For about a hundred years we’ve been living with or under a barrage of isms. The turn of the century leading into the Twentieth Century, from what I know about it, seems to have been a rather good time. Perhaps that’s because my interests lie largely in the fields of art and architecture. It was the time of Gaudì. of Klimt, Art Nouveau, and the emergence of FLLW. There hadn’t been any major war in Europe for some time. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the greatest American presidents, was promoting National Parks and leading the charge against monopolies.
Then things fell apart, and the isms started to multiply. Colonialism, socialism and nationalism were not new, but nationalism got out of hand in the second decade of the century, leading to the accidental start of WWI between neighboring countries, all armed to the teeth against possible aggression, and three decades of unprecedented worldwide death and destruction followed. An estimated 150 million people were killed. Communism got a jump start with the Russian Revolution of 1917, leaving misery in its wake for more than seven decades. In 1923 Mussolini gave fascism its name and brought it to power in Italy. He was followed by Hitler who invented Nazism a decade later and rode it to control Germany. Following the loss of WWII by the Fascist Axis, the rest of the Twentieth Century was devoted to a Cold War between communism and capitalism, sometimes conflated with democracy.
“Ism” is an innocuous and even useful suffix for turning a noun or an adjective into a movement. The art world is full of them: impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, futurism and more. Our focus here is on political terms. The old terms continue to be used, mostly out of context, sometimes in ways that have no rational connection with the original meaning.
“Fascism” as a term has hung around for a long time although the original fascist regime in Italy ended with its defeat in WWII, and the term has been prohibited in Italy ever since as a name for a political party or movement. These days, with a widespread fear of its return, there are more and more books and articles discussing or defining it. Fascism lingered on for a while in Spain with Franco and Salazar in Portugal but otherwise no regime has self-described as Fascist and the word has evolved into a term of derision for anyone who appears to be authoritarian, or sometimes, for anyone you just don’t agree with. Communism has had a similar fate and with the demise of the Soviet Union three decades ago, it ceases to really function as a regime system but the American right continues to rail at it. Some will argue that China, the world’s most populous nation is communist and indeed, its ruling entity is its Communist Party. In practice however, it has embraced much of conventional western entrepreneurial capitalism and begins to show the disparities of income and wealth that are undermining the west.
The legacies of the two opposing factions, the communists and the fascists, lie in the tendency of people who have lived under one of those systems to embrace the other. Thus, the people of much of Eastern Europe, from Poland to Hungary, who suffered for many years under communist regimes, seem relatively amenable to governments with authoritarian, i.e. fascist tendencies. In Italy, birthplace of fascism, the Communist Party became the country’s largest political party after the regime was ousted. It is still one of the largest despite changing its name to the Democratic Party (Partito Democratico). The term “Nazism” has been banished from all polite discourse everywhere, other than a few outposts in Ukraine and Hells Angels reunions in South Dakota. Germany has made a major effort to make amends for its history as the birthplace of Nazism and to assure that those roots never again sprout on its soil. It has also remained productively and reassuringly demilitarized for nearly eighty years, other than for its on-going military occupation by the US. That peaceful era appears to be coming to an end.
The terms “left” and “right” had understandable meaning for most of the world, based on seating divisions in the French Parliament long ago. Since the recent turn of the century, most such meaning has been turned on its head. In both the US and in Italy, parties that were understood as being of the left have splintered into factions which have little to do with what was understood to be leftist. The same is true of the parties of the right. This is not unprecedented, but it is certainly confusing. Not long ago, Italy’s Partito Democratico of Italy tried to pass a new Constitution drafted by JP Morgan with the paid consultation of Tony Blair, the former leader of the British Labour Party, best known for his collusion with George W. Bush in the invasion of Iraq. Its scope and intent were to remove more of public policy from the influence of the voting public, giving freer reign to the ruling class of experts. There are too many instances of such maneuvers to document here but it would not be too much of a stretch to say that the Partito Democratico is now among the most right-wing and pro-war of the major parties in Italy.
With a two-party system in the US it should be easier to understand what those parties support. As far as we can tell, they both appear to favor a dystopian regime as described in those famous books of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, with the Republicans preferring the more traditional violence of the Orwell model while the Democrats work toward the mind control and drug-induced euphoria of the Huxley model. What does “the right” mean these days? We knew that the GOP was the party of the bankers, the Buick dealers, country club members and Rotary Club presidents for longer than we can remember. It was conservative regarding social change and fiscal matters, typically opposing debt and favoring law and order over civil rights. With the arrival and takeover of the Republican Party by the big orange narcissist, everything changed. The old values of decency, morality, honesty, and respectability have been dumped in favor of using any means, legal, extra-legal or illegal to grab and hold power. The recipients of the new augmented bounty remain the same, the top 1% of the population, but the loyal troops are no longer the middle class, replaced now by an angry proletariat, ever more crass, crude and violent.
The party of the racial minorities, the workers, the immigrants, the poor and the weak, is no longer the Democratic Party, which has joined the money bandwagon and now draws its support largely from the educated, the independently wealthy and the upper levels of the service workers of the oligarchy. Money nowadays wins or buys elections and supporting the rich is an easier path to victory than helping people who actually need help. In essence, that puts both parties in much the same position, no matter how much their supporters seem to be at each other’s throats.
Recently I’ve been reminded of stories that I’ve heard of women who live together for a length of time seeing their menstrual cycles converge into perfect synchronization. That’s not my topic for today but I wonder if something similar can happen to countries. The US and the UK seem to be in total synch. The conservative parties of both countries seized control of their government with an orange-haired narcissistic son of privilege who repeatedly violated all recognized standards of acceptable behaviour. Both gained power through the subversion the campaigns of the leading candidate of the opposition party. Methods varied slightly. In the UK, Jeremy Corbin was accused of anti-Semitism for criticizing Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. He never even used the word genocide, as I might have, but he was suspended from his own party by right-wing infiltrators within the party administration. Bernie Sanders was also shunted aside twice by the leadership of the Democratic Party. The first time was an inside job, not unlike the Corbin affair. The second time, it took a greater effort, as the big guns of the major regime media were brought in, along with hundreds of millions of dollars of Michael Bloomberg’s fortune, to keep the oligarchy safe from a potentially democratic regime. Under the resulting leadership the UK shot itself in the foot by bailing out of the EU. The US did much the same, withdrawing from the world community by unilaterally abrogating various treaties and agreements, such as the denuclearization agreement with Iran and the accords on measures to combat climate change. Both of the orange/beige muppets have been removed after offending their countries’ sensibilities repeatedly, in the UK by the vote of his own disgusted party members and in the US by voters, who despite voting in what was essentially a Republican landslide, just couldn’t stomach more of the deranged antics of the boor. Neither man went quietly and both countries must face the threat of a possible comeback in the midst of growing militarism and a dearth of political leadership.
In my last blog post I erroneously claimed that the Italian government would stand until sometime next year. I apologize for my inadequate research. I was wrong because I was misinformed about how long the government had to stay in place before the pensions of the new members of Parliament would be funded. I said the government would remain because with new elections, the number of parliamentarians would be reduced by 40% and most would lose their jobs. The day on which the pensions of the new class of parliamentarians of the last elections (about 60% of the total) were assured was on 24 September 2022, not sometime next year as I had understood. The government did fall and new elections were scheduled for 25 September. The current parliamentarians remain until 24 September, the exact day on which their pensions will have been “earned”. Sometimes Italians can be more efficient than people give them credit for.
But back to the original argument. What do we call the mess we’re in? “Oligarchy” is technically correct but it hasn’t gained wide acceptance. We tend to think of oligarchs as rich young thugs, often Russian or Ukrainian, who get sweetheart deals in buying privatized assets, and then ostentatiously spend the loot on huge yachts or British soccer clubs. While often true, this is a bit of a misconception. You certainly know who Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are but how many of you know the names of the CEOs of Exxon or Rockwell? There are lots of others, some with a public face, more who are unknown to the public. Michael Hudson described it well. A study at Princeton a few years back determined that the expressed and recorded opinion of the American public had no influence whatsoever on the legislation passed by the Congress.
So while oligarchy would be objectively correct, the term fails to resonate with the American public, or with the populations of the growing numbers of American colonies and countries aspiring to colonial status around the world. My own preferred term in recent years has been “neo-feudalism”. I believe it is accurate enough but I have to face the reality that “neo”-anything has a built-in defect. People always say that the neo thing is different from the original and for whatever reason should not be confused with it. Neo-con, neo-lib, neo-fascist? What do they mean? Is there any meaningful difference? Sometimes yes: sometimes no, but mostly they sow confusion, often intentionally so.
Following the Watts riots in the late ‘60’s, gang warfare grew within the confines of South-Central Los Angeles. In typical American fashion, the smaller entities were swallowed up into two monopolistic super gangs, first the Crips, then the Bloods. They adopted the colors blue and red respectively, which to outsiders was the only distinction between them. Both had the same goal, which came down to killing members of the rival gang. They controlled zones within the large piece of the city in which they were confined and gang members who ventured into turf controlled by the other gang risked death. Over a similar span of time, six times as many of them were killed as all the people killed in “the troubles” that afflicted Northern Ireland. If you are curious about this phenomenon, watch this.
Color TV made its debut in the US in 1951 but it wasn’t until 1966 that all prime-time shows were transmitted in color. The networks started assigning colors to the political parties early on but they all had their own color charts, which sometimes varied from one election to another. In 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in what was referred to as the blue wave. It wasn’t until the election of 2000 when all the networks assigned red to the Republicans and blue to the Democrats. Such assignment was both anti-historical and counter-intuitive since red had been the color associated with the left since the French Revolution and was later the color of the communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union. Probably the networks, which in those days tended to be slightly more sympathetic to the Democrats, did not want to have anyone make such associations, since the Cold War was still raging on in America without regard to what had happened in the world.
Trying to write about US politics has become ever more confusing since if you are discussing Democrats you have to specify whether you refer to “corporate” democrats, “progressive” democrats or moderates, greens, etc. With the Republicans it is increasingly the same. All may be “corporate Republicans” but that was always understood. Now we have traditionalists, Trump loyalists, populists, anti-Trump conservatives, libertarians and RINOs.
 |
| Gang Turf |
.png) |
| Senate Turf |
Given that US election maps have come to be indistinguishable from the territorial gang maps of central LA, and the function and goals of the parties have taken on similar aspects, from here on I’ll simply refer to the two controlling parties as the BLOODS and the CRIPS. No offense intended to the original gangs. They have their own problems.
If elections have nothing to do with government policy, as we noted above, are there any differences between the CRIPS and the BLOODS, and do they matter? Possibly not in the short run, but if there is to be a continuation of human life on the planet beyond the life expectancy of the currently middle-aged, some of the differences might matter, first of all in determining speed of human extinction and secondly for the survival of the idea of democracy.
Not so long ago, monarchy prevailed in the world. Queen Elizabeth has occupied the British throne longer than all her predecessors but in all that time she hasn’t had a single subject beheaded. Right now, there are probably more than a few of her subjects who would welcome a return to a true monarchy if it brought the prospect of a few heads of errant politicians being mounted high of the walls of Westminster Abbey. That’s certainly true in the USA, among both BLOODS and CRIPS, and we’ve never even had a real Queen. Was that what January 6th was all about, Queen envy?
Democracy has been around in a few places even longer than Queen Elizabeth but its hold on most places seems as tenuous as the monarchy’s continued existence in the UK. Seen in a slightly different light, it continues its existence much as the monarchy continues in the UK. Good for parades and the rhetoric of national pride but not much of a problem for the true rulers of the world.
I haven’t needed to set foot in the Homeland for eight years but from my daily interactions with US media, family and friends, I surmise that the US is obsessed with the following themes: Authoritarianism and Libertarianism, Militarism, Diversity, Pride, Impunity, and Denial.
The BLOODS and the CRIPS have different and sometimes opposing takes on almost all of these with the obvious exception of militarism, on which there has been nearly total bipartisan accord for decades. Barbara Lee was the lone vote against the invasion of Iraq twenty years ago. Little has changed since. Ukraine was armed to the teeth by the US despite its coup-installed government not yet being inserted into NATO as fast as the PNAC blueprint had called for. Following the invasion, the vote to supply an unprecedented amount of additional weaponry to extend the proxy war with Russia was similarly uncontested. The surviving Bloods and Crips in LA must be basking in the glory of being world trend setters. Guns R Us!
Diverging attitudes about authoritarianism and libertarianism are more complex and contradictory, but then we all have contradictory elements in our personal makeup so why shouldn’t the rival gangs. For my part, I’ve always been opposed to speed limits, except as helpful advisories, but despite this libertarian obsession, I have also favored the prosecution and conviction of at least one ex-president of the US for war crimes, a stance far more authoritarian than most of my compatriots. Ron Paul is about the only US politician who calls himself a libertarian but most of the BLOODS consider it a birthright to be free to carry whatever weapons they choose wherever they want to go. Curiously, I have not yet heard of a civil suit being filed over the right to carry a hand grenade onto a train or plane. The CRIPS reject any of this laissez faire approach to angry citizens running loose while heavily armed but recently have been even more aggressive than the BLOODS in shipping arms to all the troubled parts of the world, the ultimate in NIMBYism.
The CRIPS’ own streak of libertarianism is best expressed in the slogan “my body my choice” while the BLOODS, whose implied slogan is “my gun my choice”, usually pronounced as “my gun, my right”, do not extend that libertarian approach to the contentious issue of abortion. I say contentious but there are many issues which the public has disagreed about, but until recently people agreed to disagree and the government just ignored the debate. That was before the gangland takeover of public life and everything became a binary choice.
Enough has been said about the American aversion to healthcare except as a reward for a successful and profitable life, so I won’t bother with those larger issues here. However, we have suffered through two or three years of Covid pandemic which has killed a lot of people and who would ever have imagined that facing such an emergency, our response would have been conditioned by the gang divide? My own response was that in an emergency you do whatever you can to get through it and I said that I don’t envy anyone with the administrative responsibility to deal with such a problem. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That was the inevitable course of public opinion. Doctors, nurses and others in the medical field worked in difficult conditions to get us through the crisis. However, Big Orange, the chief of the BLOODs, decided to make the emergency into a partisan gangland issue. The misinformation he disseminated has probably killed a lot of people. Still, mistakes, mostly made in good faith, have also killed a lot of people. Large percentages of people who were rushed into ventilators died as a result of such treatment, rather than in spite of it. Vaccines were developed quickly and saved many people from death or other serious effects but the vaccines were described as a panacea, a foolproof protection from the virus. As the response lapsed into political polarization, people who expressed doubts or even fears about the vaccines were told, usually by people who identified as CRIPS, that they should just follow the science and shut up. Unfortunately, many governments stopped following the science themselves when scientists noted that vaccinated people could be infected, could get sick and could spread the disease, and they reverted into authoritarian, punitive behavior towards those who questioned some of their decrees.
Being totally unqualified to do so, I wouldn’t presume to discuss the disagreements within the field of medical research, but the politicization of a medical crisis has left people of all political colors looking a little foolish. We see party-loving BLOODS congregating as never before when infection rates are high, just as we see obedient CRIPS wearing masks while walking alone in the countryside, both types engaging in a perverse sort of virtue signaling. I try to do what doctors tell me and except for the gland on my neck which swelled up to the size of a golf ball a few days after my third shot, I’ve suffered no new problems and feel happy and grateful to have survived the pandemic so far. I would only hope that the posturing around it would subside as quickly as the disease.
BLOODS and CRIPS both favor an authoritarian approach to education these days. It’s just that they prefer a different authority, reflecting contrasting views on diversity, the current obsession of the CRIPS. CRIP diversity is a bit like the diversity of a shopping mall food court. Different names, colors, spices and maybe ingredients but the packaging and overall effect is often much the same. BLOODS typically despise diversity and try to stamp it out. Diversity is a fact of nature and is the natural condition of life but with sustained effort it can be eliminated in some controlled situations. Thus, the United Fruit Company was able to suppress many of the types of bananas found in nature in order to simplify logistical problems in shipping a tropical fruit to the far corners of the world. In Germany about eighty years ago there was a similar effort toward standardization of people. We know how that worked out.
CRIPS want no part of that. They welcome all colors, sizes, shapes and origins of people as long as they can be molded to think alike, i.e. in line with the latest fashion in ideology, thus there is a push to start indoctrination of children at a very young age. Math and science can be sacrificed a little to make room for sex education for children who have no organic concept of what sex is, in order that they can be given, or can pick an elaborate sexual “identity”. There is significant resistance on the part of parents, many of whom would be inclined to be CRIPS but have limits as to what they will put up with to be in the gang.
At the higher levels of education, the colleges and graduate schools, there are similar divergencies of approach. For many decades the BLOODS have lamented the liberal ideas taught there. Their remedy was to cut funding to state universities which promoted independent research on subjects they didn’t want anyone to know more about and to get rich donors, from oligarchs to corporations, to fund departments that promoted a vocational approach to education and exalted the merits of late-stage capitalism and the Military Industrial Complex. Perhaps they worried too much. Some highly rated universities in deep blue states started providing “safe places” where students could congregate protected from exposure to ideas that made them uncomfortable. So much for the liberal arts curriculum. That was an easy win as academia turned its attention from history and philosophy to the study of minority cultures, the smaller the minority, the better.
While students are being shielded from ideas by both the BLOODS and the CRIPS, the latter have taken to using loyalty oaths to promote the Q agenda. Loyalty oaths were a tactic pioneered by the bloodiest BLOOD of all time, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. He damaged the careers of a lot of people but was eventually shamed and censured in the Senate, after which he slithered off to irrelevance and early death. The Senate doesn’t censure its own anymore, no matter how deserving. When and if the number of careers damaged by the new CRIP loyalty oaths reaches McCarthyite proportions is up to statisticians to measure, but they are proceeding uncensured.
This is not the first or only time that the BLOODS and CRIPS have reversed positions. The BLOODS or GOP as the Republican Party was also known, was started by anti-slavery abolitionists who agreed with the Whigs on all the other conservative pro-business issues of the day. The CRIPS remained the party of white southerners throughout FDR’s reign until the one-two punch of LBJ and Richard Nixon flipped the party alignments to the solid BLOOD South, which is still mostly in effect. LBJ knew that he had lost the South for the Democrats for a generation with his civil rights legislation but we’re now in the third generation post-LBJ and the South still appears to be almost solid red, thanks to BLOOD control of the voting apparatus. Georgia was a breakthrough state in 2020 and the presence of some determined independent minded CRIPS, combined with the BLOODS running a candidate for the Senate with a relationship to the truth reminiscent of that of his sponsor, Big Orange, suggests that the BLOODS monopoly control of the former Confederacy may be fragmenting a little.
The BLOODS have scored some huge victories lately. Their long battle to take over the Supreme Court finally achieved success and the fruits of their victory are now being tasted. The first feast was the overturning of Roe vs Wade, a decision which may prove a pyrrhic victory in that it may save the CRIPS from resounding defeat in the 2022 mid-term elections. It was the only one of the BLOOD Court’s three revolutionary rulings that had any conceivable justification. Abortion was and is a highly devisive issue and it had been decided by a judicial ruling, not by law, nor by any very convincing parts of the US Constitution. The earlier court ruling may have been pragmatically effective but it was judicial overreach in the face of a long-dormant Congress, enabling the views of one vocal segment of the public over the views of the another segment. The BLOOD COURT flipped it in the cherished American tradition of activities being labeled crimes, then rights, then crimes again, etc. etc. etc.
The other two radical decisions, which have received far less scrutiny, can be regarded as the acts of certifiably insane people. The striking down of laws controlling the use or carrying of weapons in New York City is the wobbly fun house mirror image of the campaign in some CRIP circles to defund or disband the police. That was a hard one to top but they did so in another landmark ruling saying that the Environmental Protection Agency, set up to protect the environment, could not take measures to combat global warming, which scientists have been warning us about for years. Scientists are now saying it’s almost too late to do anything about it. Some of us, especially those who don’t die soon, are destined to witness the earth growing uninhabitable. Jim Jones perished with his flock at Jonestown in 1978 but it makes you wonder if he’s been resurrected, cloned and appointed to the Supreme Court. Is a death wish the new litmus test for SC membership?
The two failed impeachments of Big Orange could be seen as a BLOOD victory, but they really constitute more of a CRIP defeat than a BLOOD win and a potential death blow to the concept of democracy is the US. The CRIPS lick their wounds and cannot imagine how a man could get away with fraud, sedition, corruption and affronts to all known standards of decency, while not facing the fact that we live in an age of impunity, and they were complicit in establishing it. Big Orange ran on an impunity ticket, inspiring millions of followers to partake of it.
The road to impunity was long and too complicated to trace here. Maybe it got started with Dr. Spock. It’s probably good that children are no longer whipped when they spill spaghetti sauce on the tablecloth, or if they are, the unacceptable act is attributed by society to be that of the whipper, not the whippee. That’s been the inexorable path of history for some time. Bad boys in school used to be sent to detention hall where they had to stay in school late. Some of us learned to modify our behavior. Now they are diagnosed as having ADS and medicated. Drug addicts were arrested and put in jail but lately are given substitute drugs and released. Many forms of anti-social behavior are now regarded as an illness and chemically treated.
There have been a few notable exceptions. In the years of the Giuliani mayoralty and the Clinton presidency, young black men were exempted from impunity and vast numbers of them ended up in prison on minor drug charges. For young people from the upper echelons of society, impunity went on as never before. When Enron imploded, taking with it the savings of hundreds of thousands of people, more perpetrators died by their own hand than by any punishments meted out.
The other major exception to impunity is for whistle blowers. There is no impunity for whistle blowers! Some people can get away with reporting on thievery by another employee if it’s another low-level employee and the violation is something the company wants to know about, but God help the straight arrow who reports criminal acts by the organization itself. If that agency is the US Government, no mercy will be coming from either the BLOODS or the CRIPS.
Just as the newly exalted status of impunity derailed two impeachment proceedings, it has also made a farce out of recent US foreign policy. After years of slow but steady US aggression into countries of the former Soviet Union, when Russia finally responded militarily, the current CRIP president responded by calling the Russian president a war criminal. There is nothing funny about the present tragedy but hearing such a statement from a man who was a cheerleader for the truly unprovoked invasion of Iraq made it hard to know whether to laugh or scream. No American leader or leader of any participating NATO country has yet been prosecuted for the crimes committed there or in the invasions of Afghanistan, Libya or Syria. Perhaps in another hundred and fifty years, assuming that humans still live on the planet, statues of these criminals will be torn down and destroyed by descendants of their victims but for now, impunity reigns unchallenged.
We started by asking what term describes the mess we’re in at this moment in history. Language is important and it has become a major weapon in the culture wars as well as in the military conflicts. A man named George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and philosophy, wrote a number of books and articles of the uses of language. He said that “the act of stating that a lie is false reinforces the lie because it repeats the way the lie is framed”. He urged the liberal side to catch up with the conservative side in framing issues on their own terms. He was correct in that the BLOODS had a long lead in the field, such as in gaining acceptance of using terms such as “conservatives” to describe wild-eyed neo-fascists and “moderates” to describe right-wing corporate-funded CRIPS. I haven’t seen new articles by Lakoff for some time. Perhaps he felt he had had too much success.
They haven’t been in the news recently but there have been some poor Somalian immigrants in the US involved with genital mutilation, as was traditionally practiced back home. They have been denounced for it but had they been able to afford a linguistic consultant or PR person, they might have seen a more sympathetic reception. “Virtue affirming health care” has a nice ring to it, almost as innocuous as “gender affirming health care” for the sterilization and genital mutilation of confused children, today’s new fashion trend. We all like soft fuzzy terms so if you are either for or against abortion, “pro-choice” and “pro-life” each give a positive lilt to a thorny issue.
On the war front, the distortions of language have become even more weird than in the culture wars. The media of the far right are mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch and a few other oligarch ideologues. Over more than two decades FoxNews has become the house organ of the BLOODS. The only mystery is which entity is in charge of the other. Since Big Orange decreed that the Only Truth is what comes out of his mouth, there really hasn’t been any reason to pay attention to the entire Fox media enterprise except to measure how bad things really are.
The status of the so-called liberal media is more confusing. The largest elements are the NYT, the WaPO and the four traditional TV networks but their ownership is a mixture of traditionally wealthy liberals and oligarchs occasionally posing as CRIPS. The New York Times is often called “the paper of record”. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that during a proxy war between the US and Russia, it should be the mouthpiece of the US Government. That’s what happens in wartime. Still, the linguistic gyrations that it employs make it seem more like the Pravda of the 1970’s than the BBC of the days before Tony Blair. It is hard to tell if the Times reporting on the war is influenced more by the suggestions of George Lakoff or of Josef Goebbels, or perhaps it’s simply all handouts from the Departments of State or Defense. All text apparently passes through a word editing program which transforms “the Russian invasion of Ukraine” into the “unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine”. The same program also sprinkles adjectives such as ruthless, authoritarian, or brutal into every sentence that also includes the name Putin. “Independent liberal democracy” is another State Dept./NYT favorite, as applied to all right-wing authoritarian regimes established by the CIA from central America to eastern Europe. We can’t tell if all the opinion writers have their articles run through the same word editor or if they have all been collectively hypnotized and subliminally instructed to do the same thing.
While the NYT describes the war as between authoritarianism and “liberal democracy”, its own language has not been unscathed by the radical authoritarianism of the ultra-libertarians who will accept no dictates of grammar but their own. There are growing numbers of articles mutilated by newly mandated linguistic perversions. However, the Times did recently publish a rather cool and analytical article by Amy Harmon on some of the more controversial linguistic battles, which is worth reading, regardless of how you regard some of the proposals.
Paranoia is all around us in varying degrees and if you don’t have any, you live in a bubble or are just not paying attention. Those most seriously afflicted often refer to “they” as in “they know” but the implication is that there is an evil cabal of monsters which must remained unnamed. Is the Times unwittingly slipping into that sort of nonsense by way of politically correct pronouns? We hope not. There is enough nonsense out there already, without submitting to the latest fads in authoritarian libertarianism. Victoria Nuland is not a they and the CIA is not just any they either, it’s the CIA.
My wife experienced fibrillation recently, a medical condition where the heart muscles start beating out of rhythm, both very fast and very slowly. I have come to believe that our brains, individually and collectively, can have a similar condition, undocumented as yet, where we go out of control, oscillating erratically between our authoritarian impulses and our libertarian excesses. It manifests itself in a “rules-based society” where the rules are made by the country with the biggest guns, by a “free market” imposed by the entities which control the market, by a tolerant liberal society where adhesion to establishment commandments is rigorously enforced, and where “democracy” is imposed militarily on people deemed incapable of self-government. The BLOODS do it. The CRIPS do it. I’ll call it fibrillationism. We may be headed for feudalism again, or extinction, but this is how we’re fueling the voyage.
If you have a better term for today’s condition, please share it. To cure a disease, it’s helpful to define it.
***
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment