Assembling reality
Beau Elliot
Issue date: 6/7/05 Section: Opinions
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That's a cheerful thought, no?
Maybe I'm just trying to get in touch with my inner Camus.
Or maybe, as some have proposed, life truly did originate on Mars. And we are the product of meteorites smashing into Mars, sending up clouds of bacteria and whatnot into space to be caught by, oh, I don't know, curious comets or something, that dumped the bacteria or whatnot on Earth, and thus set off the Sumerians, the Egyptian empires, the Chinese empires, the ancient Greeks and the Roman empire, the battle of Hastings and various other wars, which leads us by vicarious commodities of recirculation to how our castle is now.
And environs.
Well, maybe.
But I'm with you. Shaking my head, maybe a small grimace, thinking, "Nah." For one thing, that would make us all Mars-i-plan or something. And that would be almost as bad as being born again.
Which would put us somewhere in the neighborhood of our much-vaunted Cowboy in Chief, the strongman of the free world and the defender of everything we hold dear.
Well, OK, maybe not the environs. Nobody's perfect.
He is also apparently, not much approaching perfect in the English language. Last week, he attempted to lecture a group a reporters (who, you might remember, are writers and thus allegedly know one or two things about English) about English usage during a press conference about the Amnesty International report that contended the Guantánamo prison was a gulag. The lecture was, to use the polite word, interesting:
"In terms of, umm - you know, the - the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained ..."
Failing to mention that hundreds have been released without any charges being brought against them after several years of detention. But meanwhile:
"It seemed like to me [Amnesty International] based some of their [sic] decisions on, on the word of people who hate America, people that [sic] had been trained to disassemble [sic] - that means not tell the truth."
"Disassemble," of course, means to take apart. "Dissemble," the word the Cowboy searched for in vain in his lecture on usage to writers, means to lie or to speak in such a way as to hide the truth.
"Dissemble" might be the operative word, to employ a Watergate-era usage, given the "reasons" for invading Iraq. Anybody remember the "smoking gun" that could become the "mushroom cloud," according to Condoleezza Rice and echoed by Dubya?
