Muammar Gaddafi “Kills His Own People”
People will say all sorts of things about the day’s topics – weather, of course, and news of all kinds, old and new. The vocabularies that we employ as we emit our streams of text and audio, we either learn along the way, or invent ourselves.
Generally speaking, the individual words we say come more from the language itself, and the phrases and longer utterances, progressively, are more our own. The longer the string, so to speak, the more likely it is to be unique. In terms of probability, the single words are more likely to be held by the common, the phrases less so, the longer sentences more so, and so on, and on, and on.
So, when I’m in my noticing mode relative to political rhetoric, I go for the phrases when I am trying to characterize groupthink.
This phrase that is being piped out of the cutthroat commercial media right now (where one will find plenty of political money) is that Muammar Gaddafi “kills his own people.”
Now, people themselves will say almost anything at all, depending on the person. And people vary in the proportions of originality to cant in their speech. Human beings are distributed all over those ranges, statistically speaking, more or less.
In the midranges between the parts of language that we receive from our human culture, and those parts that are unique to each individual, are those phrases that are crafted by one person as an original work, and then subsequently repeated by other people – within any number of contexts, and for any number of reasons.
I happen to have a mental trigger set on the phrase “kills his own people”. That mental trigger goes back to my youth, when I would think about such things. I can testify that that phrase is incapable of being the product of the peace movement culture that I grew up within.
But it sure is going around these days.
I have a strong suspicion that the originator of that phrase, and the pushers of it, are in some relationship to those about us who defend whatever killing they themselves happen to be doing (whether defending to the television audience, or in their imaginings to a prospective judge – earthly or metaphysical – something along the line of “[we are killers of others, but] he kills his own people.”
It seems to be taken as a basic tenet that it is better to kill others, than to kill ones own, if one is intent on going about killing.
As I said, this rationalization did not come up much during my upbringing, except in the arguments of war mongers, of one variety or other.
The phrase pronounces stern logic even as its motive peeks out from behind the curtain.