Dear George,
Your greatest gift is your ability to innovate without even knowing you’re innovating. You created negaspeak and never knew you did; and in doing so brought to bear a rhetorical rapier far more potent than Orwellian newspeak. Newspeak is grounded in a lie (war is peace); negaspeak is grounded in the truth, in speech whose meaning self-destructs even as it is being uttered. Shining examples of negaspeak are: peace is the absence of peace—you are only at peace when you’re pissed off. Prosperity is the absence of prosperity—you’re only prosperous when you’re up to your earlobes in debt. Freedom is the absence of freedom--you’re only free when you self-censor thought and action. The negativity of the Orwellian opposite is lost and words are defined by negating themselves. It’s beautiful, George, truly beautiful. You have remade the political landscape.
But that’s mere child’s play compared to your greatest non-innovative innovation—the free-speech zone. It was a masterstroke to sanitize your campaign appearances by corralling any would-be dissenters within a fenced-in enclosure well away from both camera and microphone. What an illusion of unanimous support that created! But it’s only a beginning, George. Lean back in your chair. Close your eyes and imagine this:
Imagine, if you would, a network of free-speech villages, planned communities, where dissenters would be concentrated for fellowship and support. I see earthly Edens in prime desert locations away from the damp stench of the city where healthy lungs would blossom. They would be places of growth and enhancement, where residents would be free to reinvent themselves, aided by a strong network of counseling and re-education.
A top priority of these free-speech villages would be safety and security. To insure these, each village would be surrounded by twelve-foot high cyclone fences topped with razor wire. The electrification of the fences would offer another level of security as would the armed security personnel scattered discretely throughout each village.
The villages would be loaded with amenities. Residents would experience the joys of indigenous living in units modeled after the traditional Algonquin long house where multiple families could live together in communal bliss as they shed the obsession with privacy that has been the curse of modernity. Recreational activities would be highlighted by a “return to the earth” theme as residents thrived on the challenges of desert farming. Self-esteem would grow by leaps and bounds as residents learned to chop wood, carry water, bury their dead and pull their own teeth. Fat and flab would melt away as they learned to thrive on a five-hundred-calorie-a-day vegetarian diet.
Couple these amenities with the tax break that results from having no income and you’d have a waiting list in no time. Villages would fill as quickly as they could be built. For hard-core malcontents who refused the move West in the spirit of their pioneering forefathers, there could be some additional incentives—the point of a bayonet, the butt of a rifle. But if the marketing is effective, these should be the rare exception.
George, we are on the cusp of a golden age—the age of the nonconflicted society, an age when there is unity of purpose as all of America marches to the beat of the same drummer. All we need to remember is that shard of wisdom that has echoed down through the ages: Stability is marketing; marketing is stability. Propaganda is so yesterday.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
2:18:06 PM 
|
