Just another word war

Iranian president Ahmadinejad recently launched his own personal blog. Considering that Iran has one of the fastest growing and most directly oppositional blogging communities in the world, I guess it was about time. It’s probably a wiser move than trying to close down the more than 700.000 Iranian blogs out there.

When last I checked Ahmadinejad’s blog only had one post. Very long and very autobiographical. Almost a genealogical novel. My eyes quickly drifted away from the small font, and found an even smaller opinion poll in the upper left hand corner of the page:

”Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war?”

I’m not really into laughing at other people’s mistakes, but something about the tragicomical qualities of this little typo made for an exception. I was still chuckling when I went to bed that night. Meaning is so easily distorted, and at the end of the day a single letter is all it takes to save the world from destruction.

And then again, meaning is such a powerful force with us that it arises even when it’s lost. For what is politics – and especially international politics – but a war of words? The West claims that Iran is enriching uranium to produce weapons of mass destruction, whereas Iran claims that it’s doing so to produce electricity. Who to believe? Who to side with?

When it comes to megalomaniacs like Ahmadinejad and Bush there’s always the risk that word turns to world, and everybody else gets to suffer the consequences. Gunboat diplomacy, I think it’s called. It leaves just about as much room for negotiations as a collapsing building. Or the Cuban Missile Crisis, for that matter.

Back then Khrushchev beat his shoe against the table, and turned away his ships in the eleventh hour. Later exposures have shown that the world came even closer to an all-out nuclear war than previously known. So, yeah, we’ve been a lot further down the road to extinction than we are at present.

Still, I can already feel the laughter tickling the corners of my mouth. Makes me think of a joke I once heard sci-fi writer Kurt Vonnegut crack in an interview. An interstellar space traveller is called up in his ship, and told that there’s bad news for him.

“Did somebody die?” he asks. “My dog? My wife? My daughter?”

“No,” the voice at the other end of the line tells him. “Your whole universe just did.”

Perhaps the world would be a safer place if more people cracked jokes like that. Words heal, worlds don’t.