The Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)(Column)

Random thoughts on what may yet go down in history as the War Without a Name . . .

Can you remember, off the top of your head, the last thing they came up with? I can't. If the Bushies put it through the sensitivity grinder one more time they'll have to call it the Inoffensive Offensive. They're like a teenage girl experimenting with her name; address the newly minted "Luci" as "Lucy" and she becomes hysterical.

Speaking of word endings, the real epidemic is not anthrax but dropped gs. Both Bushes long ago made a point of adopting this speech habit to pass as just-plain-folks, but now it has spread to just about everyone who speaks publicly, from Donald Rumsfeld to Diane Dimond. Their aim is to project jaunty confidence, but the overall effect is that of globetrotting country boys and sleekly coiffed hicks. Dropped gs have been weaponized, aerosoled, enspored. Delivered to us in the electronic envelope of television, they waft out and float around us like crumbly mist, fulfilling the ancient prophecy that the English language will end, not with a bang, but with a whoosh.

Also contributing to its death throes is the constant reiteration that we are not making war on a race, religion, nation, or region, but on terrorism. This means we don't dare call the enemy Arabs, Muslims, Afghanis, or Middle Easterners lest we destroy some imaginary coalition, so Bush calls them "the evil ones." Black-and-white thinking is refreshing to a point, but he's beginning to sound like the host of a classic-movie channel introducing Vincent Price Week.

The most curious thing to emerge from the crisis were the descriptions of the 54-year-old Bush as our "young president" that suddenly cropped up in the print media, in columns by Ben Bradlee and Maureen Dowd, to name just two. Combined with regular assurances that Cheney had been whisked off to an undisclosed secret location, it sounded like a coup in the works. Now, though, the infantilization has stopped and the danger is past, thwarted by Bush himself. Whether he realizes it or not, he burnished his own image when he gave Tom Ridge the Javert-like title of Homeland Security Director. The one man in America whose eyes are even more pleading than Bush's own, Ridge looks as lost as a Dickensian orphan, with no trace of the saving pluckiness that goes with the type. His air of helpless abandonment, combined with his incredibly tiny mouth, are a guarantee that Bush will never be called young again.

The War Without a Name is proving that patriotism is the last refuge of the tone-deaf. Just because "God Bless America" is easier to sing than "The Star-Spangled Banner" is no excuse for singing it if you can't carry a tune in a bucket. Emboldened by GBA's un-operatic range, alleged singers with no memory of Kate Smith are murdering it with ululating shrieks and gulpy crooning, or belting it out like the last of the red-hot mamas in the manner of Jessica Simpson, the Las Vegas lounge singer and teenage pop star who performed it at the White House, with ...