During
the French Revolution, it was the Comité
de salut public that
administered La Terreur, to the happy
satisfaction of les tricoteuses. Chez l’Etat islamique, a similar
service is provided by the Hisbah
(حسبة). Chez nous, analogous informal entities
have developed spores.
Thus anyone who, within CONUS today, would make so
bold as to utter… anything at all, must reckon with reconnaissance by an army
of thin-skinned, gimlet-eyed, flinty-spirited Robespierres, tirelesssly
scanning all human output both visual and verbal, written or oral, for any hint
-- any whiff -- any least scintilla
of aught that might possibly be construed (if you twiddle your tunings
of reception just so, and set your head at an angle) as distaff-distancing, or melanistically
invidious, non-recevable par la pensée
unique.
And
what of our past? This American sketch
from the last century but one
provides an example, with an apparent Erstbeleg to boot:
As we swept from the shore, I cast back a
wistful eye upon the moss-grow roofs and ancient elms of the village, and prayed
that the inhabitants might long retain their happy ignorance, their absence of
all enterprise and improvement, their respect for the fiddle, and their
contempt for the almighty dollar.
-- Washington Irving, “A Sketch from a
Steamboat” (1837)
The
now-banal epithet “almighty dollar” has passed into cliché, and would in no
quarter raise an objection or an eyebrow.
But the unsuspecting author (and wordsmith) was apparently reviled, by
the speech-police of his day; and
when the piece was later collected, he defended himself in a footnote:
This phrase, used for the first time in
this sketch, has since passed into current circulation, and by some has been
questioned for savoring of irreverence. The author, therefore, owes it to
his orthodoxy to declare that no
irreverence was intended, even to the dollar iself, which he is aware is daily
becoming more and more an object of worship. -- W.I.
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