2011: the year of resistance to conservatisms war on words

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/2011-year-resistance-conservatism-s-war-words-1325429170

Our lives are de­fined by in­vis­i­ble wars, wars whose the­ater of com­bat is the human imag­i­na­tion. These eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal wars are waged year in and year out, decade after decade, cen­tury after cen­tury.

Words are the weapons of choice in these wars, and the cor­po­rate-backed rad­i­cal right adds new ones to its ar­se­nal every year. This year was no dif­fer­ent. From "en­ti­tle­ment re­form" to "trig­gers," the cor­po­rate oli­garchs couched their ag­gres­sion in decoy lan­guage that made it pos­si­ble for De­moc­rats as well as Re­pub­li­cans to launch them on an un­sus­pect­ing pub­lic.

But some­thing was dif­fer­ent this year. This was the year that the peo­ple came up with some words of their own, out­side the cor­po­rate- and bil­lion­aire-funded think tanks of con­ser­vatism. For the first time in many years, the right-wing war­riors of lan­guage ran into heavy re­sis­tance. That's an im­por­tant de­vel­op­ment that should be cel­e­brated -- and re­peated.

War of the Words

The cor­po­ratists own the Re­pub­li­can Party, and large swathes of the De­mo­c­ra­tic Party too. Most Amer­i­cans dis­agree with their am­bi­tions, but they've been so good at de­sign­ing and using these lin­guis­tic weapons that the pub­lic hasn't had a chance. Major media jour­nal­ists have used these words as mantras, while too many De­moc­rats have em­braced them for their own self­ish pur­poses.