BECAUSE I SAID SO

My sister and brother-in-law took me to Big Bear last weekend. That was kind of them. I had a heck of a time stomping around in the snow with my 3-year-old niece and communing with squirrels larger than my dog. But I have to tell you: boy-howdy, does a pack-a-day smoker have no business being 7,300 feet up in 20-degree weather!

And speaking of having no business being where one is, W took to the airwaves a couple of weeks back to explain, once again, just what it is that everyone in the world but him misunderstands about why we need to be in Iraq. He's having a rough time, poor W, because the way he describes the place, it sounds to most of us like the last spot on earth we would want to be. In his own words, we've got our sons and daughters mired in a far-off land that is crawling with “Islamic radicals” and “roaming death squads” and, worst of all, “extremists” of every stripe. There are Shia extremists, Sunni extremists, fundamentalist extremists and, believe it or not, even some radical fundamentalist Islamic extremists!

Any of you who had freshman composition should have read George Orwell's canonical essay, Politics and the English Language, in which the 20th-century master observed that:

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

Had Orwell lived to witness the devastation dealt his beloved language by this year's State of the Union address, he'd have shat his trousers. “Extremists”? What the hell are those? Why can't we just say “monsters”? What does “fundamentalist Islamic extremists” mean? Does it refer to people who believe in the foundation of Islam extremely? I don't think so. I think it refers to psychopaths who want to blow themselves and other people to hell and gone over some bizarre set of beliefs. I think it refers to monsters. They might be fundamentally scary radical extremist nut-job Arab monsters, but monsters will suffice.

Now, I'm not going to go into which construal of the message of Islam is the right one, and I won't spend any time at all analyzing a word as opaquely dissembling as “fundamentalist.” I will, however, take issue with the word “extremist” and, by extension, those silly sumbitches who use it. The term itself is of recent coinage, first entering the political vernacular in 1865. According to Merriam-Webster, it refers to one who advocates “extreme political views.” Contrast it with “moderate,” which has been around since 1794 and, according to the same authority, refers to those who hold “moderate views.” Gotta love Merriam-Webster. There's nothing like defining a term by itself.

Well, I'm no dummy. I know that “moderate” and “extremist” are noun forms of adjectives. If one is a moderate drinker, then one could say that when it comes to drinking, one is “a moderate.” Likewise, in the adverbial form, one could say that in San Diego (a nice place), these past few weeks have been moderately cold, whereas in Oklahoma (a really terrible place), they have been extremely cold. Moderation and extremity are a nice pair that way.

But the way W uses the terms, they aren't adjectives, they're substantive nouns. So what about people who are right on the verge of deciding to strap some high explosives to their chests for the glory of Allah but haven't made the final commitment? Could one say they are just moderate extremists? And what about people who believe everyone everywhere should participate freely in the open, tolerant society of their choosing? Are such people extreme moderates? I'm telling you, if we start diving down semantic rabbit holes, we're liable to end up facing a jabberwocky like the extremely moderate extremist-and that's one ugly bugger we don't want to meet!

As we say in my family, we've done dove down enough rabbit holes. The monsters in whose particular warren we find ourselves are none too fond of anything we stand for, and I don't think it helps for us to call them something they're not. They are not extremists; that word doesn't mean anything. But they are extremely willing to die in an attempt to kill people from different factions, different faiths, different sects and different lands-like us, for instance.

And I'm sure at least a few of you might ask, “What difference does it make what we call them?” It makes a big difference, actually. For one thing, if we called them monsters, more of us might have a better understanding of why it is that they continue to wear our ass like a hat. It's hard to credit the idea of taking a half-decade ass-whipping from some adjectives, but a pack of monsters-well, anyone can understand why they would want to beat the shit out of us in their own backyard.

Most important, however, if W would talk the way the rest of us do, he might get why it is that we aren't all giggly at the prospect of sending more kids overseas to kill and die for god-knows-what. If he would stop saying things about fostering liberty in a land of extremists and say instead, “I'm talking about sending a heap of youngsters to a land where nothing but monstrous lunacy has reigned for centuries to confront a passel of monsters who would just as soon die as accept our presence,” he might hear in his own words just what a cockamamie proposition that is.

But then, despite what gets said and who does the saying, W might only hear what he wants to hear. It certainly seems so. But whatever he wants to hear, I choose to hear the truth, and about this truth, when it comes to my beliefs, I am monstrously extreme.