“So, it has come to this,” I hissed as I crumpled up the announcement that Maharishi Steve’s Annual Yoga Retreat would from now on be officially known as a “Yoga Redeployment”. The whole thing was a sick, twisted joke, and I would have told the Maharishi as much if he had taken his toes out of ears long enough to listen.
The word “retreat” used to invoke pleasant thoughts of relaxing on some tropical shore, or perhaps enjoying a ginseng colonic with friends high in the wooded climes of the misty Cascades. But thanks to a relentless barrage of neo-con propaganda, “retreat” has now taken on a more negative connotation. Even congressional Democrats are afraid to utter the word, preferring instead to use the more palatable ”redeployment” when discussing their Iraq War strategy. Perhaps too eager to make nicey-nice with their Repug inferiors, the well-meaning Dems have failed to take a stand against the right-wing crusade to hijack the English language. Instead of fighting the GOP, they have essentally surrendered - a word the Repugs ironically stole from the benevolent, cheese-eating primates of France.
But it’s not to late for Democrats to take back “retreat” and preserve it for future generations of liberals. A massive marketing campaign must be launched to persuade the voting public not to think of a “retreat” as “fleeing from the battlefield”, but rather “taking a vacation from the war”. If Harry, Nancy, Jack, and all the leading Democrats in congress would make it a point to wear Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, Panama hats and sunglasses to every Congressional debate on Iraq, it would go a long way towards convincing the American people that with all the mindless bloodshed going on, it wouldn’t hurt everyone to take a little hiatus from reality with their Democrat pals for a while. Ya’ll can go right on fighting Bush’s illegal and immoral war without end, or you can join us liberals for some big, fruity, Appeasement & Capitulation cocktails down on Dhimmi Beach!
Sure, my idea may seem overly theatrical to some, but it’s far better than simply giving up on a word that has come to symbolize the Progressive approach to fighting the War on Terror.
