It used to be imprudent or just plain vulgar to say the ‘F’ word.
Now we just say it . . . fuck.
It’s such common parlance, so acceptable, it’s become the language of diplomacy, as with the policy declaration by Deputy Secretary of State Victoria ‘F**k the EU’ Nuland about the crisis she and her neocon friends precipitated in the Ukraine.
But I’ll tell you a word we don’t dare say anymore.
You know the one . . .
The ‘H’ word.
Sometimes it’s written as ‘h*pe’ or ‘ho*e’.
We used to actually use the word often. It was on everyone’s lips.
But after President Obama — or I should say Brand Obama — and the corporate lapdog Democrats made it central to their 2008 and 2012 campaigns, then turned it into both the brunt of cruel jokes and the poisonous pill of despair, it became as popular as leprosy, not even whispered anymore in polite company.
Who wants to cry in public?
They sure got us all wide-eyed and teary-eyed with all those ‘H*pe and Change’ bumper stickers and campaign posters. People started believing things would turn around and America would get back on track, after eight tortuous years immersed in the stupidity, boorishness and arrogance of George W.
Then this phalanx of feel-good experts and spin doctors responsible for the propaganda juggernaut we experienced — especially during the heady days running up to the 2008 election — took the faith and good will, the higher aspirations of the American public and threw them in the toilet, took several healthy dumps on our heartfelt desire to embrace the American Dream. They even continue cynically to this day to peddle fresh variants of their snide charm-offensive h*pe-and-change trash-talk, assuming the public is none the wiser, and still thirsty for the arsenic-spiked Kool-Aid of their duplicity.
This is shameful on so many levels. After the horror of George W. and his band of blatant liars, the ignorant, delusional, self-serving oligarchs who mockingly led us into a false war, bankrupted the economy, reversed fifty years of progress toward becoming a humane and sane society, we had all but given up. Then the sun burst through the storm clouds of our collective misery and revulsion. People were so engorged with h*pe, many even heralded Obama as the new Messiah. Okay. Okay. That was over the top. Yet not just America, but the entire world was at his feet, expecting this man who spoke with such eloquence, such passion, sincerity, intelligence, to deliver on the noble promises contained in his books, Dreams From My Father and Audacity of Hope, given in soaring oratorical performances at his campaign rallies, in his inaugural address, and any number of speeches given during the first few months of his presidency — most notably the one delivered June 4, 2009 at Cairo University titled “A New Beginning”. Many of us, arguably an overwhelming majority, naively thought this heralded a new age built around peace and prosperity spanning the entire globe, and the ascendancy of justice and respect for others.
And what do we have? You know . . .
Mr. Nobel Peace Prize has proven to be more trigger happy than the sneering gun-slinging Texan he replaced, Mr. Transparency is far more secretive and presides over a regime that spies on everyone, the jails are bulging with more and more people of color — but none of the bankers and financial predators who crashed the world economy in 2008 — the rich just get richer, the poor get poorer, the banks are looting the treasury, corporations are out of control, fracking is out of control, global warming is out of control, wealth inequality is out of control, poisoning our food, air and water are out of control, the police are out of control, the imperial neocon warmongers are out of control, the military is out of control, maybe everything is out of control.
Or more accurately, it’s in control of the wrong people.
So now the ‘H’ word is a very dirty word. It’s too charged with treachery, the violation of the best intentions and wholesome expectations of a lot of very good but obviously gullible people. No one dares utter it without everyone within earshot going into convulsions of indignation or crying fits of despair.
There is, however, another ‘H’ word I’m hearing more and more these days . . .
Hypocrisy.
