A famous 1897 letter run in the New York Sun:
Dear Editor—
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it’s so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
The response begins
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion –
What this establishes is less the existance of Santa Claus than the patented means of lying to children: overbroad general-issue abstractions.
When the children do not grow up, it continues.
There is a certain simple-minded failed politician on a recovery tour with his "memoirs" currently. Occam's Razor explains easily enough salient points in his career: he saw an easy means of achieving greatness by causing others to die in statistically meaningless numbers to prove his earnest statesmanlike grit. When asked why the Muslims didn't like us, he had a typically deep-thought reply.
They hate our freedom.
Another opinion comes from the instigator of the horror of 9-11, who provoked his psychotic troops with reference to armed Americans in their holy land. On the one hand is the unexamined notion that "security" depends on an aggressive war machine to match the rest of the world combined; on the other the idea that this world-wide killing machine is the very reason why the US is despised and targeted.
Yesterday we all beheld scenes of pleasant manicured vast lawns with orderly white crosses, and somebody in serius garb lays a wreath. If you look for an abstraction for this day, you will most often find "Freedom."
This is hermeneutical homeopathy; the diluting of meaning down into nonsense, and continuing with a broth which contains none of the agent. They are the enemy. We add water to the imperialism and colonialism which brought that about until not a morsel remains in our topic toxin, and then we fill the basin with the Pentagon and all related industries to exact the same symptoms and call it "Freedom."
I mean, how exactly does it work? What in our "Freedom" in the US did we enhance by sending troops into South and Central America, Iran, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan? How precisely are we, for all the deaths, destruction, and desolation, freer than Canadians, the French, or Norwegians?
It is another broad, general noun meant to cover a multitude of sins, and it works only because, who would question the maximal sacrifice of the soldier? And so it goes...
Look at the space all around you. It's peopled by the progeny of those lost in foolish adventures planned and not executed by such as the Midland Midget for his own greater and risk-free glory. So go out into the park, or any other pastoral scene where no death is evident, and plant your own wreath for the eternal spiking of toxic talk which exalts meaningless abstraction to our eternal peril.
If I quit on Vietnam, those Republicans in congress would kill me!
LBJ, caught on tape, during a White House telephone conversation, late in the sixties.