Norm,
When the President said that the Iraqi people were
“fighting so vociferously” for their hateful ideology,
with such resistance that could not have been foreseen,
I grew suspicious, and leapt to the dictionary, which
informed me that the root of that five syllable adverb
signifies “making or given to loud outcry,” and,
while I do not deny that there has been loud outcry
among the liberated Iraqis and among those occupied,
and everywhere else in the world, as there were before
the invasion unprecedented numbers of vocal opponents
confined in free-speech zones with their noisy puppets,
I find his use of that word, while laudable for its many
impressive syllables, seems to understate the behavior
of that resistance; car bombs, rocket attacks, kidnapping
and production of execution videos go far beyond mere
speech, beyond even extreme outcry, or expressive
activity, misrepresenting both the threats faced by the
occupiers, and the essential character of the widespread
guerilla warfare being waged in the cradle of civilization.
Terrorism is speech, conduct, crime, war and pure evil?
I chewed on that dissonant suspicion for a while, as I
appreciated the President’s correct employment of the
word “denigrate.” Only three syllables, but worth a whole
nickel! Reeling from that, I almost missed his suggestion
that post-war conditions are so war-like “because we
achieved such a rapid victory.” It is hard necessary work,
fighting them in their own neighborhoods, unfairly now
after the quick and easy victory: You’ve got Democracy!
“Every day” the “optimistic” President reads the necrology.
Then it struck me, that we, seditious dissenting people,
secular hypersexual metro-intellectuals in any anti-Bush
camp promising to decant hope, we are so ready to
believe that he is stupid, that he is lexically incompetent
(if not also in all the other modes of intelligence), that
we will be content to believe that he simply used the word
wrong because he’s stupid. But because Karl Rove knows
we are subject to this simple resolution of that thought, and
because I am suspicious, I had to probe further, and suggest
this deeper, darker, subtextual implication of the errant word:
On the one hand, as above, to describe these acts of
violence and calculated murder as vociferous is far from
accurate at the least; on the other hand, to equate the
patent and palpable evil of those slow knife murders
and car bombs with the type of speech that is loudly
voiced against, is a small step in radicalizing the
popular perception — and chilling the speech — of dissent.
Because I believe in magic, and particularly in the power
of invocation, sympathetic influence and the consensual
manifestation of the unreality of the televised mass mind,
Norm, I suspect, whether Rove had him misuse that word
deliberately thus or not, it will have the described effect.
Semper Fi.
Mani C. Parser