THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY

by William H. Benson

March 13, 2013

     Today is March 13, L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday, a day that Church of Scientology’s members on every continent observe. Born in 1911, Hubbard’s biography is an incredible story of erratic behavior, pathological lying, adultery, and estrangement from previous wives and children. You can read about Hubbard’s trail of deceit in a new book by Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief.

      Hubbard was a prolific writer who wrote hundreds of books, mainly pulp fiction, adventure tales, and science fiction, but then in 1950 he wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, a self-help book that explores how the mind works within the body. By the process called auditing—holding cans or rods wired to an Electro-psychometer or E-meter—a person is supposed to rid his mind of negative human emotions and experience a “clear” state of happiness and fulfillment.

     In December of 1952, Hubbard opened his first Church of Scientology, transforming dianetics into a theology. Thetans, he wrote, are the souls that Xenu banished to Planet Earth where they are forced to live in a series of human bodies for millions of years. Yes. It does sound like science fiction.

     There are at least eight levels of Operating Thetans, or OT, above “clear.” Disciples of scientology pay thousands of dollars for Hubbard’s books, courses, and audio tapes in order to move up the Bridge to Total Freedom. A religious scholar, J. Gordon Melton, said that “It’s basically a variation of the Gnostic myth about souls falling into matter and the encumbrances that come with that.”

     There are three tiers of membership in the Church. The first are the public scientologists who buy the courses and work to recruit others. The second are the Hollywood celebrities: John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Tom Cruise. The third tier is the Sea Org, the church’s equivalent of the clergy.

     Because Hubbard once belonged to the U.S. Navy, and he later traveled about the world aboard a yacht, he considered those with him on the sea as most-favored. Thus, the Sea Organization, or Sea Org. The church is well organized, and administered similar to the navy’s chain of command.

     The current COB, or chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center (RTC) at Hemet, California is David Miscavige, fifty-two years old, who seized control of the church following Hubbard’s death twenty-seven years ago in January 1986. Critics say that “Scientology is more and more whatever David Miscavige says it is.”

     The church is exceedingly wealthy. According to Lawrence Wright, it has “one billion in liquid assets,” plus hotels in Hollywood, plus the RTC in Hemet, and properties in Clearwater, Florida.

     Defections from the Sea Org are constant, and membership has declined. Lawrence Wright believes that there are at most 25,000 members today, and perhaps 5,000 Sea Org members. David Miscavige’s father recently left the church, as did David’s brother, Ron, and Ron’s daughter Jenna. Marty Rathbun and Amy Scobee, members of WDC, the Watchdog Committee, have also left, and Shelley Miscavige, David’s wife, has not been seen in public for years.

     It is not easy to leave the Sea Org. If a person “blows,” or leaves without being “routed out,” he or she is labeled an SP, a Suppressive Person, and other scientologists are forbidden to speak to SP’s, a policy that divides families and friends.

     Marty Rathbun says that Tom Cruise divorced his first two wives—Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman—because “both women got cold on David Miscavige.” In 2012 Katie Holmes divorced Tom Cruise and with her daughter Suri moved to New York City because she wanted out of the Church.

     To remain in the Sea Org is also difficult. There is the family disconnection policy. Husbands are sent on missions different from their wives. A woman said that she had not seen her husband in nine years. This policy leads to affairs, divorces, and re-marriages. Children in the Sea Org suffer. Jenna Miscavige said that between the ages of twelve and sixteen she saw her mother only three times.

     The pay for a Sea Org member is poor, $45 per week, according to Amy Scobee, but the work is non-stop, often around the clock, and so people are sleep-deprived. If they turn negative on the church, Miscavige and his henchmen will send them to an RPF,  Rehabilitation Project Force, where they scrub dumpsters or clean toilets with a toothbrush.

     In the 1960’s comedy “Get Smart,” Maxwell Smart belonged to CONTROL, and he and agent 99 were constantly fighting KAOS. In most institutions those in control fear that others will attack and drive them out, and chaos will rush in, and so they adopt an us-against-them attitude.

     Defectors have admitted that David Miscavige is vicious, and has verbally and physically abused his underlings, calling them “scumbags,” and slapping them in public. Chaos has overwhelmed control.

     L. Ron Hubbard created an organization similar to himself: vindictive, committed to a wild and questionable mythology, paranoid, desperate, adulterous, litigious, grasping for more money, and capable of defamation and dirty tricks—a miserable prison of belief. Today is LRH’s birthday.

DAVID KORESH

by William H. Benson

February 28, 2013

     Bill Clinton, when campaigning for President in the autumn of 1992, visited workers at an electric utility plant outside Waco, Texas. He may or may not have know that he drove past a religious compound called Mount Carmel, originally built by the Branch Davidians but controlled at that time by another Seventh-Day Adventist splinter group led by Vernon Wayne Howell, aka David Koresh.

     So immersed in apocalyptic literature were Koresh’s followers that they were armed and ready for Clinton, but his motorcade passed by without attacking them, astonishing those inside the compound.

     The actual attack, code-named “Showtime,” came at 9:45 a.m., on Sunday morning, February 28, 1993, twenty years ago today, when over 75 Special Agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms approached Mount Carmel with an arrest warrant for David Koresh for violating gun laws.

     Although an undercover agent named Robert Rodriguez had warned his superiors that morning that Koresh knew the attack was coming, that he had been tipped off, the agents went ahead, and walked into an ambush. David Koresh told his people to prepare themselves, that “The Assyrians are coming.”

     Agents approached the front door, but Koresh slammed it shut. No one is sure who fired first, but a gun battle erupted first at the door that morning that raged for the next two hours throughout the compound while helicopters circled overhead. Four ATF agents were shot, killed, and carried away.

     Three of Koresh’s followers were shot and killed instantly: Peter Gent, Winston Blake, and an armed woman named Jaydean Wendell. Two others were severely wounded: Perry Jones and Peter Hipsman. Forensic evidence later indicated that they were subsequently shot at close range and killed, victims of mercy killings. David Koresh was shot in the hip that morning but survived.

     At 5:00 p.m. that evening ATF agents shot a sixth person, Michael Schroeder, who was trying to gain access into the compound after working at his job all day.

     It was a botched arrest attempt. “It was as if the agents had gone to war,” and that “the government appeared to have lost.” The media arrived with cameras, and the stand-off continued for fifty-one days.

     Questions surfaced. Why did the ATF not call off the operation once the agents knew that Koresh knew? Why did the ATF not arrest Koresh when he was alone in Waco? He drove into town several times every week. How did he get all the guns, and what religion would stockpile guns and ammo? The answers to those questions elude us still.

     What happened in Waco, Texas is a hornets nest. Stick in your hand, and you are sure to feel a sting. This tragedy circles around issues of scriptural authority, of laws inscribed into the legal code, of the government’s authority to intrude into people’s lives, and of Constitutional rights spelled out in the first and second Amendments: freedom to worship and right to bear arms. The pros and cons line up straight, facing each other with little room for deviation, discussion, or consensus.

     Some filtered out, but nearly a hundred committed to Koresh chose to stay inside the compound.

     The public gradually learned that David Koresh considered himself a Messiah, the Lamb of God, that he held the secret to the Seventh and final Seal, and that although he demanded celibacy from his followers, he practiced polygamy, siring as many as “seventeen children.” Even though the Seventh-Day Adventist church frowns on eating meat, drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes, David Koresh did all three and could cite a Bible verse to justify each. Psalm 18: “Smoke went up out of his nostrils.”

     The ATF special agents went to Mount Carmel, acting as governing officials, to administer the law because of their office, but according to one media observer, James M. Wall, “these officials entered a situation already heavily stacked against them. Neither the Treasury Department officials, nor the FBI, seemed to comprehend the dangerousness of a charismatic who was immersed in apocalyptic literature. To the Davidians, the long siege that followed was proof that the final days were imminent.”

     It was Janet Reano, Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, who gave her approval to an FBI plan to inject tear gas into the compound and punch holes into the walls to allow those inside a means to exit. On April 19, armored tanks did just that, but only nine people escaped. Seventy-six people died inside, consumed by the fire that broke out hours after the last tear gas canister was injected, or crushed by falling chunks of concrete when tanks pushed over the walls, or by self-inflicted gun shots. It was all too painful, too tragic, to see the smoke and flames and know the children perished. Yet it happened.

     The government published the Danforth Report on July 21, 2000, and inside its 1,001 pages, it declared that David Koresh and his fellows were responsible, that they “spread fuel throughout the main structure of the complex and ignited it in at least three places causing the fire which resulted in the deaths of those Branch Davidians not killed by their own fire.”

     David Koresh, 33-years-old, died that day, as did his wife and his several children and dozens more.

VALENTINE’S DAY

by William H. Benson

February 14, 2013

     Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was in court last week. More well known as Lady Gaga, she explained to the judge that she refuses to pay her former employee $390,000 for overtime hours because “she is a hood rat . . . suing me for money that she didn’t earn.” Lady Gaga said that she paid Jennifer O’Neill $75,000 a year, but O’Neill said she worked “virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” One can conclude that there was a breakdown in their employer-employee relationship

     In 2009 Lady Gaga released her pop hit “Bad Romance,” and I would admit that the music is superb. High school and college bands now play it frequently, but its lyrics, which Stefani Germanotta wrote, are inane, repetitive, witless, and vulgar, the exact ingredients necessary for a bad romance.

     Like other oxymorons—such as jumbo shrimp, plastic glasses, criminal law, civil war, and freezer burn—a “bad romance” cannot be. If it is a romance it is hearts, flowers, candy, cards, gifts, and Valentine’s Day all year long. If it is bad, then it is no longer a romance, but an oppressive nightmare.

     I am reminded of an essay entitled Popular Songs vs. The Facts of Life that the semantics professor, S. I. Hayakawa, wrote in 1954. Although dated, the essay makes a pertinent point that is still true today, that popular songs’ lyrics suffer from the “IFD disease—the triple-threat disorder of Idealization, Frustration, and Demoralization—that is often illustrated in the attitudes toward love.”

     Some songs idealize love, that it is instant, magic, forever, that all problems are solved, and that “you don’t have to do anything—the right magic makes all effort unnecessary.” So you hear lyrics that mention a “teen angel” or “just one look.” Inevitably the real world disrupts this idealization, people feel frustrated, and you hear lyrics about “feeling blue, being all alone, and crying a river of tears.”

Then, some lyrics, such as Dione Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” arrive at the third stage, that of demoralization, detachment, and absolute withdrawal from all romance.

     What is missing from the three categories of IFD disease is that inevitability called “change.” Conditions, feelings, circumstances, attitudes, desires, goals, and wishes constantly change. The exterior life does not always match what is changing in the inner life.

     Gail Sheehy, a best-selling author on relationships, said that women today divorce husbands who are physically and verbally abusive, or are chronic womanizers, or are alcoholics. The reverse is also true. Men men wake up one day and acknowledge a fact that the popular songs will not admit, that physical beauty does not equal or even indicate intelligence or a civil and polite tongue.

     Kenneth Burke, an American writer, said that “poetry is equipment for living.” It is tragic that the memorization and repetition of popular song lyrics is the closest that most youth ever get to poetry.

     Hayakawa said that “literature is learning. By literary symbols we are introduced to emotions and situations that we have not yet experienced.” It is further tragic that so few youth read or know of romances gone awry, such as the “two star-crossed lovers” in “Romeo and Juliet,” or how Othello’s need for certainty goaded him into murdering his wife, Desdemona, or how Macbeth’s spouse, Lady Macbeth, convinced him to murder the king. In their case, ambition made romance bad, very bad.

     Edward Tayler, English professor at Columbia, told his freshman literature students, “You’re here for very selfish reasons. You’re here to build a self. You create a self, you don’t inherit it. One way to create it is out of the past.” It is a selfish thing for a youth to devote years to reading literature and history. After all, he or she could be holding down a job, buying a house, getting married, but I say that reading literature and the past is a better preparation for life’s realities than repeating popular songs’ lyrics.

     In his essay, Hayakawa asked the question, “Do popular songs, listened to, often memorized and sung during youthful courtship, make the attainment of emotional maturity more difficult than it need be?” He answers his own question by quoting a therapist, who said, “I am up to my eyes in marriage counseling. I am consulted repeatedly about ill-considered marriages based upon very superficial and inadequate ideas regarding the nature of love and how it is recognized.”

     Some people are so unlucky in love, often through little or no fault of their own, other than poor planning and wishful thinking, and so they endure a series of bad romances. If you happen to have a “good” romance, enjoy it today, of all days, for you are indeed the lucky one. You are the fortunate one.  

Lincoln

by William H. Benson

January 31, 2013

     Two weeks ago I saw Steven Spielberg’s recent movie, Lincoln, and came away impressed. Sally Fields did an admirable job playing Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones played Thaddeus Stevens, but it was Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln, who was mesmerizing, riveting. It was if I was watching the real Abraham Lincoln, with all of his diffidence, hesitations, awkward mannerisms, ugliness, and squeaky voice fully displayed, with warts and beard and over-sized ears.

     Critics agree that Day-Lewis should win the “Best Actor” award. The movie critic in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg, was even more daring when he said that “Spielberg has made a very fine film—one that has no equal, no parallel that I know of in the entire movie canon.”

     I think that comment is accurate. Hollywood, I contend, ran out of script ideas decades ago, and is now a closed circle of repetitious romances, westerns, and adventure / spy movies, and few dare to break themselves loose from those molds. It is refreshing to see history—actual American history—acted out on the big screen for the world to witness.  

     Herzberg said, “One of the great Hollywood puzzles—scandals, even—is the paucity of first-rate films about the grand sweep of our country’s history. . . . There are no great movies, as far as I know, about, for example the American Revolution.” Then, the only movie in recent years that dramatized Colonial American history is Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of the French and Indian War, and it too starred Daniel Day-Lewis.

     Spielberg begins his movie Lincoln in January, 1865, when Lincoln only has three and a half months to live. He is so utterly determined to get the House to pass the 13^th Amendment that month that he barters behind the scenes, promising Congressmen jobs and money, in order to get their votes, and he wins. On January 31, the House passes the Amendment that abolished slavery for all time from the United States. Spielberg then quickly unfolds the final scenes of Lincoln’s life. 

     At the Hampton Roads Conference, held on February 3 in the saloon aboard the steamboat The River Queen, Lincoln and William Seward, the Secretary of State, meet the three Peace Commissioners from the South, and Lincoln bluntly tells them, “Slavery is dead.” He was correct. It was dead.

     Lincoln meets his real challenge at home when dealing with Mary Todd. He is out of his element in addressing his wife’s attitude and accusations. At one point in the movie, he shouts at her, “I wish for once you would take a more liberal view!” She cannot. The grief and self-blame she feels for the loss of their son, Willie, who died shortly after they moved into the White House, overwhelms her.

     On March 4, 1865, Lincoln gives his 2^nd Inaugural Address. What is remarkable is the discrepancy between his words’ beauty and power and his unpolished manner when he delivers them. Today crowds would laugh such a character off a political podium, but Day-Lewis captured, as well as it can be, Lincoln’s thin, high-pitched voice and his jerky body movements. In that regard Lincoln was truly odd.

     Towards the end of the 701-word speech, Lincoln equated political necessities with religion. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. The Almighty his own purposes. Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. With malice toward none, with charity for all.” The words still stir us.

     On April 1, Grant’s troops crushed the Confederates at Petersburg, and Lincoln chose to visit Grant there, but to get to his General, the President had to ride his horse through the battlefield. Lying all around him were the dead, those soldiers killed just the day before, “one man with a bullet-hole through his forehead, and another with both arms shot away.” Lincoln visibly wilts at the carnage.

     As for Lincoln’s assassination, Spielberg fools his audience. We all know that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in Ford’s Theater on Palm Sunday, but Spielberg shows us none of that. Instead, we see a crowded auditorium and a stage production of a magic show. We see Lincoln’s son Tad there, alone, and then someone rushes onto the stage and announces that the President has been shot. Tad screams, and we realize that the theater we were seeing was not Ford’s theater but another.

     Why did Spielberg play such a trick on his audience? Perhaps he understood that to do otherwise would have been too painful and too horrific for audiences to watch the horror play out. Instead, he permits us to watch Tad react to the grim news of his father’s passing. I suspect that this scene is historically inaccurate in that it is doubtful that Tad was allowed to attend a play without his parents.

     Lincoln’s final scene. There he lies on a bed, the blood from his head wound soaking into the pillow, and once the physician pronounces him dead, Edwin Stanton says, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Now that is historically accurate. Stanton actually did say that, and Lincoln does belong to the ages.

     Spielberg took a gamble, and he won with Lincoln.

DOGS

by William H. Benson

January 17, 2013

     January is “National Train Your Dog Month,” an activity that can lead to a surprising outcome.

     In 2011 a writer named Susan Orleans published a book on Rin-Tin-Tin. In the book she tells of an American soldier fighting in France during World War I who adopted a German Shepherd pup, brought it back to California, trained it, and the dog appeared in 23 silent films for Warner Brothers, becoming the most famous dog in the world and the number one box office star.

     In the 1960’s another Rin-Tin-Tin had his own television show, as did Rudd Weatherwax’s collie, Lassie, a show that appeared in black and white every Sunday evening at five o’clock.

     The most famous cartoon dog is Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy, Charles Schultz’s creation. Snoopy dreams he is the Red Baron, flying a World War I biplane and machine-gunning down the enemy. Dogs do dream, and so who is to say that they do not dream of wearing goggles, a scarf, and manning a gun.

     The best dog movie in recent years is “Marley and Me,” a movie based on the book that the newspaper columnist John Grogan wrote. The dog that he and his new bride purchase soon after their marriage is a yellow Labrador, exuberant, incorrigible, neurotic, and terrified of lightning and thunder. Grogan and his wife have three children, and the dog becomes a fixture in the family, despite his faults.

     One critic called the movie “the single most endearing and authentic movie about the human-canine connection in decades. It’s also something more: a disarmingly enjoyable, wholehearted comic vision of the happy messiness of family life.” The movie opened Christmas Day 2008 and grossed $14.75 million that first day, setting a new record. I recommend it.

     Cesar Milan, host of his own television show on dog training, says that “healthy, balanced dogs require strong pack leadership from their owners, in the form of exercise, discipline, and affection, in that order.” It is a mistake, he says “to give a great deal of affection with little discipline or exercise.” In other words take your dog for a walk, command them to heel, and then rub their ears.

     “What’s A Dog For?” is the title of a new book that the writer John Homans recently published. He answers his question with a single word: “convergence.” Because dogs have lived for millennium with human beings, they have become more like humans, and “the two species forged a brotherhood.”

     Homans quotes James Thurber: “Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.

     Dogs are so dependent upon human beings for their food and shelter. Ages ago, they sacrificed their independence and wildness for human comfort and care. One wonders what they think of their owners. Experts agree that dogs are pack animals, “even when that group consists of other dogs, humans, and cats.” They sort themselves out according to gradations of dominance.

     Their sense of smell overpowers that of humans by a magnitude of tens of thousands. Dogs can detect odors in parts per trillion. Where humans have 6 million olfactory receptors, a dog has 300 million. “The world to a dog is not a visual one but a richly odoriferous one.” It is just a pity that they cannot talk and tell us what their sense of smell is conveying to them.

     And yet, Homans says, a dog has learned to visually recognize human gestures, like pointing, “something that even our primate cousins cannot do.”

     Human beings have harnessed dogs’ unique abilities. There are seeing-eye dogs for the blind, dogs for herding sheep, police dogs for terrifying law-breakers, dogs for sniffing drugs, dogs for tracking lost people, and for those suffering from a peanut allergy, there are peanut-detecting dogs.

     The actor Jimmy Stewart wrote a poem about his dog named Beau, and he read it to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on July 28, 1981, causing even Johnny to tear up. You can watch it on YouTube.

     “And there were nights he would crawl upon our bed and I would feel him between us, and I would pat his head. And there were nights when I’d feel his stare and I would look, and he’d be sitting there, and I would reach out to stroke his hair. And sometimes I would feel him sigh, and I think I know the reason why. He’d wake up at night, and he would have this fear of the dark, of life, of lots of things, and he’d be glad to have me near.

     “And now he’s dead, and there are nights when I think I feel him climb upon our bed and lie between us, and I pat his head. And there are nights when I think I feel that stare, and I reach out my hand to stroke his hair, and he’s not there. Oh how I wish that weren’t so. I’ll always love a dog name Beau.”

     Dogs do not understand that this wonderful thing called life will end some day. Homans said, “It’s not that a dog accepts the cards it’s been dealt; it’s not aware that there are cards.” James Thurber said, “If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very very few persons.” It is a pity that dogs live such short lives. So train your dog today.

GEORGE ORWELL AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

by William H. Benson

January 3, 2013

     Every year since 1976, a college in Michigan, Lake Superior State University, publishes late in the year its List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English. Examples from past years include “first time ever,” and “dot.com.” Among the recently-announced winners for 2012 are: “amazing,” “shared sacrifice,” “occupy,” “man cave,” “the new normal,” “ginormous,” and “thank you in advance,” a phrase that “is a condescending way to say, ‘Since I already thanked you, you have to do this.’”

     The American Dialect Society approaches words differently. Instead of banishing words, it meets early in January each year and votes on the Word of the Year. Last year’s winner was “occupy,” and previous winners include: “app,” “tweet,” “bailout,” and “subprime.” The society will meet on Friday evening this week in Boston and vote. Possible winners are: “YOLO,” (you only live once), “selfie,” (a photograph that you take of yourself), “malarky,” “superstorm,” “double down,” and “fiscal cliff.”

     Looking back at 2012, I think we can agree that because it was a presidential election year, we were inundated for twelve months with words. We heard arguments for and against the issues: healthcare, the budget, the deficit, taxes, spending, and the fiscal crisis. We listened to debates, and infrequently we heard words filled with substance. More often we heard vapid words filled with air.

     Whenever the focus is upon words, I gravitate repeatedly back to the British writer George Orwell, who wrote in 1946 a most perceptive column, “Politics and the English Language.” Although seldom applied to our English prose, his column deserves frequent re-reading.

     He begins by saying that “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way,” and that, “Our civilization is decadent and our language must share in the general collapse.” Orwell points out “the slovenliness of our language,” and that all bad writing, he contends, has two common qualities: “staleness of imagery,” and “lack of precision.”

     “Prose,” he writes, “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a henhouse.”

     Orwell then mentions four categories of bad writing. Examples of dying metaphors he lists are: “an axe to grind,” “ride roughshod over,” and “toe the line.” Verbal false limbs are empty words, such as “render inoperative,” “be subjected to,” “give rise to,” “have the effect of,” and “make itself felt.”

     Pretentious diction are words designed to impress, such as the words “phenomenon, objective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, exhibit, utilize, and eliminate,” Then, there are the meaningless words used especially in art and literary criticism: “romantic, plastic, values, human, sentimental, natural, and vitality.” Difficult to define, such words evade meaning.

     Orwell calls these four categories a “catalog of swindles and perversions,” an apt description.

     Instead, he cites an example of excellent English prose: “I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” For those unacquainted with the King James Bible, one can find those words in Ecclesiastes.

     Orwell then translates the same words into modern English: “Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

     Everyone, except perhaps a government official, would rather read the King James version.

     Orwell ends his article with a frightening thought. “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” Although he does not say it, he implies that if we dared to use imagery and precision in our language, we will clear the chaos, find our way, and solve issues.

     With a new year beginning, it is now the goal-setting season. Included among my goals for 2013: to strengthen my vocabulary, work imagery and precision into my language, avoid the trite and hackneyed cliche, and perhaps coin some new words. For a first example, how about “inrageous,” a less strident form of “outrageous?” Instead of being outraged, people might be “inraged.”

     Above all else, I will avoid those words I find most disagreeable, such as “24-7,” “seriously,” “going forward,” and “as you know,” a phrase writers frequently use as a forerunner before giving their opinion. I say that a writer should not assume that a reader knows what the writer is about to write.

     Today the most overworked word in the English language is “excited.” The words “I’m excited” cover a lot of territory. Is anyone ever agitated, disturbed, fretful, confused, bewildered, enthused, pleased, or are we all just excited? We are definitely not “excited” about our less than “amazing” political leadership, and we would hesitate to “thank them in advance,” “as you know,” “24-7.”