This story on the use of the word treason from NPR really hit home with me because I was deeply offended at Rick Perry’s use of the word towards the Chairmen of the Fed–doing your job as Fed chairman in a way that somebody like Rick Perry doesn’t agree with does not make one a traitor. I was on board when people used the word to describe the actions of John Walker Lindh, the spoiled brat from Marin County who is better known as The American Taliban. But I’m getting rather tired of the incendiary language–as one of my blog posts in response to Roger Ailes claim that NPR “are like Nazis.”

Is it really that hard to say “NPR does not reflect my values or ideas, so I really don’t want public funding to go to its one-sided way of presenting ideas” or “I really think that loosening monetary supply would be a disaster, and Bernake would be responsible for terrible consequence for the US and the world if he did that.”

Apparently, it is hard, according to Brian Carso in the story:

Treason, says Brian Carso, is a word that “has always been used as a prominent shorthand to evoke the intellectual and emotional content surrounding issues of loyalty, allegiance and betrayal.”

So I suppose in Troglodyte Nation (what the US has turned into I gather), nuanced argument is simply gone:

“Until the average American citizen can talk about abstract ideas like political obligation — which will not be anytime soon, presumably,” Carso says, “then we will continue to hear ‘treason’ as a way to conjure people’s deep-seated feelings toward their sense of national identity.”

I guess, given that we’ve decided to be a nation of people who both takes our tremendous privileges for granted by being ignorant about them but still be “patriotic” at some knee-jerk level, we’re going to have to listen to political discourse that boils down to “You’re fat and dumb and bad leader” and “Me no like printing money. Me hit Fed Chairman with rock.” from both sides of the political spectrum.

Sigh.