Perhaps the most telling symptom of the general retreat from reality that has afflicted America in the Bush era is the rise of Lexical fetishism. What is a fetish? Here is the online Webster's definition:
1 a : an object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly : a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence b : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion :
In this diary, I argue that the Bush propaganda team systematically uses words and phrases as fetishes because they are useful argumentative tokens in an era in which discourse has been disconnected from reason.
Take the latest Bush fetish word: Surge. Like the name of some new laundry detergent, Surge was carefully selected to convey the notion of cleansing power, a strong, temporary, wave of military reinforcement that would leave Iraq a peaceful, shiny friendly democracy. This fetish word was repeated by the commentariat, over and over and over, not because it was a meaningful description of the Bush strategy, which is really escalation, but because most of the press has been trained to accept and honor the latest Bush lexical fetish. It was the same with "stay the course," until that fetish was officially retired. During the controversy over right-wing judicial appointees, "up or down vote" was the lexical fetish that was the focus of the Republican push. An earlier Iraq war fetish slogan was "as they stand up, we will stand down."
What does the rise of lexical fetishism tell us about our culture? The most important conclusion one can draw is that symbols and surfaces have taken the place of entities and essences. We now care more about tags and labels than about the things and ideas that they reference. The shimmering, scintillating, stimulating media surface has become what is real, and the cold, dark, unfriendly, objective reality is ignored. Rather than using words as tools, selecting and adapting them as necessary to do the work at hand, we are adjusting (or ignorning) the substance of the work to suit the attractive fetish slogans we have chosen to create magical results.
Where is lexical fetishism taking the Bush administration and the rest of us? The visionary George Orwell put it best:
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." — George Orwell