Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> Personally, I can't help but note that, some time over the past year, I
> stopped automatically writing "we" as a synonym for "Americans" in my
> email, and started adding qualifiers with the appenda "US"-this
> or "American"-that. A totally unconscious shift, it's like the fingers are
> smarter than the brain.
>
> -- Dennis
> ----------
>
> This is a pretty complicated issue that could be opened out like an
> onion, peeling back layer after layer of social and cultural
> woundings, differances, alienations, isolations, disenfranchisements,
> dismemberments, and deaths---all in the interstitial spaces between we
> and them.
I have a 33 year history of objecting loudly at public meetings to the use of "we" in this sense. I began at an anti-war rally in the fall of '68 when a colleague from the English department spoke talking about the bad things "we" were doing in Vietnam. On the whole, the objection was usually honored _on the particular occasion_, but the same people would be "we-ing" again soon after, and I would be objecting.
The classic 'study' of "we," they," and "you" is Guthrie's _Deportee_. Consider the shift from the first stanza --
You are flying them back to the Mexican border
to the chorus:
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
to the second stanza:
My father's own father he waded that river,
to the third stanza:
Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted.
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
Six hundred miles to the Mexican border.
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
and the fourth:
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
the fifth:
Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just . . . deportees.
And then the radical shift in the final stanza. Who is "we" in those lines?
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit --
To fall like dry leaves, to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except deportees?
Whose orchards are they? And "my" topsoil? Who is "I" here? Who sings the song?
Carrol