Earmarks
OK, it looks like I’m on a word hunt this week.
And tonight, I’d like to bag a major word that’s been slipping by all of us for a while here — or at least the word-games being played with it have been slipping by us unchallenged.
Can we agree on a definition for earmarks already? Granted, it never was a truly positive word. But the Newspeak-ian games being played with it now — the dumbing down of the English language by setting the meaning of the word completely equal to the meaning assigned to “pork” is unacceptable.
Earmark, singular or plural, has become as contentious, as partisan as any word to come out of the mouths of John McCain, Sarah Palin, or any other Jabba-following sycophant these days. Having used the tumult of the 2008 campaign to change the definition of the word while we were busy doing other things, they’re now all set to take advantage of the changed “frames” they’ve created.
It has come to mean — especially for John McCain evidently, and probably Ron Paul as well, it appears — something more than just “projects a given representative wants to meet specific needs in his or her district.” It has come to allow — just as the word “pork” — to mean “any project, no matter how valid, that my ideology (or Rush) orders me to disagree with.”
Which is really strange in at least one sense. In both the debates over the ARRA (aka the “Stimulus Bill”) and in the House debate (so far) over the Omnibus (leftover) spending bill, Republicans have been beating one drum especially: “government is a poor creator of jobs, and big, ponderous government can’t spend money well because it doesn’t have people ‘on the ground’ like rich businessmen do.” Somehow, and I never quite understood where they “pundits” were going with this until now, the Federal government had lost the low-level, fine granularity of focus when dealing with sums of money above a certain level. But as I understand our system of government, our representatives (especially, but also our Senators) were created to take care of — and even more so, to UNDERSTAND — a very limited district. They’ll know its industries, its resources, its labour availability, etc. They’ll know what projects will benefit it, and what projects just aren’t a good fit. They’ll know — and move quickly to FILL — it’s infrastructure and other needs.
At least they’ll do so if they want to REMAIN its representatives for very long. And that’s a pretty powerful incentive to remain vigilant, to remain the eyes and ears the government NEEDS to provide well-targeted lubrication (usually) or well-targeted stimulus to our economy. And, ironically, human greed makes sure that — in most instances, sure — that aid is fairly evenly distributed, even if some “eyes” aren’t as good as others, or some interpretations of need less imaginative. (Not to mention that no state likes to be told that “you’re not getting back the majority of the taxpayer dollars you kicked in.”)
Is there waste in the process? Is there greed in the process? Are there HUMANS involved in the process? Sure.
But that’s why an additional definition evolved for the word pork.
So why are we letting John McCain get away with whining about the (purported) 9,000 “earmarks” in the Omnibus bill?
My concern here is not so much with whether or not John McCain avoided contact with any sort of earmark, or how, with an average of $14 million/17 earmarks per Representative and/or Senator, he could have avoided such contact. Nor am I anything other than interested (for the moment) in how he has survived for so long without bringing important shares of taxpayer-provided revenue back to his state. I’m not even momentarily concerned with what word(s) he’d use to describe the money which DOES end up getting directed to his state.
Rather, my concern is the word earmark itself, and the fact that two words which evolved to stand for two different concepts have been allowed to merge, and for what purpose. Newspeak, and more particularly, the word-reduction goal of Newspeak, was never intended to do anything but remove political opposition. I doubt this is much different. Indeed, I suspect that having lost the larger stage, the opposition party is now sunk to sneaking around attempting to assassinate whatever remaining good public works might remain, might prevent us becoming serfs to the now-damaged oligarchy.
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