Chapter 1: Two Levels

The Pentagon wrote two sentences on one page. Read both, then check the week.

A chapter draft of the book in progress.

On January 31, 2025, the Department of Defense posted guidance under the headline “Identity Months Dead at DoD.” Two sentences on that page carry this chapter.

The first: “DoD Components and Military Departments will not use official resources, to include man-hours, to host celebrations or events related to cultural awareness months.” The guidance then lists the months. Women’s History Month is on the list.

The second sits lower on the same page: “Installations, units, and offices are encouraged to celebrate the valor and success of military heroes of all races, genders, and backgrounds as we restore our warrior culture and ethos.”

One sentence closes a door. The other holds a door open. Both carry the same date and the same authority. Keep them side by side. Everything that follows turns on which one an institution chooses to read.

Do not take my word for either sentence. Open the guidance, find both, and look at how far apart they sit on the page.

Four days in June

For 27 years, the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus in Congress laid a wreath at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. The ceremony comes ahead of Women Veterans Recognition Day, which marks the day in 1948 Harry Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act. The caucus invites every branch. The branches send representatives. The wreath goes down.

The 28th ceremony was moved from May 20 to June 10, 2026. It did not happen.

Task & Purpose reported the cancellation that day. A spokesperson for the caucus’s Democratic side said the Navy and the Air Force, answering for the Space Force, declined to take part, citing White House and Pentagon policy. The Democratic Women’s Caucus named the policy: Executive Order 14185 and the guidance titled “Identity Months Dead at DOD.” Military Times reported a narrower picture the next day. The Air Force cited the policy. The Navy reportedly did not know about the event. The Army pointed to its own birthday events. A defense official told Task & Purpose the Marines had planned to attend. So had Representative Monica De La Cruz, the Texas Republican who co-chairs the caucus.

The accounts differ on the reasons. They agree on the outcome. No wreath.

Four days later, on June 14, the same department sent the Marine Band to the South Lawn of the White House for UFC Freedom 250, a fight card on the president’s 80th birthday. The Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds flew over. About 1,200 seats were set aside for active-duty troops. Medal of Honor recipients walked out beside the fighters.

The department had no trouble celebrating valor on June 14. On June 10, the same January guidance encouraged it to celebrate the valor of heroes “of all races, genders, and backgrounds.” A wreath for women who served fits those words exactly. The branches that stayed away read the prohibition broadly and the encouragement narrowly.

One document. Two readings. Four days apart.

Check the week yourself. Read Task & Purpose on June 10, Military Times on June 11, and the AP on June 14. Write the three dates on one line.

What Hayakawa said in 1953

On Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1953, S. I. Hayakawa spoke at the annual dinner of the Urban League of St. Louis. He was a semanticist, a former columnist for the Chicago Defender, and a Japanese American who had not been sent to a relocation camp and who “felt intensely and personally the meaning of that relocation” all the same. The speech ran that spring in ETC.: A Review of General Semantics.

He asked his audience to read race relations on two levels. “At the level of words, I repeat, things sound pretty much the same as they did twenty years ago,” he said. “But at the level of facts, things are different” (p. 169). The speeches had not changed. The lunchrooms had. Black and white Americans who once ate apart were now eating together in “factory lunchrooms, school cafeterias, hamburger stands, dining cars.” None of it made the news, because of “a fundamental journalistic fact: if 9,999 automobiles make a safe journey home after a Fourth of July week-end, it is only the 10,000th car which smashed up that gets into the news” (p. 170).

Ask for the page. The speech is in ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, volume 10, number 3, spring 1953. A good library can pull it. Read page 169 and see whether I quoted it fairly.

In 1953, he judged, the facts were running ahead of the words.

He knew the gap could run the other way. Three pages earlier he told the room that “the stirring words about Democracy uttered in answer to Communism now and to Fascism during the last war would sound a lot better if they were given a little more extensional meaning” (p. 166). Extensional was his word for the level of facts. He saw words outrunning facts. He bet that the facts would catch up.

The inversion

Seventy-three years later, the words are the strong level. The January guidance ends its list of prohibitions by encouraging the celebration of heroes “of all races, genders, and backgrounds.” Executive Order 14185 opens with its own version: “No individual or group within our Armed Forces should be preferred or disadvantaged on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, color, or creed.”

The facts are the weak level. A wreath for women veterans that went down 27 years in a row did not go down in the 28th.

Hayakawa’s two levels still hold. The lag has reversed. The words now run ahead, the facts fall behind, and an institution can hold up its words as proof of its facts.

I call the habit that catches this the two-level reading. Read what an institution says. Then read what the same institution did, on the same dates. Where the two part, the gap is the story.

Scholars found this gap inside organizations long before this chapter. John Meyer and Brian Rowan called it decoupling in 1977: formal structure adopted for legitimacy and kept apart from the daily work. Lauren Edelman showed how equal-opportunity policies turn into symbols that courts accept as proof of fairness. Sara Ahmed wrote that institutional statements of commitment can “work” by “not bringing about the effects that they name.” Their work shows the gap is ordinary. That is the reason to read for it every time.

The Pentagon wrote both sentences, and a reader who keeps only one will miss what happened in June. Every Monday I take one word an institution bent and show the page it bent on. Subscribe and the next one is in your inbox, free.

The airfield

I learned the two-level reading from an airfield, years before I had a name for it.

In January 2003 my squadron staged at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, in a billeting area the Marines called the Snake Pit. I had gone in with the advance party that built it, framing the wooden strongbacks our Marines slept in. I was a staff sergeant with Marine Wing Support Squadron 371, out of Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, in the section we called rapid runway repair. Our job was to take an airfield and make it land aircraft.

In the Snake Pit, our platoon commander brought over the imagery of our objective: Qalat Sikar, an Iraqi Air Force base in Maysan province. My assistant platoon sergeant and I bent over it together. The picture told a clear story. Vehicles sat across the field where aircraft needed to move, placed too deliberately to be random. Ditches cut the ground. Some marks looked like mines. Someone had set that field up to stop us.

We planned for the picture. We planned the clearance as if the field were mined and every vehicle could be wired.

The war started on March 19. We left Kuwait by convoy on March 21. On our fourth day on the road, the convoy was ambushed. We woke up the next morning and drove onto the field.

Then we stood on the ground. The vehicles were where the imagery showed them. Up close they were car and truck cabs. We found no mines. Nothing was wired. We brought up the D7 dozers and the TRAMs, cleared the field, and patched the holes. We stood security on the perimeter and trained our Marines between shifts.

The imagery was accurate about what was there. It could not tell us what any of it was for. A photograph from altitude is a statement about a place. The ground is the fact. We prepared on the first and trusted only the second. A Marine who treats the imagery as the ground gets someone hurt. A Marine who ignores the imagery gets someone hurt sooner. The work is reading both, and knowing which one you are holding.

The paper still disagrees with the ground. My own discharge record files my part of that war under “Kuwait.”

The habit

Hayakawa gave his audience a habit he called dating. “Mr. Jones (1940) is not Mr. Jones (1942) is not Mr. Jones (1944),” he wrote. “Supreme Court (1950) is not Supreme Court (1952) is not Supreme Court (1954)” (p. 174). A year after that sentence ran, the Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. Same name. Different Court.

Date an institution the same way. The Pentagon of January 31, 2025, wrote both sentences. The Pentagon of June 10, 2026, read one of them. The Pentagon of June 14, 2026, read the other.

Try it before you close this page. One statement, one action, two dates.

The pin: the two-level reading. Set an institution’s statement beside what the same institution did within seven days of it. Put a date on each.

What it includes. The statement, quoted from the primary document. The dated actions of the same body in the same window. A document for each action.

What it cannot be read to say. That the words are lies. That anyone intended the gap. That one week proves a policy. That the words do not matter. The words set the standard the facts get measured against, which is the reason to write them down.

A question for you. Pick one statement an institution you belong to issued this month: your school district, your employer, your union local, your congregation. What did it do the same week? Write both dates down.

Read your ballot the same way. A candidate’s words sit on one level and the votes sit on the other. Check both before you mark it. Every race, every measure: vote411.org.

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This essay is chapter 1 of Ask for the Page, the book What Time Binds is writing in public, one chapter a Monday through December 7. It grows from the June 29 essay, “At the Level of Words, At the Level of Facts,” which now carries a correction. The comments are the appendix: tell me where the record is wrong and I will show the page or fix the line. Paid subscriptions open at 500 readers, and the paid product is Coded Threads, the codebooks built from these comment sections. A pledge now is a vote for that.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years, a combat engineer by trade, an instructor at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and the writer of What Time Binds, a record of how institutions bend words and how the page holds them to account.

Sources. U.S. Department of Defense, “Identity Months Dead at DoD,” news release 4050331, Jan. 31, 2025. Exec. Order No. 14185, 90 Fed. Reg. 8763 (2025). Patty Nieberg, Task & Purpose, June 10, 2026. Democratic Women’s Caucus press release, June 10, 2026. Hope Hodge Seck, Military Times, June 11, 2026. Tanya Noury, Military Times, May 29, 2026. Dan Gelston, Associated Press, June 14, 2026. S. I. Hayakawa, “The Semantics of Being Negro,” ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 10, no. 3 (Spring 1953): 163–175. John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977). Lauren B. Edelman, Working Law (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Sara Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism,” Meridians 7, no. 1 (2006).