Listening to the debates that occupy our personal and political lives, one is struck by a common thread that runs among such seemingly unrelated issues as abortion, free speech and political correctness, Hollywood and artistic expression, quotas and affirmative action, and many others. That thread is the deliberate, nihilistic destruction of many of what used to be called “the ties that bind.”
Perversion of the language was the first step in this process. Just as Orwell’s Newspeak seemed far-fetched at the time, his grim vision of the oxymoronic (or, these days, simply moronic) abuse of words to mean their polar opposite now seems almost quaint. Demagogues such as Daschle and Gephardt routinely refer to “spending” the surplus on tax cuts, and talk about how much this will “cost” the government. This is in spite of the obvious reality that you can’t spend money that hasn’t yet been received, nor can a decrease in future tax revenues be considered an expense. (War is peace, and a reduction in intake is an outlay.)
But no one seems surprised at this bizarre terminology. After all, it has taken twenty years for a sizable segment of our poorly educated populace to grasp the simple fact that a 4% increase for a program that requested a 10% increase is NOT a 6% cut in funding.
Not content with destroying our common comprehension of a single, mother tongue, the “liberals” (who, as we all know, are anything BUT liberal) have also promoted the Babel of polylingualism. Try moving to Spain and see if they will give you citizenship or even a driver’s license examination in French, Arabic, or Vietnamese. Take a look at the cultural carnage in Quebec with just TWO languages to deal with, and with only small provincial politics in play, not national and international responsibilities.
But we are supposed to believe that only xenophobes would oppose multilingualism in our schools and, by extension, in our society. Another Orwellian convolution of language: common sense is xenophobia.
Even the use of the word “liberal” itself has been convoluted to mean its opposite. The tolerant and libertarian people are now firmly in the conservative camp, while liberals look to their elitist, statist, socialist, and totalitarian icons who repress dissent and promote a bogus, perverted orthodoxy. Gore, Kennedy, Geraldo, Dershowitz, and others of their ilk defend a growing anti-culture of obscenity and moral and ethical dissolution, but will tolerate no debate from anyone on “matters of importance” to them —- such as the fantasy that they, the anointed, must be empowered to shackle the planet and all of its inhabitants to save us from “global warming.”
There used to be an American consensus that maintained some civility and decorum. They were the unwritten rules of personal and political engagement. Only a pig would have dared to attack someone such as Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris on inconsequential grounds such as makeup and hair (especially when such attacks are totally unjustifiable and completely inaccurate —- by and large, Ms. Harris and other conservative women are far more intelligent, attractive, professional, articulate, feminine, refined, strong, and comfortable in their own skins than — for example — their liberal, Democratic counterparts in Congress and the recently-departed but-not-lamented Cabinet).
The important point here is that such a venomous cretin who stooped to such trashy commentary would have been regarded as a pariah by BOTH the Right and the Left. But nowadays the lines of decency have been blurred if not eradicated, ignored by the Left and demeaned by its spokesmen. Clinton’s people perfected the “nuts and sluts” defense, substituting offense in the form of character assassination, private investigation, and raw, unadulterated, unapologetic abuse of power (including IRS audits).
The consensus that we used to enjoy regarding taxation, representation, and governmental “largesse” has also been destroyed, quite deliberately and with malice aforethought, by the Left. As closet socialists, they have worked for decades to foment class warfare, and now they no longer even attempt to disguise that sordid tactic. Daschle’s idiotic “a Lexus for the rich and a muffler for the proletarians” formulation could only make an impression on envious fools (a/k/a the Democratic voting base).
The Right has also fallen into this trap, albeit blindly and in good faith. By endorsing a plan that removes many lower income people from the tax rolls, we contribute to the trend wherein a decreasing percentage of the population works and pays taxes, while a growing segment of the population is able to vote itself goodies from the Treasury at no cost to themselves. It would be far more equitable to have a flat tax or a consumption tax, so that every voter is both a player and a payer.
Paying taxes is part of the common cultural and political fabric of America. While no one enjoys this obligation, we all recognize a LIMITED common claim on our income in order to permit a representative government to perform its LIMITED constitutional tasks. Low-income citizens must be maintained on the tax rolls to keep them as participants in the political process, even if they are taxed as little as five percent.
But the class warfarists know that the pseudo-egalitarian appeal of “fairness” will trump reason and continue the splintering of America into smaller, hence more easily controlled and manipulated, subgroups. Just as they are not concerned about the impact of exposing children [liberals always piously proclaim their special interest in protecting “the children”] to cultural depravity, they deny what every generation of Americans had acknowledged until recently —- that erasing consensual standards, defining deviancy down, failing to stigmatize and/or punish socially-destructive behavior, and implicitly promoting the Orwellian construct that freedom and anarchy are synonymous will inevitably destroy our society.
America is famed for being a melting pot. It is NOT a multi-layered cake with separate colors and flavors. The Balkanization of America into racial, ethnic, political, gender-based, and linguistic factions all competing for group preferences is a poisonous stew. It has already rendered the country into segments that feel alienated from others. The loss of cultural consensus makes it easier to persuade individuals into believing that they are constantly being group-victimized by a conspiracy of their fellow citizens.