Author’s Note: Vic, Your recent turn of phrase “What’s next?” regarding American events these past five months spurred me to write this short piece. I am unsure my characterization of the ending list of phrases, words and concepts answers your query, since I have direct evidence from colleagues that well more than half of them are already in force or being seriously discussed in business and government.

These are times most curious. We seem to be cursed.

-Marlow

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A primary function of a healthy culture is to make important knowledge widely available by submerging it into universally held traditional acts and beliefs. In this way, a healthy culture democratizes intelligence. Conversely, the absence of such cultural functioning injures mostly those with the fewest intellectual resources, condemning them to survive, more or less, on their own. That’s why this endless 24/7 televised and social media spectacle of meager bread and street circus acts of elitist “white guilt” purification without considering the accompanying extra amounts of permanent stupid we are accruing seems so ill advised. It’s as if we are forever chipping away at our childhoods’ received wisdom from fairy and folk tales. Statues, words, concepts are all under siege as if they really mattered or will make a difference to, let alone solve, the underlying issues at hand.

All but one of my grandparents were immigrants and very sensitive to “otherness.” Only now in my senescence am I becoming more intimately familiar with what that meant and felt like to them as I react to these current public ceremonial days of cleanliness.

Persons offended by “(fill in the blank) lives matter” are free to look away. Or post a responsive sign. Or to march. Or to make a speech. What he or she should not be allowed to do is to limit the free, even if offensive, speech of another. I thought that was a bedrock principle. I guess that shows how old-fashioned I am.

I’m glad three men I admire — George Orwell, Anthony Lewis, and Mario Savio — are not alive to see the state of free speech in America today.

My point? No point, except that the young should push the boundaries, express themselves, even if impolitely.

George:

“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. . .”

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

Anthony:

“If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. . .

“A final argument for broad freedom of expression is its effect on the character of individuals in a society. Citizens in a free society must have courage — the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but novel and shocking ideas in the arts and sciences.”

Mario:

“The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well-rounded person. The university is well equipped to produce that sort of person, and this means that the best among the people who enter must for four years wander aimlessly much of the time questioning why they are on campus at all, doubting whether there is any point in what they are doing, and looking toward a very bleak existence afterward in a game in which all of the rules have been made up, which one cannot really amend.”

Freedom. What a concept.

And now for a short list of terms, concepts and phrases that are likely to fall into America’s growing Memory Hole (sort of a preliminary candidate “What’s next?” list if you will):

whitelist & blacklist
master/slave IT terminology still widely used in the USAF; same for the phrase “shoot the server in the head” regarding wiping and re-loading it.
Fort Pillow commercial from GEICO. There was an actual Fort Pillow at which black Union soldiers were massacred by Confederate troops. The mere use of the words “Fort Pillow” was enough to cause them to yank the commercial, despite the context, because context no longer matters and words can be deemed forever verboten, regardless. Maybe, the GEICO Caveman will finally get a much deserved multi-million-dollar settlement.
Vanilla as in “vanilla contract” and other uses of this adjective.
Brown Cow fountain drink.
Oreos
Snow White
Dixie Cups & Dixie Beer
white hat & black hat
white paper
whiteheads and blackheads
white and black knights
black ops; special ops may not pass muster due to possibly offending the developmentally disabled
black sheep

I am sure there are more.

This revolution is going to eat itself. Or, like Saturn, its children. Whatever. The gap between these rebel’s real and declared aims has led them instinctively to use long words and tired idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. I just hope they hurry it up.

Page from George Orwell’s novel 1984. The bolded words were the official slogans of the Party.
They were inscribed in massive letters on the white pyramid of the novel’s Ministry of Truth.

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