Saying much by saying nothing.

Dear George,

Language is a whore who spreads her legs for any John with money in his pocket. And like a whore, she is quick to cut your throat if you abuse her. She can inspire, inform, emote or bore. She has started wars and fistfights, but is equally able to soothe and comfort.

In politics, language has a special role. In the real world, words communicate. For the politician, words are like the zeros in arithmetic; they are place holders devoid of both value and semantic information.

When pundits, politicians and experts talk about the current economic challenges facing America, they dance around the R word and the D word. Both recession and depression carry too much emotional baggage to be of any use. What is needed is a word that is a semantic zero, that conceals more that it reveals. You need a label, George, because understanding and analysis end where the label begins. A well-turned label becomes the lens through which reality is refracted.

May I suggest that in the future when your minions discuss the economy they say that America is now going through a countersession? Here is a word that speaks volumes without saying a damn thing. Because it says nothing, it neutralizes and comforts.

Explain that a countersession is simply an historical trend that focuses the benefits of unbridled growth on the demographic most likely to benefit from its returns. What we are seeing is not an economic downturn, but an economic adjustment.

A countersession is simply a structural adjustment that is reflective of the democratization of the global economy. It is an egalitarian movement that will establish parity between American workers and Third World workers. In a world of increasingly scarce resources, our obscene standard of living must go south if we are to avoid species extinction. This is facilitated by the upward movement of capital to the top of the food chain.

In a countersession, financial retards are turned loose on the economy in the expectations that they will encourage this upward movement by trashing the economy thus making it easier to gut the social programs that have only served to enrich the underclasses by tying up capital that could have been better used to invest in more derivatives.

Once the drones accept the fact that the country is in a countersession, they will breathe a sigh of relief and will greet you a liberator who has freed them of the oppression of debt-driven consumption. Nothing comforts like a rhetorical void.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones