Made me laugh on the train...
I rarely laugh out loud on the train, but this had me...
New Word Order(as appears in today’s Metro)
Have you ever considered that right after World War II the “Department of War” was renamed the “Defense Department”? Sixty-one years later, thanks to legions of pinstriped mountebanks, we exist in an age where helicopters named Apache are unselfconsciously used to quell ethnic cleansing. It’s a new word order where the land of the free incarcerates its citizens at the rate of 1200 per week...the home of the brave carpet bombs civilians from 15,000 feet in the name of humanitarianism.
Kill someone while wearing a uniform and you’re a hero...do it in gang colors and you’re a criminal. Hire a lawyer to help you find tax loopholes and you’re a good businessman...make a few bucks off the books and you’re a tax cheat. Sell cigarettes, alcohol and lottery tickets and you’re an entrepreneur...smoke a joint and bet with a bookie: you’re a menace to society.
It’s all about setting standards and defining the accepted parameters. Our society, through corporate propaganda and an overdose of so-called patriotism, has become a coast-to-coast mall. We’ll buy most anything-from consumer electronics to electoral deceptions-if we’re convinced we need it. Yes, we can “have it our way,” as long as we stay well within the range of choices being offered. We can “just do it” any time we damn well please, all we need in a $120 pair of sneakers. We’ve strayed so far from reality that even the most elementary truths have become obscured. Everything is four or five degrees removed from its original form...and it’s all conveniently forgotten before anyone has time to analyze it.
Just when I thought we’d hit linguistic rock bottom, multinational corporations began patenting life forms, thanks to the “trade-related intellectual property rights” agreement of the GATT treaty (precursor to the notorious WTO). For example, when a human gene is introduced to a sheep’s mammary glands to produce a protein called alpha-1-antitrypsin, a sheep is no longer a mere “sheep.” Instead, that woolly object is now a legally patented corporate commodity known as a “mammalian cell bioreactor.” Not a sheep, not a lamb...but a mammalian cell bioreactor. Mary had a little mammalian cell bioreactor. Sound good to you?
Show some flesh in a particular magazine and you’re a pornographer...flash some skin on a public bus and you’re a Calvin Klein ad. Collect food stamps and you’re a welfare queen...hire a lobbyist to win government subsidies, tax breaks, and protectionist tariffs and you’re General Motors. Invade Kuwait and you’re the “next Hitler”...invade Iraq and you’re “George W. Bush, Leader of the Free World.”
Let’s say you’re NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg and you want to institute a regressive tax on your city’s poor residents. Easy, call it a “transit fare hike.” What if your company wants to dump toxic sludge on farmers to be used as fertilizer? Hire a massive public relations firm to give it a new image by renaming it “biosolids.” There’s really nothing to it: Cars aren’t “used,” they’re “pre-owned.” Invasions aren’t invasions when they’re pre-emptive wars.
Since today’s words have developed an uncanny knack for altering their meaning from situation to situation until they have no meaning at all, perhaps it’s time for Americans to hold a mass dictionary burning. Who needs Webster or Roget when we’ve got Bill O’Reilly? What good are words when they give peace prizes to men like Henry Kissinger?
It all reminds me of something South African activist Steven Biko once said: “The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” But, then again, what do I know? I’ve always been the black mammalian cell bioreactor in my family.
Posted by Mickey Z on 02/15 at 06:01 AM
his website can be found here.