The worst thing about e-mail is that you can’t interrupt the other person. You have to read the whole thing and then e-mail them back, pointing out all their mistakes and faulty assumptions. It’s frustrating and it’s time-consuming. God bless phone calls.

I can’t understand a grown man whose nickname is Fuzzy and who actually allows people to call him that. Do these guys really introduce themselves that way? “Hi, I’m Fuzzy.’ If some guy said that to me, I would say to him, “Well, you don’t look very fuzzy to me.”

If you vote once, you’re considered a good citizen. If you vote twice, you face four years in jail.

In this country, alcohol is hardly ever seen as a drug problem. Instead, we think of it as more of a driving problem.

Life is simple: Your happiness will be based completely on luck and genetics. Everything comes down to luck and genetics. And when you think about it, even your genetics is luck.

Seems as though I never get to do the fox-trot anymore.

What’s going on with these people who tell you to “have a safe trip’? I would never tell a person that. Because if they died it would feel really creepy.

If I had been in charge of reorganizing the government’s security agencies into a homeland defense organization, I would have divided the responsibilities into two agencies: The Bureau of What the Fuck Was That? and The Department of What the Fuck Are We Gonna Do Now?

READ ONLY

Don’t you get tired of this simpleminded Laura Bush nonsense about children reading, or reading to children, or teaching children to read, or reading to children about teaching, or whatever the fuck it is? What is it with these Bush women? His motherthe big silver douche bagwas into the same sort of nonsense. These women should not be encouraging children to read, they should be encouraging children to question what they read. Content is far more important than the mere act of sitting with your mother and dragging your eyes across text. By the way, I noticed that, apparently, the idea of teaching children to read didn’t work when Barbara tried it on George.

When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops

EUPHEMISMS: Political-Interest Groups

Not all the political manipulation of language is done by the big bad politicians. A lot of it comes from people who think of themselves as good and virtuous: the politically active. Activists. As opposed, I guess, to “passivists.” Who should not be confused with pacifists, who are, after all, quite often activists.

GOD HELP US

Let’s start with faith-based, which was chosen by right-wing holy people to replace the word religious in political contexts. In other words, they’ve conceded that religion has a bad name. I guess they figured people worry about religious fanatics, but no one’s ever heard of a faith-basedfanatic.

And by the way, none of the Bush religious fanatics will admit this, but the destruction of the World Trade Center was a faith-based initiative. A fundamentalist-Moslem, faith-based initiative. Different faith, but hey, were all about diversity here.

The use of faith-based is just one more way the Bush administration found to bypass the Constitution. They knew Americans would never approve of government-promoted religious initiatives, but faith-based? Hey, what’s the problem?

The term faith-based is nothing more than an attempt to slip religion past you when you’re not thinking; which is the way religion is always slipped past you. It deprives you of choice; choice being another word the political-speech manipulators find extremely useful.

CHOOSING SIDES

School choice, and the more sophisticated version, parental choice, are code phrases that disguise the right wing’s plan to use government money to finance religious education. If you hear the word voucher, watch out for the religious right. Again, though, be alert for the more sophisticated term for vouchers: opportunity scholarships.

It’s impossible to mention the word choice without thinking of the language that has come out of the abortion wars. Back when those battles were first being joined, the religious fanatics realized that antiabortion sounded negative and lacked emotional power. So they decided to call themselves pro-life. Pro-life not only made them appear virtuous, it had the additional advantage of suggesting their opponents were anti-life, and, therefore, pro-death. They also came up with a lovely variation designed to get you all warm inside: pro-family.

Well, the left wing didn’t want to be seen as either anti-life or pro-death, and they knew pro-abortion wasn’t what they needed, so they decided on pro

choice. That completed the name game and gave the world the now classic struggle: pro-choice vs. pro-life. The interesting part is that the words life and choice are not even opposites. But there they are, hangin’ out together, bigger than life.

And by the way, during this period of name-choosing, thanks to one more touch of left-wing magic, thousands of abortionists’ offices were slowly and mysteriously turning into family-planning clinics.

And on the subject of those places, I think the left really ought to do something about this needlessly emotional phrase back-alley abortions. uWe don’t want to go back to the days of back-alley abortions.” Please. Its over-descriptive; how many abortions ever took place in back alleys? Or, okay, in places where the entrance was through a back alley? Long before Roe v. Wade, when I was a young man, every abortion I ever paid for took place in an ordinary doctor’s office, in a medical building. We came in through the front door and took the elevator. The three of us. Of course, as we were leaving, the elevator carried a lighter load.

A BUNNY IN THE OVEN?

Then there’s the fetus-unborn child argument. Even leaving aside personal feelings, the semantics of this alone are fun to unravel. To my way of thinking, whatever it is, if it’s unborn, it’s not a child. A child has already been born; that’s what makes it a child. A fetus is not a child, because it hasn’t been born yet. That’s why it’s called a fetus. You can call it an unborn fetus if you want (it’s redundant), but you can’t call it an unborn child. Because not to belabor thisto be a child, it has to be born. Remember? The word unborn may sound wonderful to certain people, but it doesn’t tell you anything. You could say a Volkswagen is unborn. But what would it mean?

The fanatics have another name for fetuses. They call them the pre-born. Now we’re getting creative. If you accept pre-born, I think you would have to say that, at the moment of birth, we go instantly from being pre-born to being pre-dead. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Technically, we’re all pre-dead. Although, if you think about it even harder, the word pre-dead probably would best be reserved for describing stillborn babies. The post-born pre-dead.

By the way, I think the reason conservatives want all these babies to be born is that they simply like the idea of birth. That’s why so many of them have been born again. They can’t get enough of it.

TARZAN WOULD BE MORTIFIED

Here’s some more left-wing nonsense, this time from the environmentalists, the folks who gave us the rainforest. “Save the rain forest.” They decided to call it that because they needed to raise money, and they knew no one would give them money to save a. jungle. “Save the jungle” doesn’t sound right. Same with swamp. “Save the swamp!” Not gonna work. Swamp became wetland! Nicer word. Sounds more fragile. “Save the wetlands.” Send money.

But I think the environmentalists still have their work cut out for them when it comes to global warming and the greenhouse effect. As I see it, these terms are far too pleasant for people to get all worked up about. For one thing, global is too all-embracing for Americans; it’s not selfish enough. “Isn’t globalization that thing that’s been stealing our jobs?” Global doesn’t make it. And warming is such a nice word. Who wouldn’t want a little warming?