Language and Politics

Well, I'm back. Hard going this year, and unfortunately I haven't been as diligent as I'd like to be about keeping fresh content going here at ThinkingPolitics.

Let's start with something I touched on before: how the use of words, in this case a few specific words, is eroding their value. Certain words have a very real, very potent meaning associated with them, often far beyond the simplest definition of the word itself. For instance, when we use the word "holocaust", it conjures not simply the textbook definition but an array of historical and flavorful meaning. We associate "evil" and "death" and the historical linkage of the word to the Holocaust event, the attempt by the Nazis in WWII to eradicate the Jewish people (and, it should be noted, others as well). The word has a force to it, an emotion, that is beyond its simplest definition.

At least, it does, until we start calling things that don't reach that emotional level, that force, a "holocaust". If the press every day calls each individual bomb exploding a "holocaust", soon the value, the punch, of the word begins to lessen, because we're associating it to lesser events. If we reserve the use of the word to events that match the force and personality of the word, then it retains that original value and original punch.

Which brings me to the two most overused words in society today: Nazi, and the word "right", as in, our "Rights" as citizens. I've addressed the word Nazi before, so today's focus will be on the word "Right."

The Founders put together our Bill of Rights, to be the Rights of each citizen, those things that were truly significant, those things that we would all share that were fundamental in nature. They didn't sit around and add a citizen's "right to a doctor's responsiveness in 24 hours or less" (mocking our present-day, much-repeated "Patient's Bill of Rights") and things that, quite frankly, are not Rights, as the word has been used in the past 40,000 years of human history, but are PRIVILEGES. The word "Right" needs to be left to the force, the punch, of the association to the Bill of Rights -- "rights" like our "right to assembly", our "freedom of religion", and such. These are abstract principles that define how we relate to one another and how the governments relates to us (and with us, and how we relate it it). Something like "we have a Right to health care" isn't quite of the same level as a Right to Free Speech -- and it shouldn't be.

How many things have our politicians called "Rights"? Think about it. "A Patient's Bill of Rights", which is merely layering regulations on the medical industry? Regulations? Equal in significance to the Bill of Rights and those guarantees? Not quite. Not even close. Or, a "Worker's Bill of Rights", in which we add regulations and requirements of businesses to "make worker's lives at work better" -- those aren't "Rights", they're simply regulations, tweaking of business minutae. They're Privileges, the things that we would like to have. They aren't Rights.

The sooner we begin using the language properly, clearly, and begin once again reserving certain words to their proper use, the better. Because as we de-value words (like calling someone who wants to reign in the growth of spending in a government program a "Nazi, just as bad as the Stormtroopers under Hitler" (actual quote from a U.S. Congressman, by the way, about another Congressman) -- there is NO valid comparison of the acts of a Stormtrooper under Hitler or of being a Nazi to anything any Congressman has proposed recently. It merely devalues the word.

On a side note, it's also disgusting. Because it counts on the American public being too lazy, too ignorant, and too willing to believe what they're told without thinking through what they're told or verifying the facts behind what they're told. It counts on Americans being stupid. And it means that our politicians are counting on us to be ignorant -- and are exploiting that ignorance. That should make people mad ... and it's sadder that they aren't. Because far too many wallow in their ignorance, holding up things that aren't factual and that haven't been proven as facts and demanding severe penalties based on... empty rhetoric, oft violent rhetoric. We misuse words, but we forget almost entirely about making sure our rhetoric, our ideology, is actually rooted in facts.