Some time ago I wrote a little essay about things and signs, res and signa in Latin, in relation to a little book Saint Augustine wrote on that subject. Signs are of course of many kinds, but among the most prominent in human cultures are verbal signs. This is probably a too elaborate way of saying something rather simple. Language is absolutely fundamental to human societies, but language is also marked by ambiguities requiring interpretation. The same sound means bear (an animal), bear (the verb) and bare (the adjective), among other things. Hence the shaggy dog question: How can a bear bare to bear a bare bear? According to some linguistic theories both ancient and modern, language can never completely eschew ambiguity. The Stoic linguistic experts said that words could be explained only by using other words: “That is like bringing an unlit candle into a darkened room!” Even more ambiguous very often are signs that are pictorial and gestural. I present as examples some problems of “signage” raised by two eminent alumni of my institution, Princeton, who would appear to be on opposite sides of our deeply divided political culture.
It turns out the gesture may have been imported from France, and it has a French name, quenelle. Such quenelles as I have known are gastronomic delicacies, but signs (verbal and gestural) mean different things in different times and places. “In late 2013, following its use by professional footballer Niccolas Anelka during a match, Jewish leaders, anti-racism groups, and public officials in France have interpreted it as an inverted Nazi salute and as an expression of antisemitism. French officials have sought to ban the gesture due to its perceived subtext of antisemitism.” The triumphant or defiant arm reach actually has no single conventional meaning, or indeed any conventional meaning. It is more than doubtful that protesting black American Olympians in 1968 intended it as “throwing a Sieg heil” in a celebration of fascist power. It was at the time described by some as a variant or perhaps desecration of an “Olympic salute”—another supposed common gesture of which I was unaware. You can read about that one in a journalistic essay of 2012 by Rose Eveleth, published four years before Trump’s first inauguration*. Elon Musk is one of those public figures I would be inclined to dislike on the grounds of his obscene wealth alone, but that is my problem. The idea that he was “throwing a Seig heil” with crypto-fascist intent is kind of looney. Has Dr. Roth never himself sung the anthem of his doctoral alma mater, “Old Nassau”, with its weird but statutory arm gesture?
My second subject is a bearer of strange signs rather than a strange interpreter of them. I refer to Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, of the great undergraduate class of 2003. Michael Roth didn’t quite overlap with Pete Hegseth at Princeton, but there is in general little commerce between undergraduate and graduate students in any event. I remember Hegseth by name as a notable basketball player, but I never met him. As a man tattooed, he is perhaps rare but by no means unique among Princetonians. He was preceded by at least one celebrity, Secretary of State George Schultz, who thus explained the factors discouraging him against a presidential run of his own: “I’m afraid the country is not ready for a president who might have a tiger tattooed on his rear end.” That’s Tiger, as in Princeton Tigers. I suspect the country is by now ready for more or less anything, but Schultz, alas, died at a great age a few years ago. What Hegseth has tattooed very prominently over one bicep is the Latin sentence Deus vult. I am no expert, but this is one of the more learned tattoos I have encountered. It means “God wants or wills [it],” it being the First Crusade. The phrase was the crowd’s enthusiastic answer to the Pope’s suggestion of a holy war made at the Council of Clermont in 1096. The war’s ostensible purpose was to “liberate” the holy biblical sites in Palestine and to safeguard the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem. This verbal exchange was in all probability conducted in the vernacular, but chroniclers generally wrote in Latin. You may or may not know how all that crusading business worked out, but it was, well, complicated.
According to various reputable sources various proto-fascists have adopted this phrase (Deus vult) as their motto, so that it is now, according to critics, an emblem of white supremacists. As it happens, I have encountered one or two of those supremacist types over the years, but none of them looked to me like Latinists. Though I am strongly in favor of studying Latin, all good things have their limits. There are many reasons to be tentative about Hegseth’s appointment to direct the largest, most expensive and perhaps most important division of our government, the one charged with the national defense in a dangerous world. What special gifts or experience argue in favor of such an appointment? But his tattoos and their putative interpretations are perhaps pretty far down on the list of concerns and may have already attracted more attention than they merit.
I remember writing one time about Rudyard Kipling’s swastikas. The swastika is an ancient Indo-European emblem of prosperity and well-being the English writer adopted as a personal symbol more than thirty years before the Nazis arrived in power. Kipling was one of the most prolific and popular Anglophone writers of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and had millions of readers. At least one of the collected editions of his works published in the 1920s is prominently decorated with swastikas in its binding. After the 1920s came the 1930s. And after that came a great world war. A specialized journal devoted to Kipling and his works repeatedly had to point out that the swastika could not have had for him a meaning in any way connected with Adolph Hitler or the National Socialist Party of Germany. For him it invoked the fascinating, often exotic energies of the mysterious India of his birth. Use the Moby Dick test. Queequeg was no less effective as a harpooner for all the tattoos covering his face, as Ishmael himself came to learn. We have enough to worry about in how our new Secretary of Defense will handle the harpoons. A good place to begin there is with an old adage: Loose lips sink ships. We can fret over the pigmented epidermis later.
Spine of a Kipling novel?
*“The Olympic Salute We Don’t Use Anymore Because it Looked too Much Like Heiling Hitler” (Smithsonian Magazine, August 10, 2012).
