An intriguing question is why the immanent truth of social cohesion even in successful societies is forgotten or overlooked at times. We currently are in one of those odd periods when segments of the political class and ‘intelligentsia’ think and act as if oblivious to very remarkable accomplishments and signal achievements both political and economic.

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The term Middle Class has been completely denatured by a process of indiscriminate, promiscuous usage. It is a complex phenomenon whose examination reveals a number of current elements in the silent campaign against truth and honesty. It has become a synonym for the great mass of Americans who figure neither among the super-rich nor live below the poverty line. Anyone earning between $20,000 and $250,000 is now declared ‘middle class’ in political parlance. The upper bracket is drifting even higher.

One calculating reason for this inflation is to erase the ‘working class’ from the public vocabulary. That term has acquired unsavoury connotations. It implies poor and failure - notions that are linked in American minds. Rather than take steps to improve the lot of the working class, they are offered honorary status in the Middle Class. Admittedly, in our habits of what we buy and how we entertain ourselves, there indeed has been a move toward uniformity, a cultural compression. Nonetheless, life on an annual income of $30,000 is very different in terms of health care, comfort, opportunities for children and many other ways from life on $250,000. A one-size-fits-all vocabulary elides those realities and glosses over the public policy implications.

Responsibility is yet another casualty of the flight from truthful expression of reality. Its deformation takes two forms. Most glaring is its cavalier use to affirm something real when in fact nothing real is intended. Leaders of all types declare themselves responsible when the organizations or groups they head do something reprehensible. It has become almost cartoonish for the chief involved to go to the microphone in order to pronounce: ‘I take full responsibility” or ‘the buck stops here.’

Left to be inferred is that there will be no consequences. It is as if the declaration is sufficient unto itself. Responsibility carries with it no tangible accountability, just nominal accountability. In short, the promiscuous use of the word responsibility has voided it of all but nominal meaning. Its very use in this manner is a lie.

Freedom has been in servile use for generations. The free world Cold War days included a menagerie of tin-pot dictatorships and thugs in American employ. One certainly can argue that the core of the free world was indeed free; that expedient actions had to be taken to protect it; that it was not possible to be honest by calling our own bad guys something other than defenders of freedom. Still, promiscuous use of the word, and its derivates, has discounted its value.

For most Americans, it simply has come to mean those people who are on our side and /or do what we want in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Pakistan, Israel /Palestine or Lebanon. George Bush sealed these subjective perceptions with his self-serving and simplistic rhetoric about ‘being with us or against us’ - ‘us’ meaning the United States as the fount of political virtue. Thus, we had Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and sundry other misappropriations of a noble word. This was calculated exploitation of a brand name.

Bleached words have been scrubbed of all denotative meaning while keeping a faint tinge of past usage. Center and bipartisanship head the list. They conjure vaguely positive images that merge in peoples’ minds. Center suggests pragmatism and moderation as associated with avoidance of the ‘extremes’ of ‘right’ and ‘left.’ Whatever meaning any of those terms has is wholly situational. The remarkable shift in the locus of American political discourse toward the radical right, accompanied by the liberals’ self-emasculation, means that the literal center is now somewhere to the right of where so-called Rockefeller Republicans were located, and on the right fringe of the political spectrum anywhere in Western Europe. Oddly, the locus of public opinion, as measured by issue specific surveys, simultaneously has shifted well to the left. That is to say, public discourse is manipulated to serve a conservative political agenda.

Bipartisanship has suffered a similar linguistic and political fate. It has been reduced to verbal decoration. Once it was used when a pragmatic coalition of legislators from both sides of ‘the aisle’ was formed to back some piece of legislation that cut across standard party platforms. The other was as an expression of solidarity in times of national emergency, e.g. World War II, post-war security engagements, the Gulf war.

These days, bipartisanship is a fuzzy word used to lend an aura of high-mindedness around what is a flaccid, lowest common denominator consensus. On most occasions, bipartisanship is not good for everyone. There are losers in compromises. Moreover, a broad bipartisan consensus can form around dubious policies - the cocktail of unsavoury practices that is called the ‘war on terror.’ The words appendage to the disgraceful process that produced health care ‘reform’ suggests that it should be given a dishonourable discharge from the political lexicon.

Barack Obama’s legendary stress on bipartisanship was integral to his ‘feel good’ style, an above the fray manner that neatly matched his preference for the status quo on matters of consequence - American commitments in the Greater Middle East, the virtues of mutant financial institutions and practices, the probity of the intelligence agencies, and a health care system built around profit-making commercial enterprises also ‘too big to let go of.’ What mainly interests us here, though, is not the content of Mr. Obama’s views as much as his addiction to a discourse that intentionally blurred rather than clarified the meaning of words and ideas.

Common ground was his mantra. It became a metaphysical concept rather than a considered political state where opposing parties might find a measure of agreement based on some shared, underlying principles or simply expedient overlapping interests – e.g. Hitler and Stalin’s tactical security calculations that produced the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The common ground so casually invoked by Obama, and others of the same disposition, connotes an idyllic grove where concord and goodwill prevail. Once parties enter that exalted realm, they supposedly would behave like bonobos – congenial, tolerant and accommodating. In reality, the inhabitants of Washington are by nature fractious, intransigent and distrustful – like chimpanzees in an enclosure.

Hence, Obama’s multiple attempts to lure the Republican Congressional leadership onto the harmonious common ground were met with distain and hostility. His devotion to finding common ground with the financial predators of Wall Street by playing companionable rounds of golf with the likes of JPMorgan Chase’s Jaime Dimon amounted to little more than a policy of appeasement and deference. The Bethesda Country Club was the perfect place for spying those legendary ‘green shoots” poking up amidst the ruins of the country’s financial system. “Common ground” has no fixed location.

“Common ground” is not a kidnapped phrase recast to exploit its evocative power in a campaign to promote something quite different from its original meaning, Simply put, it is a banal phrase of no particular affect energized to create an image useful as an all-purpose rhetorical device signifying nothing in particular.

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Some words have been so abused as to be little more than slogans emptied of all meaning. Bastard carries no presumption as to the matrimonial status of one’s parents at the time of birth. Son of a bitch carries no presumption as to the actual temperament of one’s mother. Analogues in the political realm jump to mind. Change for example - or, CHANGE as it has come to be known. Whenever the current state of affairs is bad, change looks to be a good idea - whatever its contents.

The key to turning it into a Janissary is to exploit its positive connotation while diverting attention from what if anything substantive you have in mind. Jimmy Carter took this tack to gain entry to the White House. So did Bush the Younger. And that is exactly what the Obama campaign did.

Phantom words reference a seeming reality that in fact does not exist. They are emotive words masquerading as denotative words. Emotive in the sense that they are intended to create an impression of something actually happening or being that is not. Public discourse nowadays is rife with them.

First there is responsibility, again, as in “the system failed, but I take full responsibility.” This is a favourite of elected officials and of organizational leaders more generally. The explicit meaning is that the unfortunate matter at hand was my fault - directly or indirectly, intentionally or inadvertently. That literal definition implies accountability which, in turn, implies penalty or chastisement. None is envisaged, of course, by the resolute statement of ‘responsibility.’ Just the opposite.

The declaration is designed not to open the way to some sort of reckoning. Rather, it aims to foreclose any further consideration of the issue, most specifically punishment. The speaker is pronouncing closure even while punctuating that he is the only one who has done anything blameworthy. In plain English, the true message is: yes, what occurred was most unfortunate; it was pretty much inescapable given the circumstances, I am the one who as the Boss therefore am ultimately ‘responsible in that I am supposed to monitor and supervise, but we all know that it is impossible for any mortal soul to oversee and monitor everything that goes on in this vast government /organization, so I’ll do everything I reasonably can to prevent things like this happening again, now let’s find closure on this troubling affair and fix our attention of other pressing problems - going forward.’

It is a commentary on our feeble power to scrutinize critically the conduct and speech of our rulers that this formula invariably succeeds. Evidently the part of us that desires comity and faith in high officials outweighs the part of us that seeks to place blame as a prelude to exacting a penalty. Skepticism is not ingrained in our political culture even as Americans vaunt their rugged individualism and strong belief in the republican virtue of not deferring to the holders of high office. Rugged individualism itself is manifestly a phantom phrase itself.

(Concluded)