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The Meaning of Words
January 21st, 2005 at 10:46 Björn Hallberg
The Bush inauguration. Like the crowning of a king. A really big event in the news but no more than hot air and flatulence for those who do not agree that Bush is the Second Coming. And there they were, safely guarded by the biggest security hoopla in presidential history, the elite. Snug within their fur coats and a one hundred block police controlled zone, perhaps a taste of things to come. Or a manifestation and a powerful metaphor of how reality is. Protesters were dealt with swiftly but even though they were effectively placed in the back, their activism shows great promise for democracy as it were.
I took the liberty (seems to be the word of the day) of running the inaugural address as can be found here through a word frequency analysis and here are a few select results from that list:
| 27 | FREEDOM |
| 15 | LIBERTY |
| 12 | AMERICA |
| 8 | AMERICA’S |
| 8 | AMERICANS |
| 8 | WORLD |
| 8 | OWN (adjective form) |
| 6 | FREE |
| 6 | JUSTICE |
| 5 | UNITED STATES |
| 5 | TYRANNY |
| 3 | ENEMIES |
| 3 | GOD |
| 2 | OWNERSHIP |
Isn’t that interesting? 48 occurrences of either "freedom", "free" or "liberty" within 21 minutes. Talk about oral flatulence. And obviously three meagre cases of "God" is still three too many. I found it particularly interesting to hear that Bush claimed not to bring an American form of government to the unwilling. As laughable as that is, the US historical and continued meddling with and oppression of less powerful nations is staggering really. And as pointed out in the article above, the US still has no qualms about teaming up with the so called tyrannies, if it suits their purpose.
And about this talk of an ownership society it’s kind of frightening really. I would have hoped that we could move away from those kind of ideas. America is already number one on ownership and false dreams. Isn’t it time to take a step back and ask yourselves why America has got over 1 MILLION lawyers (70 percent of the world total). If that is what is called freedom then I want no part of it. There is a delicate balance between individual and society and the US has broken that balance in much the same, if opposite, way that the Soviet Union once did.
There is also the question of WHO will own newly privatized corporations. Five bucks that it will be the same elite cronies that courted Bush in Washington. Equal chance and opportunity is one of the best lies ever told.
Entry 20 filed under: North America. This entry was posted 3 years, 10 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.
