Caesar, Brutus, and the Coloured Language:

Some years ago I was acquainted with a young man who had grown up in the Urban Ghetto. He was white, and one of his associates of colour put a gun up to his head, allegedly. The Reason was: my friend called this man "coloured", not "of colour", as is common practice.

 

Now: it's not too long ago that "coloured" was the term of preference. There even is a whole organization which we learn about in school, N.A.A.C.P., the National Association for Advancing Coloured Peoples. (I have paraphrased for meter’s sake, of course.) The term's not been in common use for quite some time. We learn it purely in our studies into History.

 

I know the story. Martin Luther King, the intellectual, the pacifist, the Hegel scholar, saw it fitting that the adjective should follow up the noun and not the other way around. It's just like saying "I am not bipolar, but I HAVE bipolar." This is founded on the notion that the Public will remember that which it hears first and not that which is last.

 

The man was credible and educated, truly. But it's shit like that which leads me to believe he wasn't big on Shakespeare.

 

There's a scene I love in Shakespeare's play *Julius Caesar*. Brutus believes, by speaking first, addressing Rome about the deeds of his conspirators, that he can seal the deal for them, consolidate their power, and preserve their reputation for the new world order. This scene is ingenious politically as much as it is brilliant poetically; I don't think I have ever witnessed something which had moved me all at once to grief and to hysterical amusement quite like this. Brutus delivers his short bit; the audience is moved and now they're on Team Brutus like a herd of sheep. Then Brutus LEAVES and leaves the podium for Antony, believing it's all over. And it is, for Brutus.

 

So Mark Antony gets up, and all throughout the Speech, a rather lengthy one, he praises Brutus and his lot as "honourable men", but really he proceeds to scorn their deeds, to send off Caesar like a God, to render that repeated line of "honourable men" as so redundant it's absurd, and then, under the urging of the Romans, he cracks open Caesar's CASKET and displays the corpse with all the stab wounds. By the time that he reads Caesar's Will, by popular demand, the selfsame Romans who were praising Brutus and condemning the late Caesar have decided to burn down the former's house.

 

What's the moral lesson here? It's this: the People don't remember what they hear at FIRST, but rather that which they hear LAST.

 

Somehow, I have to wonder how this argument was buried with the Dr. King. I must imagine that an academic would have given it some due consideration. At the very least, we ought to wonder if the core presumptions underlying a reform that's forced upon the Language truly stands the test of Reason. At the very least, let's show humility before the possibility, before we shoot somebody over it for messing up the order of the words, or we might take a page from Ancient Rome, where order does not matter in a sentence so much as the conjugation, but the order of the SPEAKERS makes the difference.

 

One might always contend, as any amateur Hegelian would, that merely "Reasoned" arguments do not suffice, that they do not reach the "heart of the matter", et cetera. Yet Reason, in the case of Noble Rhetoric, is not very far removed from Affect, just as humour is not very far removed from grief, and both these couplings abound in Shakespeare's famous passage starting with "Friends, Romans, Countrymen: lend me your ears."

 

One also may contend that it's not MY place to decide, as if Our Language has no say in my own Life. To this I say: an Ethic of Minority has NOT set all men free from Kafkaesque Bureaucracy, but rather aggravated it, and if we ARE minorities at Heart, then we are ALL oppressed by this Bureaucracy. But leave it not up to the PEOPLE, whether they are Black, Roman, German, or Japanese to say what OUGHT to be regarded as "offensive". People are the Problem; they'll agree to whatever you tell them, often with great violence. You have only to be the Last to Speak.

 

**[({R.G.)}]**