What is the Meaning of Words?

What is the Meaning of Words

I am having trouble finding the right words to use to describe the some of what is happening in this election. I was raised in a household where words were important, where they were “tools” to use with clarity and precision. Mine was not an “Alice in Wonderland” world in which a word was any old thing that I wanted it to mean. This election, however, and this Administration, have taken all of my proper words for defining the positions of the candidates and turned them upside down, and backwards. America has become “Wonderland,” and our some of our words are redefined by George Bush and John McCain in ways that are unrecognizable to me. Given this redefinition, I am not quite sure what to call the positions of the candidates on issues. Some examples of the confusion:

What is a Conservative?
I always thought I knew what a “conservative” was. My mother was a conservative, according to her, and she was passionately Republican in the great tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom she admired greatly. She was a “fair” person, and fair in her dealings with everyone. She found a great sense of “fairness” in Teddy Roosevelt’s unwillingness to have the country pushed around by a bunch of “rich fat cats,” who thought their money gave them a right to set the rules of commerce for everyone. She applauded Roosevelt for taking them “down a peg,” as she would have put it.

She also admired in Teddy Roosevelt for his efforts to preserve and conserve a portion of this beautiful country in national parks, so that her children and grandchildren could enjoy them forever. She told me a “conservative” was a person who believed in “conserving” – preserving, protecting, maintaining, and certainly not wasting. I know this because as a teenager we visited, iat her insistence, almost all of the national parks west of the Mississippi.
She saw in Abraham Lincoln a man who would conserve other things that she loved dearly – her country and her heritage of individual freedom and liberty – and she believed that Lincoln’s commitment to extend those rights to African Americans was the best way to preserve those rights for her own children. “If the government can deny freedom to them, they can deny freedom to you!” She told me. “It’s that simple!” She did not trust the people in the government in Washington, DC, not one little bit, and she lived long enough to have many reasons to support this skeptical view. She believed in laws and in the Constitution, and she was passionate about conserving those rights in the Constitution.

In her heart, she could not be anything but a “fiscal conservative.” She and our family went through the Great Depression poor, and she could not spend more than she made because it was fool hardy to live any other way. Her father lectured her repeatedly that it was a whole lot easier to make money, than to keep it, and she worked hard to make what little money we had cover what we needed. She supported Republicans mostly during her lifetime because she thought they stood for the same things she did.

Bush and McCain as Conservatives: No, it is not a joke!
Given my background, you can understand why it is difficult for me to listen to what George Bush and John McCain say about the new brand of “conservatism” they have together brought to American. And “Yes,” I do brand them with the same brush; not as punishment, but because they, together, embrace the words and the policies they now describe as “conservative.” My mother taught me some slogans that help me to understand Bush and McCain. One slogan was: “Never judge a book by its cover.” The second was: “Listen carefully to what people say, but watch what they do. The deed counts for more than the word.”
Given my mother’s predilection to defining a “conservative” by his or her deeds, this is what she would have to believe that a modern day “conservative” really believes (based on what they “do”, and not on what they say they believe):

1. Believes in doubling the national debt every eight years.
2. Believes in massively increasing our Federal spending {and the size of the government) on the products that America makes best – weapons systems, bombs, bullets and rockets, tanks and bomb proof trucks, and a thousand other products that our military-industrial complex manufactures.
3. Believes in devaluing the American Dollar by more than 45 percent in eight years.
4. Believes in providing massive tax breaks and reductions to the economic “interests” that support them, even while they knowingly increase government spending.
5. Believes in encouraging the growth of massive deficits that you finance by selling the debt to the American and Chinese people, and then passing the payment on to the American children and grandchildren who do not yet have the opportunity to vote.
6. Believes in making the United States absolutely dependent and intertwined with those who hold our debt in dollars, mostly the undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and equally undemocratic China.
7. Believes in manufacturing evidence to support wars that they have decided upon for other reasons – reasons that they really would prefer not to share with the American people
8. Believes in increasing our dependence on foreign oil.
9. Believes that energy conservation can be ignored and that carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming.
10. Believes in expanding the rights of the Federal Government to intrude into our personal life through unwarranted searches and seizures in the name of national security, which is, of course, “conserving” the governmental rights claimed by every dictator since the beginning of time.
11. Believes in putting people with “good Christian, fundamentalist” values in charge of “science policy” in the United States, so that they can “conserve” science by making it conform with the knowledge of the “Old Testament.”
12. Believes that the increase in the disparity of income between the “haves” and the “have not’s,” the rich and the poor, is largely God’s way to rewarding hard work and enterprise.
13. Believes that we should invest our national wealth in building the Infrastructure of Iraq, rather the infrastructure of the United States; and that we have to “win” the war they gave us at any cost –whether it costs $600 billion as they say, or the $2 Trillion that other analysts estimate.

Since this is what the Republicans actually did in the past eight years, and since both Bush and McCain say they are “conservatives,” this is precisely what my mother would say that the word “conservative” means today. She wouldn’t recognize the word, of course, but she was certainly wise enough to look at what they have actually done, not what they say they have done. She would think the word “conservative” was imported from another planet, by comparison with her values.

What Does It Mean to Be a “Liberal?”
Now this is where it really gets confusing. For more than three decades, the so-called “conservatives “in the Republican Party have been vilifying the Democrats as “Liberals.” They have run massive advertising campaigns to tell our children how “dangerous” it would be to have a bunch of “liberal” Americans run the government; how it is the Liberals who massively increase spending, run up huge uncontrolled debts, devalue and debase the currency, and believe in the “big brother” of a government that intrudes into our lives at every step of the way. But wait a minute! Isn’t that precisely what the Republicans have been doing for the past eight years?

It is difficult to reconcile all of this. Based on what they do, and not what they say, aren’t George Bush and John McCain really “Liberals” at heart? And if they are really the “Liberals” in this campaign, what do I call Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton? Aren’t they both really “fair market conservatives”. They want “fair markets”, markets which treat everyone the same and not with different standards and rights for the rich as opposed to the poor. Based on what they say, the want to “conserve” oil, “conserve” our planet, “conserve” the lives of our young men and women, “conserve” the Constitution, particularly the Amendments dealing the human rights, “conserve” our independence from foreign interests, “conserve” the value of our currency, “conserve” our liberty (at least as much from our government as from the threats from abroad), “conserve” our infrastructure, etc.

But, both John McCain and his mentor, George Bush, have already told you very explicitly that they are running as the true “conservatives” in this race – Bush to defend his “conservative” record of accomplishment over eight years and McCain to defend George Bush. Maybe, they really mean to say, “Confusionists” instead of Conservatives. If they practice being “Confusionists” long enough, they believe that they can convert a narrow majority of Americans to embrace “Confusionism” as the new doctrine of the middle class in American.

Who knows? It could happen? Just my opinion,

Gordon Black