Politics and the American Language.

If you've been reading in this space for any appreciable period of time since I've started writing here in 2007, you've been urged by me to read George Orwell's seminal 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language." 

It's an essay I've likely recommended to a thousand creatives and clients through the years. If you care about words from a communication point of view, not an effete one, you'll copy it and keep it no more than an axe-length from your keyboard. You might even read it. Even think about it.

Here are two passages you'd be better off not passing over.

While Orwell deals with loftier topics than I do in a dopey (but consistent) blog on advertising, to my withering mind, it makes nothing but sense to treat language with precision, elegance and even beauty (if you can get there.) No matter who you're writing for.

As humans we have to choose how we use language. We can use it to communicate. Or we can use it to deceive. Today, it seems to be the deceivers are out-pacing the communicators like Secretariat would out-pace my grandson in his Cozy Cart. Deception is winning going away.

In amerikkka since the 1960s, and the liberal attempt to uphold both the letter and the spirit of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the now-eviscerated Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other stabs at upholding what Lincoln called 'the was best hope for man', there's been more than a little murmuring about yet another 'Civil War.'

Civil War itself was one of those terms Orwell was warning us about. As Anthony Conwright points out in a recent essay in The New York Times, 

Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. 

During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” 

Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.

Mr. Conwright plumbs history to find out what we today call euphemistically call the Civil War was called in the past. In1861 Senator Samuel Pomeroy called it “the slaveholders’ rebellion.” 

The slaveholders' rebellion.

All the talk--and please pay attention about the 'next civil war'--is really yet another incipient slaveholders' rebellion, masquerading as a battle for liberty and freedom.

The slaveholders here are the big tech leaders, the lindsay grahams and mike johnsons, the mitch mcconnels and ken paxtons who don't like the idea, as the slaveholders before them didn't like the idea, that they have to be fair, pay taxes, pay people, and not transfer wealth by way of an outdated tax-code from people who are income earners (most people) to people who don't have to pay tax because they don't earn payroll taxed income.

If you think you're not a slave, in the last half-century, wages have plummeted, costs have sky-rocketed, permanent jobs have evaporated, pensions are no more, health-care is out of reach. As Billy Pilgrim said in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse, "And so it goes."

The slaveholders' rebellion can be read about here. Metaphorically, I mean.

A book that seeks to explain why this has been allowed to happen. Those people, the ones at the top of this graph are the slaveholders who are rebelling. And they're using the tactics that the super-wealthy plutocrat class has always used. They're turning people against each other, so the slaveholders win.

Next time you hear about "civil war," or 'christian values," or "american exceptionalism," "class warfare," or any other far right shibboleth, think Orwell. Fast.

See all this for what it really is, "the slaveholders' rebellion." A few people who prefer war and destroying equality so they can get out of paying tax.  A few people who will pass on their untaxed wealth to their children and cement that most-un-amerikkkan of ideas--a permanent aristocracy.

Until we learn what's being said and how they say it, and what's really meant by their coded language, they will win. They meaning the slaveholders.