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What Do You Mean “we,” Paleface?

Richard Ostrofsky
(June, 2001)
Peter Hecht came by my store this afternoon to remind me that it was time
to write another article – this one for his last issue as editor of OSCAR. I
asked him if he had any suggestions on what to write about, and he began to
talk about the planned amalgamation of our municipalities into a
consolidated city of Ottawa. I protested my complete ignorance of the
matter, but Peter overrode my objections, insisting that the creation of a
new entity by fiat had philosophic interest apart from any mere facts, and
was therefore a subject suited to my talents. I’m not sure he meant this as a
complement, but it doesn’t matter. This being my last effort for the paper
under his administration, I felt it would be churlish to refuse his request
however little I knew. So here goes.
We (English-speakers) use the pronoun “we” ambiguously, referring
either to self-and-interlocutor, to self-and-others against interlocutor, or else
to self-interlocutor-and selected others against other others. It might be
useful to have three words to distinguish these separate meanings, but we
don’t, so it is necessary to figure out what is meant according to the context.
The pronoun also makes no distinction between what might be called
casual vs. invested groups. The people in a movie theater at some moment
usually constitute no more than the most casual group – or, let us say,
grouping. If they need to refer to themselves for any reason (e.g. the
manager gets up on stage to make an announcement and shouts, “Can you
hear me?”), the “we” that they would use (“Yes, we hear you!”) is of the
weakest sort. By contrast, a platoon of soldiers under enemy fire is likely to
think of itself as a “we” in a rather strong sense. Both its awareness of
external threat and the presence of a good officer will strengthen the group’s
bond: its sense of being a “we.”
We can see, then, (you and I, dear reader), that politics, to a great extent,
involves self-interested manipulation of the scope and strength of first-
person-plural pronouns. Which people can be goaded or exhorted into a
state of excitation about their common interests – real or imagined – is
perhaps half of what politics is about. The other half consists in persuading
them that you are just the person to procure the satisfaction of those
interests on their behalf.
In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut draws a useful distinction about the we-
groups of a society. These are of two kinds: Some exist to get something
done; others are organized to maintain and assert a group identity. The
distinction is not hard and fast. Most real-life organizations have both these
elements. But in each case it is usually pretty clear which is more important
– the work itself or the sense of belonging. A group that really wants do
something together is called a karass in Vonnegut’s language. A group that
mostly wants to enjoy its own greatness and importance is called a
granfalloon. The karass (if it is conscious of itself at all) selects a leader to
help it meet its goals. The granfalloon craves sovereignty as such, and
organizes a government to achieve its granfalloonish objectives of power,
security and self-aggrandizement.
In easy times, nations and other political entities behave like
granfalloons, their people showing a preference for caretaker governments
that will leave them to their private lives, and their self-chosen groupings
and associations. When things get rougher, the granfalloon tries to
reconstitute itself as a vast karass, by organizing itself to get a job done.
At all events, whether the the province of Ontario or the city of Ottawa
are more like karasses or granfalloons, this paper itself, OSCAR, under
Peter’s editorship has certainly done a job in make Old Ottawa South a
functioning community on the karass side. As he steps down, I’d like to
thank him for his good work, and for welcoming Carol and myself to the
neighborhood when we opened our store here, six years ago.

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