The Name Game

While reading yet another screed online where President Obama is either a socialist or trying to establish a socialist nation, I considered the disjointed reasoning behind said screed and others like it I've endured. I recognized that a large part of the efforts to derail Obama's proposals have centered on emotional symbols, especially when corroborating facts are thin. The most powerful symbolism is often the simplest: the names we use to label people.

The epithet of "socialist" has been thrown around freely by Limbaugh conservatives and the Tea Party set, like a magic tar that should stain the president and scare the rest of us back into line. The mere mention of the most vile leftist monikers -- socialist, Marxist, communist -- fans the wildfire of irrational anger and fear, and the mob mentality at so many town hall meetings on health care reform is a logical result of the baiting language that has been used.

Some folks on the left have their own f-word -- fascist -- that they throw around like a rhetorical gold MasterCard. Most use it the same way as the right use socialist, with a there-I-said-it certainty and nothing else to back it.

It's easy to push someone's buttons and motivate opposition. But what gets built this way? When we can't listen to the ideas in a proposed course of action because one or both sides are substituting inflammatory language for reasoned debate, nothing meaningful can be accomplished. With the great problems of our time, we can't settle for a grade-school playground level of discourse.

Judge: Ky. Can't Legislate Dependence on God - ABC News

It's been a week where there's been a little rolling back of old mindsets in Kentucky. Earlier in the week, a bill was prefiled to remove the 19th century section of oaths of office vowing not to engage in duels. No joke; my wife took that oath when renewing as a Notary Public. Yesterday, a circuit judge's ruling struck down 2006 law forcing the state Office of Homeland Security to propagandize (the term that best fits here) that "the safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God." The law mandated such references in training materials and on the plaque at the entrance to the state Emergency Operations Center in Frankfort. I can't make this up. A link to the ABC article follows.

Judge: Ky. Can't Legislate Dependence on God - ABC News

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Agitators and Our Country

Something to keep in mind as our country celebrates its birth once again: We've been through a period of time where speaking out against authority/establishment has been heavily frowned upon, with hints of treason sprinkled in. I've come across a piece by Jim Hightower, national radio commentator and author of Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow that suggested quite the opposite.

According to Hightower, "the Powers That Be detest you -- you ... you ... 'agitator!' They spit the term out as a pejorative to brand anyone who dares to challenge the established order. . . . [T]he message is that America would be a fine country if only we could get rid of those pesky troublemakers who get the hoi polloi agitated about one thing or another. Bovine excrement. Were it not for agitators, we wouldn't even have an America. The Fourth of July would be just another hot day, we'd be singing 'God Save the Queen,' and our government officials would be wearing white-powdered wigs. Agitators created America, and it's their feisty spirit and outright rebelliousness that we celebrate on our national holiday."

Individual liberty is celebrated on the 4th of July, but we should regard it as a work in progress. Our history shows it to be so. Hightower stated that while the Founding Fathers were most definitely agitators, "they didn't actually create much democracy. In the first presidential election, only 4 percent of the people were even eligible to vote. No women allowed, no African Americans, no American Indians and no one who was landless. So, on the Fourth, it's neither the documents of democracy that we celebrate nor the authors of the documents. Rather, it's the intervening two-plus centuries of ordinary American agitators who have struggled mightily against formidable odds to democratize those documents."

Hightower and I seem to share a mistrust of Establishment expectations. He said, "The Powers That Be -- especially America's overarching corporate and political forces (often the same) -- give lip service to democracy, but tend toward plutocracy, autocracy and kleptocracy. They prefer (and often demand) that We the People be passive consumers of their economic and political policies. Don't rock the boat, stay in your place, go along to get along." That sounds a lot like Ari Fleischer's "watch what you say" admonition during the W years. Actually, the confluence of corporate and political demand for passivity (joined by demands of the religious right, it should be noted) was a mark of W's time in office, weighing on the chest of individual liberty like a gorilla.

The powerful in our society may make it uncomfortable (or worse) to dissent. So it is vital to realize that it was agitators that created our country, and agitators continue to form a more perfect Union and better allow for the pursuit of happiness. Hightower's closing remark was "when the establishment derisively assails you as an agitator, remember this: The agitator is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out."