Strategic Rhetoric Reserves Shrinking

Critics of health care reform worry it will bankrupt the country. I'm worried that the overheated debate swirling around the issue has emptied our strategic rhetoric reserves.

What happens now if Blofeld steals a nuke and holds the world hostage, or President Harrison Ford is kidnapped aboard Air Force One or the Barbary pirates rise again? We'll rush to grab some bracing, high-proof words from our lexicographic cellar and find we're fresh out of good, strong stuff.

All our best, heavily gunned rhetorical frigates were deployed to open fire on ... insurance exchanges?

Totalitarian, tyranny, Armageddon, Stalin, Hitler, etc. Once razor-sharp attention-grabbers, now devalued and dulled by a long, misguided deployment. I fear it will never be the same.

“Dude, did you drink the last Bud Light?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, man.”

“This act of brazen tyranny shall not stand, dude. Six Semper Budweiserus!”

Certainly, there is plenty of fair criticism of health care reform, which could be clearly expressed with conventional weapons. Use bloated, misguided, foolish, ill-conceived, awful, onerous, if you must. Heck, throw in buffoonery, skulduggery and malfeasance if you need to make a passionate point.

But should we climb to the tiptop shelf in our library of fighting words, breaking the glass with a sledgehammer and throwing totalitarian Stalinist tyranny at a piece of legislation, of all things, ratified by a popularly elected Congress and president? A bill that, just a few years agom would have been considered a centrist approach to health reform?

I'm just not getting a tyranny tingle up my leg. Sorry.

And what will we do when real tyranny occurs - call it super-sized tyranny, extra-tyrannical or tyranny 2.0? That is not going to be terribly satisfying. Totalitarian, where is thy sting? Ask Steve King.

I suppose this should be expected in a nation where every idea is “bold” and every minor development is a critical “game-changer,” every legislative action is “historic” and every celebrity, no matter how useless, demands constant attention. Those crazy, yelling used car salesmen we used to chuckle at now sound like statesmen.

Maybe we're just too comfy in our frothed latte and pedicure-on-demand world to understand how silly we sound. Maybe we could all use a little quality vacation time in North Korea or Myanmar to gain some real totalitarian perspective.

Or, how about just toning it down, extinguishing our hair and taking a deep breath? Put Hitler back in the bunker, Stalin back in the Gulag, and hash out our disagreements in sensible terms.

That way, when the pirates show, we'll be ready.

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