Language Matters: The Iraq-War Recession and Iraq-War Deficit (a Marxist Perspective)

The simple Marxist insight into the nature of war, taxes, and language in tonight's blog post comes to us from Groucho and his brothers, not from their distant cousin Karl.

"War would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes," the uniformed Freedonian functionary warns Groucho Marx's Rufus T. Firefly at the 8 second mark of this video from Duck Soup.  

Everyone knows that if the leaders of  Freedonia decide they need to attack Sylvania -- or the United States government needs to attack Iraq -- then those leaders need to raise taxes to pay for their war. Or almost everyone knows that basic fact of responsible governance. The Bush/Cheney administration slashed taxes on their rich friends and benefactors as they began multi-trillion-dollar wars throughout the Islamic world.  Of course some true-blue-liberal cynics might point out that their goal was to bankrupt the nation with their unfunded wars and unnecessary military spending so that they could roll back New Deal achievements like Social Security and Great Society programs like Medicare.
All they (and we) ended up getting for their troubles (besides the unnecessary deaths of Americans, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, ...) were a massive recession and an astronomical deficit.
According to the True Blue Liberal style guide, the so-called "Great Recession" should always be referred to as the "Iraq-War Recession" and the multi-trillion-dollar deficit created in the Bush/Cheney era is the "Iraq-War Deficit."  Period. We should use those terms as single-mindedly as  conservatives who use the "job-killing" prefix before any mention of  environmental regulations.

say the secret word and the duck will drop from the rafters and give you the gop nomination!

Wouldn't it be great to see one of the many upcoming GOP debates hosted by Groucho Marx in You Bet Your Life format? The clowns on stage would finally be treated in the manner they deserve, with wisecracks rather than unearned respect.

The Marx Brothers came to mind while I was thinking of Herman Cain's videotaped brain freeze last week when asked a simple question about Libya, and the deeper hole he is digging every time he's asked another foreign policy question. I wondered if any interviewer was going to ask him a question about a fictional nation to see if he might simply make things up to avoid another uncomfortable silence. I tweeted a couple of hours ago that I would ask him about the hostilities between Freedonia and Sylvania, the war declared by Groucho's Rufus T. Firefly in the Brothers' 1933 classic, Duck Soup.

Little did I know that Spy magazine already pulled this trick in 1993. The writers asked incoming members of Congress about the ethnic cleansing taking place in Freedonia, and 20 of our new Representatives responded with opinions or expressions of concern about the imaginary atrocities in the imaginary kingdom.

The idea of making people look silly with questions about Firefly's fictional Freedonia wasn't new with Spy either. Thirty years earlier, Candid Camera's Woody Allen asked victims what they thought of Freedonia's bid for independence. I wish I could find a video with which to end this post...

I couldn't find that video, but basic film literacy should require Americans, whether politicians or not, to know the source of the Freedonian references (if only to avoid tricky questions from comedy shows and magazines), so I'll end with this clip from the original source: