Work is a Four Letter Word

Work is a Four Letter Word

By Richard Girard

"I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves."

Bruce Grocott (b. 1940), British Labour politician. Quoted in: Observer (London, 22 May 1988).

Language is the most powerful tool that humanity has ever developed for both its advancement and repression.

More precise than a surgeon's scalpel, mightier than any sword, as crude and unfeeling as an ogre's club: language's use and misuse has inspired and aroused humanity's worthiest achievements as well as its most horrific tragedies; too often in the name of some transient cause or vainglorious triumph.

Masters of the rhetorical art too often believe that the power of their words can overcome any insufficiency of truth in their argument. If stated with sufficient volume both in terms of quantity of prose, and the repression of other information by the sheer weight of that massive volume, they believe they can turn black into white, up into down, slavery into freedom, and wrong into right.

We the People of the United States have permitted the deluge of propaganda from unscrupulous commentators and politicians to override both our knowledge and our common sense. We have done this while permitting ourselves to be sold a bill of goods of continuing or improving governmental services, while taxes are continually reduced for those who are best able to pay.

The rude indifference of the plutocrats' propagandists to either reality or the needs of the 90% of Americans who have no claim to a seat at or near the oligarchs' table, has crippled America's middle class (those 75% of the American people in 1980 who were between the lowest 15% in annual income and the top 10% in annual income), leaving them increasingly destitute and shorn of any reasonable safety net.

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