Palilogia: Repetition of the same word, with none between, for vehemence. Synonym for epizeuxis.
Boom, boom, bloom, boom! 4th of July was fantastic. The exploding colors in the sky perfectly celebrated the smashing of the Brits and the opening of American Independence. We were free! We are free! How much longer will we be free? I hope forever, but the fragility of the struts quo is evident everywhere. The Kings and Queens of the Supreme Court are free, free to lay down dictates formed from their majority vote.
The dictates wash over the rest of us like cleansing rivers of truth or as stinking lines of oppression borne on flumes of scarred and purchased judgments. Oh well, that’s just the way it is. If you agree with the judgment you cheer in the streets. If you don’t agree, you may protest in the streets and cry in the shadows over the protests’ futility and your fear for the future.
Where there are winners, there are losers. That’s the hell of Democracy and games in general. But voting isn’t the medium of decision in any games that I know of, except maybe swimming and gymnastics and figure skating where the judges hold up their judgments as numbers on cards.
But nobody “knows” what’s good for the country, although candidates act like they do. What’s “best” for the USA is a matter of opinion, resting on a bundle of factors that come from, and go to, everywhere-all-at-once. A cacophonous hodgepodge of conflicting and synonymous ideas—or more accurately—beliefs, are sorted by rhetoric and aimed toward the future in packages of probability and songs of contingency.
But the future does not exist. Certainly, it will exist, but we do not know what it will be: we believe, we have hope, we have faith, but we do not know. We have to make decisions. Politicians strew vivid narratives as highways to hoped-for futures. But these highways criss-cross in a jumble of roadways leading to promises of love, peace and happiness. Different ways, different destinations bearing adjectives that glow and motivate people to take the trip to heaven-town which may be somebody else’s hell-town, laced with different particulars that are judged true, good, and beautiful, and false, evil, and ugly at the same rime. “Judged” is the key term. In politics, judgments constitute decisions aimed at the future, and curiously, decisions can constitute futures that are the opposite of what was hoped-for.
Sadly, or not, that’s why democracy rolls on majority views, with tiny islands preserved for minority views. Among an ensemble of humans as big as the USA total consensus is impossible. Majority rule is the best we can do. But there’s no guarantee that the majority is “right.” There was a time when the “majority” believed the earth was flat.
Beware of attempts to overturn elections, they are the beginning of the end of our democracy, and freedom too. Citizens must be willing to bear the weight of decision regardless of their alignment with their hopes or fears. This can take the shape of voicing opposition or affirming the status quo. “Sitting it out” is the worst thing a citizen can do, along with insurrection and assassination.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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