Last night on the NPR show Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Frank Luntz. When I found the link this morning to review the show, I was stunned at what a freshly scrubbed, chipper face evil has chosen to wear. Luntz has even shaved his beard.
Luntz is usually dubbed a "Republican pollster." But he’s far more than that. Luntz has made a career of helping Republicans and other corporate manipulators change our perceptions through word choices. It’s the kind of thing people pooh-pooh as alarmist until they consider that they already have had their heads invaded by this pugnacious word-mangler. Take "death tax" as a replacement for "inheritance tax," for instance. Luntz vigorously defended his phrasing as somehow more accurate and clear, because someone must die for the tax to be levied. As if, Gross pointed out, everyone who died paid this tax, when in fact it’s only those who die with over two million bucks and pass it on to someone.
Then there’s "climate change" instead of global warming, and "energy exploration" instead of oil drilling. He’s attempting to win arguments before they even begin by calling up warm fuzziness instead of alarm to make those who would oppose such things look extreme, a word he used perhaps more than any other in the interview. To claim that such clearly manipulative constructions aid clarity is nauseating.
All of that was a warm-up to the main event, though. In a breathtaking spiral of irony like unto that endless progression of images one sees with two mirrors facing each other, Luntz attempted to change the meaning of "Orwellian." He argued that those who would criticize with that term were just misinformed, and that Orwellian in fact alludes to clarity, since Orwell wrote a book about language use.
Good luck with that one, Luntz. Not even you can pull that off. How did he get to a place in his moral reasoning that this seemed like an okay thing to do?
It can’t, however, hold a candle to the time when Terry Gross interviewed Grover Norquist, who said of taxing the wealthiest Americans more than others, "I mean, that’s the morality of the Holocaust." He really, truly did.
Luntz is probably behind one of my pet peeves: noticed how Republicans have taken the adjectival form of Democrat, "Democratic," and replaced it, lest people associate something positive and democratic with the Democrats? As in: "This new Democrat proposal is bad." Democrat used to only be a noun. In fact, it still is.
It’s sad that our culture allows such soulless people to influence our speech and our thoughts. And sadder yet that most of us don’t know it.
