Homeland


September 27, 2002


BROOKE GLADSTONE: Late last week in the Capitol Hill publication called Roll Call the headline read: War of Words Snarls Senate. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security has been bogged down in a labor dispute, so the president charged the Democrat-controlled Senate with paying more attention to special interests than to protecting the nation. Senate Democrats then counter-charged that the Republicans were stalling Homeland Security legislation to keep it front and center until the November elections. Homeland, homeland, homeland -- it's invoked a hundred times a day inside the beltway, and yet despite very real fears of external and internal terrorist attack, it still has no currency on the American street. Security we get, but Homeland still won't catch on. So as part of our occasional Word Watch series we asked OTM's Leon Wynter to look into it.

LEON WYNTER: For a department that hasn't cleared the Senate yet, Homeland Security has been everywhere in Washington. On a single day this month, no less than four different seminars and conferences around town addressed the subject by name, including the Homeland Security Technology Expo and Conference where over 200 companies displayed their homeland security wares. Its high point -- an address by designated Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge. He's heard the negative buzz about the Homeland part of his proposed fiefdom, but he still likes the word -- a lot. Here's Ridge in a July NPR interview explaining what his new department will do for homeland security technology.

TOM RIDGE: Giving strategic focus to the science and the technology and the public dollars that are directed in that direction through this agency as it relates to Homeland Security. Right now dollars are expended in a, in an ad hoc fashion. There's no real strategic focus as it relates to Homeland Security -- again a very specific mission.

ELIZABETH BECKER: He's a very seasoned politician.

LEON WYNTER: The New York Times' Elizabeth Becker brought the word "homeland" up with Ridge in a recent interview.

ELIZABETH BECKER: He recognizes that homeland security is not an automatic concept - that Americans have not had to worry about whether their homeland is secured. So he has a number of these catchy phrases that he uses such as: "When the hometown is secure, the homeland is secure" to start educating people that listen, unfortunately we're going to be like all those other countries in the world who've been invaded and had wars fought on their soil.

LEON WYNTER: Becker says linguists confirm her gut feeling that after nearly a year "homeland" isn't tripping off the average American tongue. She traced the problem with American acceptance to "homeland's" better-known application in Germany -- specifically the Nazis' usage of the words "heimat" and "heimwher" for "homeland" and "homeland defense" respectively. Becker asked officials at the German embassy about it.

ELIZABETH BECKER: They said the Nazis totally misused it. It had more to do with the romantic ideas of the 19th Century, and it has more to do with what we would call our roots, our origins. To Americans, homeland just sounds like a foreign concept; not our own concept.

LEON WYNTER: The Bush administration didn't invent the new usage of homeland; the inherited it from a fairly obscure 1997 Pentagon review of defense readiness. Had they looked it up in the dictionary, they would have found two short, simple meanings. 1. The land of one's allegiance. 2. The place of origin of a people.

MICKEY KAUS: But I'm bothered by that second meaning. It implies a sort of ethnic homogeneity. The Armenians have a homeland; you know, the, the Turks have a homeland. Everybody has a homeland, and they are sort of ethnically or racially homogeneous, and that's not the idea of America.

LEON WYNTER: Writer Mickey Kaus has blasted "Homeland" in his Slate.com column. For Kaus, embracing homeland's Germanic land-and-blood definition feels unnaturally tribal.

MICKEY KAUS: We have to convince the world that we are not just another tribal imperial power. It sort of puts us in the wrong mindset right from the start of the war on terrorism to think all we're doing is we're just another tribe and we're mighty mad and we're going to drop a bomb on your tribe.

LEON WYNTER: It's not that Kaus is unmoved by all the American flagging and pledging etc, since September 11th, 2001. They're all good, provided they point to a higher expression of American ideals.

MICKEY KAUS: We're not just protecting our homeland; we're protecting the idea of freedom, and we're n--in a, in a worldwide war to promote this idea abroad against other ideas such as-- Osama bin Laden's ideas.

LEON WYNTER: Ken Bacon was a spokesman for the Clinton Pentagon that gave the phrase "homeland security" birth.

KEN BACON: It has sort of a, a gray bureaucratic tinge to it, I suppose. It's maybe not a term one can rally around with a great deal of passion. But it's descriptive.

LEON WYNTER: Yet, Bacon, too finds fault with the term. He now heads Refugees International which works on behalf of people displaced by conflicts worldwide. From this vantage, Bacon's problem isn't the sense of homeland security as a bright line around the interests of hearth and home; his problem is where that line is drawn.

KEN BACON: Homeland security begins abroad. That's the lesson from September 11th. And we have to think of security as, as seamless. It has to begin in distant lands and end in the United States.

LEON WYNTER: Critics from across the political spectrum are uncomfortable with the adoption of the term "homeland." Even loyal Republican Peggy Noonan has written that "homeland" isn't really an American word and gives people the creeps. It shouldn't be that serious.

MICKEY KAUS: It's just a word.

LEON WYNTER: On line columnist Mickey Kaus.

MICKEY KAUS: If the homeland security is very efficient and, and respects civil liberties yet stops terrorism, it will be a good word. But it just starts off as asking people to swallow something they don't have to swallow in order to come together across races and to love New York. Why ask people to go that extra step?

LEON WYNTER: It is, after all, just a word. Maybe we haven't decided to see ourselves as a land-and-blood tribe yet. Still, with the choice of "homeland," the name-givers in Washington seem to have made the decision for us to look inward rather than outside ourselves to find a safe place in the world. For On the Media, I'm Leon Wynter. [MUSIC]