Muñoz wrote in his statement.
“Reaccommodate.” The public met Muñoz’s interpretation with nearly as much consternation as it did the eyewitness videos of police officers knocking the head of the elderly passenger, a 69year-old Kentucky doctor named David Dao, against an armrest and dragging his limp, bloodied body down the aisle.
Meanwhile, in a press conference on Tuesday, April 11, Spicer was offering his interpretation of the Holocaust of World War II.
“I think when you come to sarin gas, (Adolf Hitler) was not using the gas on his own people the same way that (Syrian president Bashar) Assad is doing,” Spicer said, adding that Hitler put Jews into “the Holocaust center.”
“Holocaust center.” Reporters, scholars and regular citizens responded to Spicer’s statements with gasps and frantic fact checks, reminding everyone who would listen that Hitler did indeed use gas on “his own people” — the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that 160,000 to 180,000 of the Jews murdered by Hitler’s Nazis were German.
As for the venues in which these acts took place, well, it’s safe to say that “Holocaust center” conjures up a more neutral image than “gas chamber” and “concentration camp.”
Two very different incidents, two very different “misstatements.”
Muñoz and Spicer have both offered apologies for their words, and those apologies have failed to calm anyone.
That’s because we all sense something similar in their impulses. It’s not just that they used the wrong words. It’s that they were attempting to reshape reality via a specific kind of banal, corporatized language. This is a language that elides facts and disguises brutality. Perhaps they did so without even realizing what they were doing.
The phrases represent a corporatized language, not a totalitarian one. This isn’t a small distinction — totalitarian language requires ideology, vision, some sense of communal grandeur that awes even as it horrifies. George Orwell, whose books everyone seems to be reading now, captured this language well.
But corporatized language may be the more relevant lexicon for an era when we are being led by a real estate tycoon and watched, in our own homes, by the “smart” devices we’ve purchased for our own convenience.
Corporatized language is brands and public relations, not all-powerful governments. This language isn’t interested in ideals and principles.
It offers blandness — “Holocaust center” — and an optimistic face — “reaccommodate.”
It’s a language that recognizes a sale as the final value — and believes that any violence arising in the process may be unfortunate but certainly not a deal breaker. It’s the language of Franz Kafka, whose work with data at an insurance company taught him how to substitute euphemism for reality, how to create horror by putting a pleasant face on distress.
There are no active players in this language, only a passive, all-encompassing atmosphere. This allows brands to avoid responsibility. It’s hard for anyone to hear you screaming if there’s no subject.
“He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain his compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more and more disruptive and belligerent,” Muñoz wrote in a leaked email to his employees.
Who did the approaching? Who asked for compliance?
Who cares?, Muñoz’s statement says. What’s important here is the wrongness of the victim, not my company’s behavior.
As for Spicer, it’s not an accident that he spun this bizarre history lesson while he was attempting to sell his boss’ warmongering behavior to a room full of skeptical reporters.
Like Muñoz, he needed a distraction. Since reality wasn’t providing one, why not offer a marketing spin on reality?
In its own way, “Holocaust centers” is a particularly apt window into the administration. The term implies that the concentration camps are just more properties, in need of nothing more serious than a rebrand.
The problem for Muñoz and Spicer this week was that Americans are smart consumers.
And while Americans may be struggling with citizenship, we sure know the gulf between a corporate promise and reality when we hear one. This week, Muñoz and Spicer learned that the hard way.
Corporatized language offers blandness — “Holocaust center” — and an optimistic face — “reaccommodate.”