Weekends are supposed to be for relaxation to some degree.
So from time to time we like to revisit something either we or one of our contributors has written. Here's a piece from 2011 when the EU crisis was exploding on the global scene and the bureaucrats and politicians were tripping over themselves to deflect blame.
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A lot of people believe that God whipped up the heavens and earth in six days and on the seventh, exhausted, flopped into a lounge chair, kicked his sandals off and put his feet up.
But what if He didn't? What if He used that seventh day to create the concept of credit, investment banking and along with those geniuses of Wall Street and all their political allies?
In college certain courses require prerequisites. There's a reason. One could make a sound case that debasing a language is a prerequisite for debasing a currency. Those hard-headed, self-centered Germans most economic and political pundits are complaining about today understand that all too well. And that's the problem; they get it.
Debasing a language is not much different from debasing a currency. There are prices to be paid. And they both begin, as one of Hemingway's characters in The Sun Also Rises points out when asked how he went bankrupt: "Gradually, then suddenly."
In 1964 George Orwell published an essay, "Politics and the English Language." The first paragraph pretty much tells the tale.
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it's generally assumed that we cannot do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language--so the argument goes--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric lights and hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath lies the belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument that we shape for our own purposes.
Orwell didn't stop there. He pointed out that the decline of a language inevitably has political and economic causes and those causes are not simply owing to the bad influence of a few individual writers. An effect, Orwell wrote, can become a cause "reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely."
He was particularly harsh when it came to politicians.
"Keeping out of politics in today's world is impossible. All views are political issues," he wrote, "and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasion, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer."
The Germans and some others simply want to hold the mark on the language agreed to in the Maastrich Treaty. That language called for fiscal and monetary responsibility. Their critics obviously see it differently, taking the just-this-one-time-it-won't-happen-again path to justify their stance.
Even Bill Gross, the Pimco bond guru whose performance this year has been anything but sterling, in his latest screed chimed in, taking his cue from a quote on a 12-year-old coffee mug he received as a gift: "You can always tell a German, but you just can't tell him much." Quite cute to be sure, but really just another round of verbal legerdemain.
"The whole tendency," Orwell noted, "of modern prose is away from concreteness." He included activities like public speaking and speech writing. Germans admire the concrete, debasers the abstract.
The Germans are trying to hold the line against abstraction, one of the main tools the bebasers of language and, apparently as it follows, a currency, love to use.
Take a look at the so-called $1.2 trillion spending cuts our illustrious President recently claimed he would steadfastly veto any attempts to trim after the super-duper committee went snap, crackle and popped. On his part it appears to be an admirable stand against the economic philistines.
The key phrase is spending cuts. Anyone who thinks those are real cuts in real spending as in real deficit reductions should look again. It's obfuscation, a euphemism for lying, of the worst kind. Orwell no doubt would deplore the use of such a highly Latinate word like obfuscation. It's precisely what he wrote about, the dishonest use of dishonest words to deceive, the hallmark of politicians, bureaucrats, statesmen and other assorted species of the gas-inflated.
We've yet to hear anyone suggest that maybe the initial project was too ambitious to begin with. Even Jacques Delors, the man credited with creating the euro, is deflecting blame. In a recent interview from the UK scribe, The Telegraph, Delors states "surveillance" was a problem (An interesting choice of words for a European.), as bureaucrats, the Council of Ministers, failed to police member states to ensure they followed economic convergence criteria. Don't know about you, but that sounds like they reneged on an agreement they signed.
Even the word science, Orwell pointed out, isn't immune. It's a word like many others--e.g., patriotic, democracy, justice, realistic, to name a few: "Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different."
Like a blanket of soft, fresh snow the doomsayers wallowing in their gloom fest are all over the problem. So what if a few countries opt out of the monetary union? It's happened before, more than 80 other times since the 1940s, and most ended so horribly that hardly anyone can remember.
It isn't like the EU bureaucrats and politicians didn't know what they were getting, especially with Greece and Italy. So who are the naive here, bureaucrats and politicians who cooked up this scheme, expecting a quick religious conversion, or those of the so-called peripheral, weaker countries?
Perhaps this whole mess is a clear warning to the rest of us about international bureaucrats and politicians who keep pushing for globalization, one-world government and the end of local sovereignty, a clear signal just how dangerous these supposed know-it-alls are.
For many of Germany's critics the outcome of no bailout represents a kind of living Dante's Inferno. Worse still, a clutch of investment bankers and their ilk will likely take a big hit. The repercussions could provide another round of shock and awe.
But maybe, just maybe that's what the entire system needs. Maybe then, just maybe words and meaning will carry some real meaning.
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