WORDS THAT HURT: Downs's new album documents the war on the Mexican-American border. BY JOSH KUN Susan Sontag began her recent acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer who examines the relationship between freedom and individuality, by talking about words. She spoke of how words are never just words, especially words that are big and over-arching and general. These words, she said, can come to “resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand or cave in.” Because they mean so much, they can end up meaning so little. She gave as an example “peace,” a word that can mean either victory or defeat depending on who employs it and who it is employed against. It is of course no coincidence that she offered her comments in the Middle East, at yet another moment of crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Such moments force us to re-evaluate how the world becomes narrative, how society is transformed by the language that pretends to represent it...
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