Word Play

We look at words commonly used in our discourse today such as forgiven, free and insecurity and how they are used to warp our discussions.  

Transcript

Word Play 

July 2023

“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Words! Words! Words!

 I’m so sick of words!

 I get words all day through;

 First from him, now from you!

 Is that all you blighters can do?

Alan Jay Lerner from the Musical My Fair Lady 

A guy who spends most of his time with words, whether reading them or writing them, should not be sick of words. For the better part of three decades, as a businessperson, I played with words in a far different context. In that regard, my goal was to use messages, comments, visuals, and even music, to compel a select group of people to favor my product over something else. For this, I used a simple three-part framework. First, what is it? Second, why should the target care? And third, how was it different from something else? 

This works well with politics and history, but the reality differs. Politicians and their ilk understand principles two and three in their bones. To take one prominent example the recent debt cancellation decision. Select groups of Democrats care because they want their debts canceled. Another group of Americans cared because they either paid their debts or incurred none and did not want to pay those of others, which they had no choice in taking out in the first place. This understanding of why they care leads to the third piece, an alternative. 

Progressives wish to cancel student debt, and the GOP and most Americans do not. This gets trickier in primaries when candidates encompass the same policies. However, other factors, such as character or ability to “fight,” as the modern GOP voter might say, come to the fore.  

This podcast is about that first piece, then what is it? Here, we get to the challenge of defining what we are talking about. And the desire from politicians and pundits to define what is favorable to their point of view. One example is the heated debate over abortion. 

Pro-choice proponents can use that term all they like, but at its core, it is still pro-abortion. Pro-lifers can use that term all they want, and I would tend to agree more with the accuracy of the moniker over pro-choice, but it is still about denying the liberty of the mother to make a decision that does affect her body.  

So not at all sick of words, but their alteration for a specific ideological narrative is both ingenuous and harmful. Here are some of the more prominent examples in our discourse.  

Forgiveness vs. cancellation. 

“Be careful with your words. Once they are said, they can be only forgiven, not forgotten.”

In addition to the words cancellation and forgiveness concerning debt, there is also the more squishy term relief. At least, even forgiveness keeps the focus on the debt and not the feelings of those who receive this unconstitutional largesse. So much relief! Why do I bring up the C word (no, not the other c words, the constitution in this case)? Because, as we shall see later, nothing is free. Someone has to pay, so for those like myself who paid off the loan or those who never went to college, this is a tax just as if they had raised the income or payroll tax. In this case, we, as American voters, had even less say than usual.  

I prefer the historical term cancel. Defined as a factor or circumstance that neutralizes or negates the force or effect of (another). Brutal, clear, and focused on what is being canceled. 

Contrast that with the word forgive, “stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw, or mistake.” In this case, the loan is bad; therefore, Biden, our benevolent ruler, can forgive its outrageousness. What Biden is forgiving is the stupidity of someone taking out a loan without the wherewithal or intention to ever pay it back. When a diety forgives us our sins or trespasses, I do not recall that sin being then projected on someone else. I could warm to that concept. I steal a necklace but am forgiven, but Tommie, down the street, has to go to jail. 

Sorry about that old chap; I needed the necklace, you see.  

The Roosevelt Institution, no right with think tank they, called the debt imbroglio canceling. Though they wrongly missed the regressive nature, “Student Debt Cancellation IS Progressive: Correcting Empirical and Conceptual Errors.” 

This cancellation of debt is not new, of course. A piece found on the excellent Foundation for Economic Freedom site by Lawrence W. Reed and Marc Hyden states, “More than 2,000 years before America’s bailouts and entitlement programs, the ancient Romans experimented with similar schemes. The Roman government rescued failing institutions, canceled personal debts, and spent huge sums on welfare programs. The result wasn’t pretty. Roman politicians picked winners and losers, generally favoring the politically well-connected — a practice that’s central to the welfare state of modern times, too. As numerous writers have noted, these expensive rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul efforts were major factors in bankrupting Roman society. They inevitably led to even more destructive interventions. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the old saying goes — and it took a while to tear it down as well. Eventually, the emperors attempted to control the entire economy when the Republic faded into an imperial autocracy.” 

Even the International Monetary Fund, a global banker to the world, talks of cancellation, “This note considers the implications of proposals to cancel 100 percent of the multilateral debt.” 

And finally, the IRS, in their tax forms, talks of canceling the debt.  

So please forgive my use of words here, but can we cancel all use of the term forgive for unilateral canceling debt? It would be a great relief to use a term with greater clarity.  

Food Insecurity.  

So I got my latest issue of Ancient History magazine, published out of Rotterdam in the Netherlands (yes folks, I am serious about history, and this is one of four magazines I get from an outfit called Zutphen).

Right there on the cover was their feature article, “Food Insecurity in the Ancient World.” When I go onto the New York Times, Washington Post op-ed section or watch CNN or talk to my progressive friends, I have come to expect the term of food insecurity. It was a little jarring to see it in what is usually a politically free safe space of a magazine that looks at ancient cultures through an archeological and not an ideological prism. Not here, though. Yet the articles, as is usually the case with this magazine, are fascinating, well-written, and comprehensively researched. There is a piece on the famine that accompanied the collapse of the near eastern Bronze Age states occurring around 1200 BCE. Another good read on Roman mobs getting a little itchy when Egyptian grain was in short supply in the late Republic and early Imperial periods. But this is not insecurity as defined by today’s left. The reality for most humans prior to the 18th century, was no food security at all. A full belly was a luxury and consistent satiation, or the anticipation of that state 6 months hence, was the stuff of dreams.  

So why does the left not simply say the hungry? Because in modern America, we have banished hunger (one of the three great scourges of humankind, with disease and war being the other two). 

In history, we can look at great famines, such as visits to the Assyrian Empire in the 7th century BCE to the Bengal famine of the 18th century CE. Yet these are just the mass hunger. From 14,000 years ago to the advent of the modern era and capitalism, over 90% of the population were farmers. It is not a stretch to imagine the farm family looking out the window of their three-room house with growing concern that another week of too much rain and the crops will die. Or no rain at all, and the crops will die. Or maybe the local Lord was feeling some late-night cravings. Only the guy with the swords and a group of toughs to back him up enjoyed food security. His security was the peasant’s insecurity.  

Food insecurity is defined today as living in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. One of the keywords here is if a family is concerned about food. Not hungry, certainly not starving, but concerned.   

And who are the creators of these terms up to and including food insecurity? Sure, you have activists and charities, about the actual owner is the Department of Agriculture. In a follow-the-money fashion, the primary movers and shakers of the DOA are … Food companies. And not Farmer Ned is looking like something from a Grant Wood painting. I am talking about Conagra, Perdue, and Tyson. This is what, in business, we used to call revenue generation. Big food convinces the DOA that we have food insecurity which provides a cause for the department bureaucrats. Liberal groups always look for victims, so they play the heroes, comply, and spread the term. 

In fact, Americans have too much food, or at least the wrong kind, not likely to be fixed by Perdue. According to the CDC, The US obesity prevalence was 41.9% in March 2020, an increase from 30.5% in 1999. Severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%. That means 10% of our fellow citizens are “morbidly obese” and a candidate for weight reduction surgeries. I will not catalog all of the health issues that our hefty citizenry will cause. We are a wealthy country, so what if many Americans look like characters from a Fernando Botero or the plus-sized Peter Paul Rubens figures? The reality in our nation is that, In contrast to international trends, people in America who live in the most poverty-dense counties are those most prone to obesity. So says my progressive friends, but that is a nutrition issue; they get the wrong calories. To which I say, then it is not food security but rather good food insecurity. Not quite a good ring to that, which is why they use far more inaccurate terminology.  

Free.

Definition of the word Free - without cost or payment.

As noted in the previous comments on debt cancellation, nothing is free. Someone has to pay. Or even as Lyndon Baines Johnson, a key giver of supposed free stuff through his Great Society, put it, “Nothing comes free. Nothing. Not even good, especially not good.” One need not be a Nobel laureate to understand this, though this concept seems to be lost in the case of Paul Krugman. As Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro noted in 2017, “And when the free things don’t materialize, the people turn on you. Solution: Stop lying. Democratic politics is riven by a central conflict: the conflict between truth and desire. People generally want things; they want the government to give them those things. Conservatives aren’t wrong when they say they can’t compete with Santa Claus — it’s far harder to draw voters to your side by telling them they won’t get something than by telling them they’ll get real estate on the moon.” 

In my business days, I voluntarily taught eight and 9-year-olds commerce as part of the Junior Achievement program. Gamification was key. We would start a fake business, usually a pizza parlor. I taught 3rd and 4th graders that they needed to buy ingredients to make the pizzas but sell them for more than the cost. I remember one kid telling me, “My pizza is going to be the best, and I am going to put all my ingredients on it.” I explained that the pizza would cost a lot, and he said, “Yes, but mine is going to be the best, so people will pay!” This kid had not heard of Adam Smith, but he got it in a way that Krugman never will. I marveled at how a nine-year-old could grasp something that most of the world and all too many members of Congress do not seem to understand. 

Well, this is not entirely true. Sheldon Whitehouse or Elizabeth Warren understand at some level that nothing is free; they figure that if deficits get bad enough, future governments will impose draconian taxes and thus figure a way to pay. They fail to mention that the entire Forbes 400 has assets (not income) of about 4 Trillion dollars – a lot of money, I get that. The issue is that we run annualized deficits of over $1 trillion and have a debt of over $32 trillion. And we have just taken every penny of the wealthiest, and now we need to move to the next rung and so forth.  

Even free speech, guaranteed by the first amendment, comes with a price. The price is, on occasion, to be offended. So when I read about Michigan’s new law, I knew a violation when I saw one. As noted in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “Michigan hometown’s violation of its citizens’ First Amendment rights. The city code prohibits people speaking during the public comment period of city commission meetings from “demeaning city officials, officers, or employees,” making “derogatory comments directed at another person,” or “using vulgarities. In a letter sent last week, FIRE called on Bay City’s government to eliminate these unconstitutional restrictions on its constituents’ right to speak freely about matters involving the city and its leaders. The prohibitions on “demeaning” and “derogatory” comments violate the First Amendment by selectively targeting speech based on viewpoint.”

I am old enough to remember when the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to organize. I should not have to state that conservatism, based on individual rights and leader selection, is the true polar opposite of fascism and not a mirror, which is Marxism. And I hesitate to cite the speech from A Man for All Seasons in which Thomas Moore notes that if you cut down the laws to get the devil, the devil will win. If a political group of the day gets to decide what is offensive and what is not is the determinant of speech, that is the equivalent. Free speech is not free, but it is absolutely vital for liberty. 

Insert any public office without the word FORMER.

There is a straightforward test if you want to know whether your media is truly news or provides independent opinions. When addressing former officeholders, do they use the former in the piece or treat the figure as if they still hold office?  

Here is an example:  

In a piece in the National Review referring to Donald Trump by Andrew McCarthy, “After all the Capitol riot dust settled, did former President Donald Trump commit a plain old financial fraud — i.e., pocket a pile of dough that he raised on false pretenses?”

Here is a piece from the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio, “Bill Barr, who amassed populist cred as a loyal servant of the former president until, like Mike Pence, he squandered it by refusing to abet the “rigged election” nonsense.  Even Townhall does this “Unsurprisingly, former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were the most popular in the THM straw poll.”

Yet here is Senator Edward Kennedy speaking of Trump, “On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) stated that he thinks the Justice Department will do “whatever they can to make sure that President Trump is the nominee because that’s who President Biden wants.” And Biden “thinks President Trump is the only person he can beat.”

Former President Barack Obama often receives the same treatment from those on the left, interestingly, in a way that Former President Bill Clinton does not.  

And it is not just presidents. Fox News routinely interviews former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and though they put the “former” into the title image, they always refer to him as Mr. Speaker.  

So is this just some nit? When the founders constituted our government, they deeply understood its impact on society, having just overthrown an aristocratic one. They consciously avoided titles: no Barons, Viscounts, Dukes, or Kings. But increasingly, we treat former officeholders as if they were a type of peerage.  

Our government features offices, not titles. The presidency is a temporary position. Many governorships are the same. Congress should also be term-limited, but in some cases, as with the Speaker of the House, elections cover that. Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, and Gingrich are former speakers.  

This is not new. A 1992 piece from the Washington Post mentions this title issue, “The rule is that there is only one president of the United States at a time; therefore, the title does not accompany anyone out of office. Many lesser titles do, however, so a former president generally uses his last such title. The proper address is Senator Nixon, as it is Governor Reagan and Governor Carter.” As noted, those Fox News hosts are not exactly wrong in calling Gingrich Mr. Speaker. But I think that should change, and I prefer the Mister or Ms. Versions.

Football and the rare basketball coach also have a title. I always love it when sports reporters call a coach “coach such and such,” as if the reporter is ready to suit up and hit the gridiron. But everyday people, the people, do not get titles. As noted, I was a businessperson for several decades, but no one referred to me as Businessperson Aves or, even today, Historian Aves. It would seem weird. Imagine the people who work for you now being asked to address you with a title. Until the 1970s, it was routine for a subordinate to call you Mister, but that went the way of bell bottoms and male athletic shorts. Thinking a simple, respectful Mr. Trump, Mr. Gingrich, Ms. Pelosi, and Mr. Obama is just fine. But then, come to think of it; Historian Aves does have a nice ring to it!