David Freddoso:

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill., was on the House floor just now during President Obama’s presser, offering a privileged resolution aimed squarely at Texas Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry. The resolution is designed to extend the Washington Post’s coverage on the offensively named parcel of land that Perry’s father once leased for hunting.

The resolution basically calls on Perry to apologize for the offensive name that other people from a bygone era gave to the property, and which Perry’s father deleted with a can of paint. The resolution also calls on Perry to reveal the names of anyone who went hunting with him on that property.

Public lynching attempts like this — but government officials — are precisely the reason why I’ve been adamant that we INSIST that, from a linguistics perspective, we re-assert where meaning lies, how it is transmitted in the course of a speech act, and what role is played — necessarily — but both the author and the receiver of the message.

In this instance, what Jackson is asking Congress to do is support a resolution that indicts Rick Perry (and anyone they can tie to him) for leasing land that others before him signified — and that his father, by virtue of an active attempt to cover-up a pre-existing sign — wished not to be associated with, regardless of what one wants to argue may or may not be in their hearts or in their “subconscious.”

To use an analogy: this would be like Jesse Jackson Jr paying for a rental car, only to find after he’d left the lot that someone had carved a swastika into the dash. Should Jackson take ownership of the swastika? Be asked to apologize for it? Along with anyone who may have driven in the car with Jackson — even if he covered the swastika up with, say, a Black Power Post-it note for the duration of his rental?

And more, should Congressional Republicans, having learned of the chain of events, submit a privileged resolution demanding Jackson apologize for the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Gay, and anti-Gypsy sentiment expressed in the dashboard carving — along with demands he reveal for the Congressional record the names of anyone who drove in the car with him?

Of course not. Because Jackson didn’t intend the sign, the sign is not Jackson’s. And in fact, his attempt to cover it up was an attempt to create a distance between himself and the sign, whose intent he didn’t know — and whose intent we don’t know, because we don’t know it’s origins. Truth is, it could have been a Native American who put it there, in which case its meaning would fall outside of most conventional understandings.

My point being this: it matters how we get there, and that we understand what it is we’re doing when we say we’re interpreting. It matters whose intent we decide to privilege — and that we understand and acknowledge how we are reaching our hermeneutic conclusions.

Here, Jackson has decided what the message on the rock means (plausibly so); but to then tie that message to Perry requires a linguistically incoherent (and dangerous) leap, one in which which we are all said to be responsible for any meaning someone like Jackson can glean from something we happen to come in contact with.

Leaving aside the particulars of this specific case, think through the implications of such a linguistic arrangement.

Because when you do, you’ll come to understand how, say, “witches” came to be accused of being witches, and then burned or hanged. And how “progressivism,” for all its pretensions otherwise, is systemically and ideologically, at its very structural core, regressive and (intentionally) tribalistic — with the goal always being to create the most powerful tribe, or at least control the coalition of tribes whose messages are ascendant.