During the November 2012 election cycle in the United States, Kevin DuJan of HillBuzz asked his readers on several occasions to reclaim certain words from the Left.
DuJan is an ex-Democrat and writes for a living.
It occurs to me that he has a point.
He actually banned the word ‘liberal’ when referring to leftists. He also banned the word ‘progressive’ in the same context.
His rationale is that this is how the Left have designated themselves. I started noticing ‘liberal’ popping up everywhere in the media as the 1960s were coming to a close. ‘Progressive’ seemed to have gone mainstream sometime in the past decade, although it was around many years before that.
Classic liberalism has nothing to do with the Left. The French seem to be among the few who still realise that. Liberalism in its original sense has to do with free markets, small government and individual achievement. Yes, I’ve oversimplified the definition, however, it is the exact opposite of leftism.
Also, leftists are far from progressive in their efforts to tax people even more, implement hardcore redistributionism and legislate us to life in an unhygienic ‘green’ world.
So, I would kindly ask going forward that my readers, like DuJan’s, please refrain from commenting here using the labels ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ when referring to the Left. These are terms they have stolen for themselves and no two words could be further from describing them.
Please be aware that I shall edit incoming comments to reflect this.
Similarly, I would also encourage you to please advise your friends and family to stop flattering the enemies of freedom by using these words when referring to them.
Many thanks for your help in this regard.
21 comments
January 22, 2013 at 3:15 am
Amfortas
Words in Passing
We were not ready.
We were distracted.
Exhausted.
Battle had taken its toll
But the Family survived.
The children played.
Malevolent Smile.
She was Ready.
Definite. Ordered.
The Blue Pencil, poised.
Poisoned.
Flooding in, the swamp re-defined the land,
The familiar, the family, the Form.
The first was Fair, our childhood’s most cherished friend:
Resolver of squabbles, distributor, sharer,
Fair cared for all:
a string of rubies around her doomed, pale and lovely neck.
It was so sad.
They said it was consumption.
All used up, in tatters, shrouded,
she just faded away.
Next to go was that sturdy, quarrelsome Equality, which surprised us all
as he was so in demand, they said,
by all,
especially some;
aye, and relied upon.
For so many years a staunch friend and fighter.
His burial dressage, a white cheesecloth, yoked neck.
Naked beneath,
his scarred skin a testament.
Parchment.
Burned Beyond Recognition.
Truth tried hard.
Was Tried. Hard.
Derided, Derrida-ed,
denied existence;
perjured,
Falsely accused,
she struggled
as she was garrotted.
Died hard.
Soon after that, Justice
suicided off a nearby cliff.
Lover’s Leap, a place then
from which many a couple had gazed out,
seeking the broader vista.
Now has Disabled Access.
Was it in despair?
Perhaps sympathy with the others.
No-one saw her silent fall.
Was she pushed?
Who could gain?
Her handmaids will argue for a time and time,
billing Innocence by the hour,
Kept in chains, for gain.
The old, wise man, Honour, lost his marbles, they said.
He languished as the village idiot for a while,
The butt of jokes and calumnies.
Taunted.
His body was found in a ditch one day.
Starvation.
They left it there.
The loss of these good companions all
has been followed now
by Liberty and Freedom,
two noble and leathery old soldiers.
They put on their dress uniforms, immaculate,
faced each other squarely and
blew each other’s brains out.
Such fine shots, both.
They left a note. Signed as written together.
They could no longer support the malignancy of the vile regime,
the note said.
They felt duty-bound to remove themselves
from further abuse,
the note said.
They took Duty with them.
An Altar was discovered in the woods
On which the charred bones of hermaphrodite Trust
Were found,
Sacrificed to Narcissus, elevated to the Pantheon.
Tears flowed down Olympus’ stony sides.
Even God cries.
After, there was Laughter, Music, Whine.
High pitched.
So much fun.
The departed were only words
After all.
Oppressive words.
Now dead.
Like Fathers.
Dead, white males.
What, three were maids?
So? Whatever, said the wenches.
No one noticed Love fall to her knees.
Her calls for help were drowned by song.
Trampled to death under dancing feet.
The last to succumb.
Four.
The surging mob, with popular will,
Tied Democracy’s hands, and,
fattened and degraded on suet foie gras
trotted it to the abattoir.
The Impostor was on the scene quickly.
Ready, Definite.
Re-defined.
By Order. She said.
Scripted.
The Princess of Lies rides
over barren lands.
Long hair her spider-silk, chain-mail
down her back.
Across her breast,
Over her steed’s flank.
Hooves on skulls.
The children gabble and cry.
No words
describe
their pain.
They were
forbidden.
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January 22, 2013 at 6:34 am
churchmouse
From your website:
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January 22, 2013 at 6:42 am
Amfortas
I do not have a website, Chruchmouse. I have been encouraged to, very often, but I am happy as a contributor to others.
I wrote this poem about 6 years ago (maybe more) and ‘update’ it from time to time. It went through four or five major revisions. Who knows how long this will stay as it is.
Sometimes people ‘suggest’ points that might be included and I try hard to find an expression that fits.
Should you have some views for inclusion I would be happy to consider them. As with all ‘ideas’ there is always room for improvement and I am not so egocentric as to reject appropriate enhancement.
It is ‘poetic’ but I am not a poet. I see great value in concise words but know from vast experience that I am not anything more than a journeyman wordsmith.
The question is, do YOU like it?
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January 22, 2013 at 9:50 am
churchmouse
Well, it is your website as it has your name on it.
What matters is that your work says what you want it to, not what other people think.
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January 22, 2013 at 10:14 am
Amfortas
The website has a contribution written by me. In fact it was not even that. The website owner had seen the poem elsewhere and asked if he could put it on his site. I was quite ok with that. Just as I am ok with my screen name and jottings appearing on your site.
(Mind you, it is only because your’s is such a fine site)
Warren Farrell’s name is also on the site as are the names of quite a few other far more quoted folk.
I know who the website owner is. He is a well known person in the MRM. As I am. But as I said, I do not have a website.
As for liking or not liking. People are rarely totally disinterested. They put a ‘value’ on things. Positive or negative. As a writer yourself, I would expect you to want people to like what you write, even if it is only having them take issue. Liking is what brings and keeps people reading your blog with your thoughts and efforts. But perhaps I am wrong about that. I have been known to be wrong 🙂
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January 22, 2013 at 10:29 am
churchmouse
Apologies for the mistake about authorship of the website!
What matters is that what we write should make others think. Your work did just that.
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January 22, 2013 at 6:43 am
Amfortas
(Excuse my typos)(There is no ‘edit’ button I can see to correct them)
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January 22, 2013 at 9:48 am
churchmouse
No worries. It would be the same as if I commented on your WordPress site.
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January 22, 2013 at 3:43 pm
churchmouse
PS — Thank you for the kind words! I meant to thank you earlier but had a few distractions at the time.
Sounds as if you might have been adversely affected by feminism or are sensing others’ disappointment?
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January 22, 2013 at 9:02 pm
lleweton
CM: I’ve got my thoughts on this. I haven’t read through and digested the comments here . I hope to return to the subject. I would just say that I have noticed since the 1960s that people with an agenda to implement, always a destructive one from my standpoint, start with the language. Don’t know how that relates to the above.
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January 22, 2013 at 11:02 pm
churchmouse
It’s got everything to do with it, Llew! Thanks for that observation — much appreciated.
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January 22, 2013 at 9:07 pm
lleweton
PS: for example, ‘two units’ for a pint of beer or table cloth for altar frontal (I go back nearly 50 years). Clever the latter, but not if it strips the mystery from the description.
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January 22, 2013 at 11:03 pm
churchmouse
Thank you — I learned something new today. Never heard the term ‘two units’ for an altar frontal cloth — interesting, that — and, yes, a dignity/mystery-stripping term indeed.[Edit, Jan. 23] Sorry, Llew — I missed a couple of words in your comment. (Expect more over the next couple of days, very possibly.)
Re ‘tablecloth’, well, who is going to know these days? Not that many people pass down the information when they train someone to care for linens.
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January 23, 2013 at 7:52 am
Amfortas
I think the ‘table cloth’ was the disalternate word for altar frontal, CM.
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January 23, 2013 at 11:49 am
churchmouse
Oh, yes. So it is. Thank you! Have now edited comment.
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January 23, 2013 at 6:54 am
Tom
What about when someone refers to the current crop of authoritarian dictatorial intolerant leftists using the words “liberal” and “progressive”, but in quotes – so as to make their attachment to leftists opposite of what the words might otherwise denote? Is that also taboo, or no, since it’s done to imply the opposite of what the words may have orginally meant?
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January 23, 2013 at 7:49 am
Amfortas
Challenging the misuse of words can take a number of forms, Tom. In writing, it is easy to put inverted commas around words of a bracketed ‘not’ after one or an asterisk with a footnote.
Also one can use the word correctly in the proper context. Heck, you can have a gay time expressing real meanings. Soon you will see progress and be able to call yourself a progressive !
🙂
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January 23, 2013 at 8:52 pm
lleweton
Thank you for your comments and explanation about the altar frontal. Actually I think your initial response could stand up in the present unhinged state of public discourse. Perhaps it would not be beyond the ambitions of some psychological investigator to try to measure religious experience in terms of the aids used in encountering it, e.g. – table cloth equals one unit of religious experience; altar frontal: five units. Recommended units: five a week maximum… (if you are low Church, even five per month). An atheist might well say there is no ‘safe’ level of units. Life overtakes satire. The serious point is that the terms used in a debate can be used to put walls around the discussion. A glass of wine is not 1.75 units. A glass of wine is …… it depends on the individual and where he or she is in life. It can be a prison for some and poetry for most. But what it is exclusively not, is 1.75 units.
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January 24, 2013 at 12:29 am
churchmouse
Sublime, Llew, utterly sublime. Thank you!
My mind at the time of my original reply to your comment was running towards ‘two units = two yards of fabric’ in someone’s mind. (After all, who understands what a yard of fabric is now? 😉 How many women even sew these days? On a related note, how many man can say to a taxi driver, ‘My destination is just 100 yards further along the road’?)
And, as you have (once again) ably demonstrated, language is an odd thing — particularly with regard to ‘units’.
In France, the word means one piece of merchandise as it often does here — things are sold in unités, possibly copied from the English. And, of course, here in the UK, we speak of a unit of many things nowadays — housing, drinks and, probably, a human being. (I’ll have to dig it out at some point, but I’m pretty sure I saw something approximating the last late last year with regard to elder care. Something like ‘patient units’, referring to people. Exactly the thing Ayn Rand was warning us about.)
Yes, let’s define a unit of wine, beer or spirits — in our terms. Our parents and grandparents would have found the term applied to alcoholic intake as absurd. To them — and to you and me — that unit signifies comfort, friendship, conviviality, fun and relaxation. Not necessarily in that order, but the point still stands. One could also create a Venn diagram of interlocking circles of at least two or three of those adjectives, if not all of them. 😉
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January 24, 2013 at 5:16 pm
lleweton
Thanks for your reply CM. We could go on and on here but, if I may add a further thought: how we define or describe something isn’t necessarily to say what it IS – eg wine as ‘units’. Another example might be for some cunning axe-grinder to talk as if everyone assumes religion is a matter of ‘fairy tales’. And then to start any future debate by asking: ‘Do you believe in fairy tales.’ Then, returning to the subject of ‘units’, when and why, did someone, somewhere decide that Personnel should be called ‘Human Resources?’ Ever since I first heard that term used I have thought of the Nazis. They certainly turned human beings into ‘resources’. No-one these days objects to the use of the term. Why? As for care of the elderly, yes as one of that group I do keep a suspicious eye on officialdom. If anyone were to try to treat me as a ‘unit’ or any of my acquaintance, they might encounter some aspects of my ‘humanity’.
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January 24, 2013 at 5:26 pm
churchmouse
‘We could go on and on here …’ I, too, was thinking of more examples this afternoon. I might post them in future.
Yes, the ‘religion = fairy tales’ meme annoys me to distraction. Last summer, a Free Church in Scotland invited Dawkins to debate with them but he turned them down. He was going to be in the area at the time, so the church extended a friendly invitation. I would have loved for that to have taken place; no one knows and quotes the Bible in context the way the Reformed do.
Agree fully with the change from ‘Personnel’ to ‘Human Resources’ with no one batting an eyelid! I’d naively expected that to be a fad, but, no. (It reminds me of cattle trucks.) That gave rise to ‘human capital’, which makes us sound like livestock.
The US has had the Department of Health and Human Services for a few decades now. Aren’t most government services human? Why not just call it the Department of Health?
Grr. I have a feeling I’m not finished on this topic. Thank you for chiming in — cathartic for me! 🙂
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