Nonfiction review: 'Talking Dangerously'

Michael S. Roth, Special to The Chronicle
Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Years of Talking Dangerously
By Geoffrey Nunberg
(Public Affairs; 265 pages; $18.95)

Geoffrey Nunberg's new collection of essays and commentaries explores how we have attempted to combine, divide or dismiss parts of the world simply by talking about them. Nunberg focused on the "end of the Bush era," but he is not limited to the gyrations of political speech ...

Even though we are still living in the messy legacy of Bush misrule, it is somehow easier to look back on the language of those years now that we have a president who knows how to form a sentence. The last gasps of the Karl Roveian approach to language were clearly audible in the 2008 presidential campaign. Nunberg writes incisively about the manipulation of patriotism and paranoia in the desperate attempts of the McCain-Palin effort to make Obama seem like a scary outsider. The initial efforts to paint Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a racist should be a reminder that old linguistic tricks can be easily reactivated ...

Some of the best pages in "The Years of Talking Dangerously" are devoted to the word "torture." Nunberg quotes philosopher Henry Shue, who wondered whether by talking so much about torture, we actually loosened the conventions against the barbaric treatment of prisoners. Nunberg reminds us of the writers who went to great lengths to distinguish between enhanced interrogation, abuse, mistreatment and sadism. "Were we really having this conversation?" he asked in a "Fresh Air" commentary from the fall of 2006. Two years earlier, he had already concluded: "If you find yourself having to draw fine semantic distinctions here, you're already way over the line" ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/15/DDK717USKV.DTL