Early in the spring, during a period when the war news from Iraq was still in its round-the-clock phase on many broadcast outlets, I listened to a radio commentary about the prospective entry of coalition forces into Baghdad. Anticipating the replacement of one regime by another, the reporter observed that the "transition process" was about to begin.
"Transition process"? The terminology was surprisingly anodyne. I certainly remember the peaceful transition of power from the Clinton Administration to the Bush Administration, and the youthful hijinks of Clinton loyalists who removed the W keys from their computers as they left the White House. In Iraq, of course, the transition has involved using precision-guided weapons to remove key ministries from entire city blocks, plus weeks of ground fighting. The General Accounting Office criticized departing Clinton officials for "damage, theft, vandalism and pranks" inflicted on government infrastructure, and estimated the cost at more than $13,000; one wonders what the GAO might have to say about the transfer of power in Baghdad.
The idea that "transition process" might be a synonym for "forcible overthrow" in Iraq makes one wonder if it would also suit other pivotal moments. Historians have long put a negative spin on the barbarian visitation of A.D. 410, which they call the Sack of Rome. Edward Gibbon described the scene.
At the hour of midnight the Salerian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilised so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.
But maybe "Sack of Rome" is too melodramatic; maybe "transition process" is what we're looking for. The term could usefully substitute for numerous instances of pejorative shorthand—the Black Death, the Inquisition, the Terror, the Great Purge. Adolf Hitler's mad embrace of personal and national annihilation in the closing days of World War II has been likened to the Wagnerian spectacle of Götterdämmerung—the destruction of Valhalla and the death of the gods. Do we have it all wrong? Should the last opera of the Ring Cycle have been called Der Übergangsprozess? Was Victory in Europe Day really Transition in Europe Day?
Keep an eye out for "transition" and its relatives. As linguistic tics they constitute an invasive species, colonizing every available niche—a consequence, perhaps, of the spread of evolutionary thinking to every corner of the popular mind. If change is constant and mutation unavoidable, and if all social and physical processes are interrelated, then transition becomes the basic dynamic behind almost everything. Moments of radical discontinuity—pestilence, upheaval, death—were once taken for granted as an element of the human condition. The new perspective allows us to see all events, no matter how surprising or calamitous, as part of the seamless workings of an indifferent universe.
Tracking the usage frequency of "transition" and its cognates—creating a Transition Index, as it were—would yield an accurate picture of social and personal flux at any given moment. It used to be that people simply lost their jobs. Now they are said to be transitioning. I've seen the word "transitioning" applied to people undergoing sex-change procedures, people undergoing plastic surgery, women entering menopause, couples embarking on divorce, patients starting to take powerful drugs, addicts ceasing to take powerful drugs, prisoners getting out of jail, Catholic clerics trying to become Episcopal clerics, and entire church congregations attempting to alter their style of worship. Judging from a newspaper article about a minister who works in a hospice facility, people no longer shuffle off this mortal coil: "As chaplain, he daily grapples with the heavyweight issues of life, death and dying, helping others who are living on the edge—transitioning between this life and the next." A manual concerning mail-order brides from the Philippines and their adjustment to life in the United States is titled "Transitioning from Filipina to Filipino-American." The manual was written by an American husband for the benefit of other husbands, and contains advice like this:
Food. The idea that certain foods are for breakfast, some for lunch, and some for dinner might be alien to some Filipinas, and you might need to explain what foods are generally acceptable for different meals (i.e., no hot dogs for breakfast, no bagels for suppers, etc ... unless you're a college student).
Transitioning is made flesh in the form of "transitional figures," an increasingly prevalent archetype. Transitional figures come in two main varieties—the historical footnote and the historical facilitator. Newt Gingrich became a self-proclaimed example of the latter: he saw "transitional figure" as a harbinger of greatness and prematurely applied it to himself as speaker of the House. Historical footnotes are people like the Soviet leaders Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, both of whom were seen as transitional figures from the moment of their elevation; they were expected to do little more than mark time on a narrow isthmus between two vast national destinies. Pope John Paul I, the so-called "smiling Pope," was elected almost with the proviso that he be a transitional figure; he fulfilled his mandate, dying after only a month in office. Shortly after the 1996 presidential campaign Bill Clinton was reported to feel that his record thus far had made him merely a transitional figure, not the "transformational leader" (like Teddy Roosevelt) that he hoped to become. Neanderthal Man, were he alive today, would in all likelihood be called a transitional figure, rather than the more judgmental, and perhaps politically incorrect, "evolutionary dead end" that he actually represents.
The main characteristic of "transition process" is its neutrality: it doesn't presume to discern a moral vector but merely makes note of an altered state. That same neutral quality animates its close cousin, "moving on," which blends elements of "changing the subject," "hitting the road," and "turning over a new leaf" into one all-purpose locution.
Jane Fonda, announcing that her marriage to Ted Turner had entered a transition process, said in a prepared statement, "We shared ten years together, and I will always care for him. Now it's time to move on." As the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton edged toward finality, the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, declared, "For the good of the country, and in keeping with the Constitution, it is now time to end this trial. It is time to move on." Picking up the theme, People for the American Way sponsored a nationwide pro-Clinton advertising campaign built around the explicit message "Let's Move On." To be sure, the political left has no monopoly on this phrase. Senator Trent Lott got himself into trouble late last year for suggesting that America would have been a better place if the segregationist Strom Thurmond had been elected President in 1948. As the controversy persisted, a spokesman for Lott told reporters, "We believe it's time to move on and do the work of the American people." The conservative activist Grover Norquist has launched a campaign to replace the image of Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill with an image of Ronald Reagan. "Hamilton was a great American," Norquist explains, "but it's time to move on."
Of course, there is a very old sense in which all of Creation may be ready to move on, transitioning to the Rapture and from there to the Great Tribulation. These are stages of the period known as the End Times, associated with the Second Coming. The Internet these days is filled with religious speculation on the subject, much of it involving recent events in Iraq. The biblical book of Revelation's feverish End Times prophecy mentions the Euphrates River, a conflict involving Babylon (which lies south of modern Baghdad), and the coming of someone called The Destroyer (which the name Saddam can be interpreted to mean). A Dow Jones-style online metric called the Rapture Index now monitors the prevalence of forty-five end-of-the-world indicators (earthquakes, famine, wild weather, false Christs) as prophesied in the Bible.
This is not exactly the transition process that the radio reporter I heard had in mind, but it is worth noting that as I write, the Rapture Index stands at 173, up from 57 in 1993.