Pen-Elayne on the Web

The Ism That Isn't

I was going to post more below (mainly just to link to good blog entries about the subject of electronic vote tampering by, among others, Lisa English and Dave Johnson) but apparently Blogger is buggered at the moment; after I saved the "Little Black Box" entry and went to edit it, all the editing functions, including "Post," disappeared. They exist for this subsequent entry, though, so I must have pressed the magical invisible "block editing toolbar forever" button on the previous one; sorry about that.

Via Atrios I found this interesting blog entry, The Boy Who Cried McCarthyism, by Adam Felber, now linked to at the sidebar. He laments the situation possibly created by the trivial over-application of terms like McCarthyism (or "something-gate" or "Orwellian") to the point where the words lose their sting, their power to mean what they meant when they were first employed. There's no doubt that this has happened, it's a linguistic peculiarity. Some terms lose coherence or power with repetition, or their use changes altogether. I can see where he'd arrive at the opinion that we can't use McCarthyism to describe what's going on in this country now, but I don't think it's because the word has lost potency so much as because the situation in this country, at this point in history, is so much more potent than "mere" terms like "Orwellian" or "McCarthyism." Just as people who witnessed the demise of the World Trade Center kept describing it as seeming like something out of a movie, many of us feel that everything going on now is so much bigger than it's ever been, than what we're used to, that we're simply having trouble encompassing it into one catch-all, defining image or phrase. They didn't call McCarthyism "McCarthyism" until after it happened. What's happening now is still escalating, we can't stop an express train as it's accelerating to name its journey.

But since I want to end on an up-note, for anyone who starts to think they're alone in feeling this way about war versus peace and freedom versus fearmongering, just take a look at these pictures and remember that you're not. (Via Jeanne at Body & Soul)