Dear George,
Cup your hand to your ear and listen. There’s a dust storm of words out there, words that limit, undercut, mislead, confuse, conceal, and misdirect. In short, this whirlwind of words provides perfect cover for your assorted intrigues that are slowly draining the nation of its soul.
But if you listen carefully, there is one word you will never hear, and it is just as well you don’t because this is a word that can cut through the fog and reveal the sordidness that permeates America. That word is “liberty,” a dangerous word if ever there was one. Liberty is a product of the clarity of vision that recognizes oppression as soon as it raises its ugly head and initiates the action necessary to send it to its room without dinner.
The evolving usage of the last century has marginalized liberty and reduced it to a dusty artifact that is the subject of myth. Where liberty and freedom were once synonymous, their meanings have diverged, with liberty reduced to a bauble that decorates a dead soul and freedom reduced to the possession of whatever toy provides instant gratification.
The oligarchy has denigrated liberty by putting a negative spin on two words that are derived from it: liberal and liberation. Your father pioneered the discreditation of liberal. He didn’t speak the word, he sneered it and in doing so, created a stereotype of the Limousine Liberal dumping on long-suffering blue-collar America while he undercut our Christian heritage and turned us into a nation of sexual anarchists.
Discrediting liberation was easy. Everyone knows what liberation is: machete-wielding peasants slaughtering the pillars of society and nationalizing down-home American corporations.
So, who dares mention liberty? For that matter, who needs liberty when they are free to buy? The Bill of Rights granted us liberty; our credit card companies grant us freedom. Oppression is palatable when driving a Lexus.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
4:49:34 AM 
|
