A wedding is a rite that goes back to antiquity in some form in many cultures. It often features elaborate rituals, special clothes for the couple being united, and some sort of public proclamation of the union. The couple involved is most often, and traditionally, and man and a woman. But that’s not always the case. In fact there was a wedding on February 10, 1920, that violated that particular tradition pretty thoroughly.
It happened in the Bay of Puck in northwestern Poland. The sea was frozen near the shore, and a hole was cut in the ice. General Jozef Haller, the commander of part of the Polish Army, presided, and tossed a ring into the hole in the ice. There was a ceremonial 21-gun salute, and a Roman Catholic mass presented by the Reverend Jozef Wrycza. When the flag of the Polish Navy was blessed and raised on a mast, the wedding was complete. The nation of Poland had been married to the ocean.
This ceremony was unique in a couple of ways. It wasn’t a wedding between a husband and wife, for one thing. I guess that’s pretty obvious. But for another, it apparently didn’t take. The very next day, some fishermen from the area invited General Haller to do another ceremony; this time on one of their boats further out at sea. He accepted, boarded the cutter Gwiaza Morza, and presided over the second ceremony. The locals were very appreciative, and gave him an excellent price on a plot of land near the ocean, which he purchased.
The whole operation was repeated, not once but several times, twenty-five years later. It was 1945, and by then World War II was being fought. The First Polish Army reached the part of the coast still, at the time, called the Wedding Sea, and they reenacted the ceremony any number of times, from March 15 to April 6. As far as we know, as many as ten weddings were held marrying Poland to the ocean. In fact, the one that took place on March 17 is still reenacted annually, with more rings tossed into the water.
But no matter how many times they hold the ceremony, there’s still something just a bit off about a wedding that involves, not two people, but a political entity and a geographical feature. It’s like holding a contest between a person and a set of written instructions; on its face it makes no sense. Except that second one is true, too. It was February 10, 1996 that the IBM computer Deep Blue won (or “won”) a chess match, three wins and one draw, against world champion human, Gary Kasparov. It’s usually described as a “computer” winning the match, but really it was a computer program. And how much sense does it really make to talk about it “winning?”
To win a game, no matter what the game itself might be, means someone is trying to outthink or outmaneuver or outplay someone else. None of these took place here. Instead, it was a team of people, including several chess grandmasters, working on a set of canned responses. And since the thing was owned by a corporation, IBM, they cheated. They didn’t have any choice; that’s what corporations do; cheat in every possible circumstance. You might say that’s why corporations were created in the first place; to cheat their way out of any responsibility that might be attributed to their founders or owners. In this particular case, what IBM did was deny their opponent, Kasparov, the chance to review previous games “played” by their program. This is unprecedented; at the top levels of chess, previous games are always studied in great detail. IBM, though, was not in this game for anything to do with chess; they were in it to boost their stock price. So they did what they were accustomed to doing: cheat, and deny their opponent the customary chance to review previous games for clues about style and strategy.
In a way, that’s what was going on in the various weddings supposedly establishing a “union” between Poland and the ocean. The political entity, the country, was governed by people who thought it would be advantageous to control a seaport. The advantage would be economic, and it might even be strategic. But what it wouldn’t ever be is any sort of union of equals, nor would it be anything honored by a society. It was just a cheat. A warping of the idea of something, in this case a time-honored ritual; in the other case a contest, with strict rules, between two people.
The flexibility of thinking, and of language, sometimes leads us into these weird little cul-de-sacs where we can convince ourselves and sometimes others that the outward appearances of a thing mean that its inner nature also prevails. We’ll call this a wedding, and it will take on that kind of significance. We’ll call this a chess game, and that’s what it will appear to be. But language is a tricky thing. It’s almost infinitely malleable, and minds are so plastic and pliable that when you see a “battle,” and then somebody calls it a “discussion,” you’re remarkably capable of thinking “well yes, I can see how there are some aspects of ‘discussion’ that also apply here.” It’s a badge of mental accomplishment that you’re pretty easily able to construct connections like that.
And yet…sometimes language can be stretched too far. A “wedding” that involves a political organization and a geographical object is, maybe, just nonsensical. A “game” where one participant is a human and the other is a list of instructions is, maybe, just absurd. A “discussion” where some people get killed, others get hurt, and violence is abundant is, maybe, a twisting of language that starts to get dangerous all by itself.
But some people seem to have a pretty clear view of the world, and of language. Dwight Eisenhower seems like he might have been somebody like that. He warned us, you know. About what corporations would do if we let them get too involved in building and selling armaments. He called that the “military industrial complex.” And on February 10, 1954, he delivered a warning to the US in no uncertain terms. “Don’t get involved in the conflict in Vietnam,” he said. The US did anyway, and look how that turned out. Listen to the Eisenhowers, when they come along.
