[Newspoetry] Honing and Dulling Political Focus

[emerick at chorus.net]

I posted this in a Reader Forum for Kristov, on the New York Times,but I think it may have some interest to newspoets, as one of my views about what newspoetry ought to do about language, in various modes of newspoetic formulations.

don.emerick - 9:10 AM ET January 22, 2004 (#10080 of 10080)

Special Interests?

I appreciate ChiefWiley's sentiment, that we are blessed with democratic institutions, and that these generally permit the public to express some small degree of control via its choices of its elected representatives.

Corruptions of the political system variously increase the amount of noise in the system, so that larger than normal majorities -- with usually more radical or more violent methods -- are necessary to overcome the inertia of a corrupted system.

For example, in an extreme case, a total dictatorship of the masses may arise but -- shockingly -- as in the former Soviet Union case -- may not require extensive "counter-revolutionary" violence. In the meantime, though, millions of people were haplessly murdered by that dictatorship, mostly in its formative years. The propaganda of that regime promised greater equality to all, but it only was capable of reducing the level of equality, so that the people were much like cattle, merely numbered among the beasts of the field.

In lessser cases of corruption, entrenchment is less. Not every political district is gerry-mandered and not every election of political interest is dominated by organized institutions without grassroots within the election districts concerned.

In that vein, though, one of the corruptions of political systems is the crystallization of new language phrases, that permit new views to have an expression as a simple identity, and their subsequent neutralization which nullifies or even reverses the political meaning of the phrase, as originally used.

Chief Wiley's use of the term "Special Interest" reflects a political phrase that has undergone nullification. The term literally no longer sheds light upon its originally intended significands. That is, the original use-meaning of the term was to help people recognize that, unless they collectively exercised their citizen responsibilities, their government would be run and overrun by "special interests" which generally had no popular or populist grassroots.

Operatively, what would make a group into a special interest seems related to an idea out of Duverger's long ago thesis concept, which distinguished political parties according to their mobilization characteristics. A special interest would be distinct, in his language, from "mass mobilizing" political groups, with general and durable political interests. On a structuralist thesis, one might argue that "special interests" are like the molecular material out of which might be constructed the parties of "general interests".

Today's usage of the term makes it clear that the phrase is now virtually synonymous with "political organization" or "political association." It no longer signifies any critical difference between groups that arise out of the grassroots and groups that impose themselves upon the grassroots. It no longer marks the difference between a parasite and a pet puppy.

When language phrases loose their cutting edges, and become dull phrases, spouted by the politically correct, new leaders must introduce new phrases to refocus the eternal struggle against political corruptions of this mild kind, and of the far worse kinds, above.

Thanks for listening, Donald L Emerick