Semantics--Study of Meaning--Is Good For You

SEMANTICS--THE STUDY OF MEANING--IS GOOD FOR YOU ON

Well, it would be good--but one needs to give a damn first.

(I wrote this piece in Magyar, on December 7, 2022, and published it here. This is the first English version of it. Tell me if it is outdated.)

Getty image of the civil rights march of Selma, AL, March 9,1965. For more, see here.

The term "woke" is a catchphrase animating a wide range of the American far right--from adherents of the Ku Klux Klan to old-fashioned, "Hitler-salute" fascists, from all manner of detailed, "nuanced", "who-should-we-eliminate-first" neo-Nazis to victims of the pandemic of conspiracy theories and flat-Earth believers, and the scores of people who have been manufactured as "low information" voters.

Its primary meaning: "social criticism against which we have no argument, because we are unread, uneducated, insensitive, short-sighted, selfish, aggressive and desireous of violence."

Second meaning: "something we will suppress and eliminate first when we come to power--more effectively than the bourgeois lackey media has been able to do." (Again, remember, this was written two years before Creep1 and his technofreak-neonazi-extreme-neoliberal-low-info coalition came to power.)

Abuse of the term "woke" is often associated with the mantra of "cancel culture." I don't have time to discuss this in more detail here--I am bringing it up because it is nothing more than the far-right's projection of hate--that is, projecting their own emotions, desires and specific action plans onto the behavior of their perceived opponents--real or imagined--accusing their them of what they themselves practice.

Of course all that has cropped up in eastern Europe.

Of course we are chewing on those things in the devastated terrain previously called Hungary. We fill our time with these lies, until the very end--or, most likely, until the next cargo of anti-social lies arrive. Mental, cultural, textual corruption everywhere.

With this effort, it would obviously be easier and vastly more fruitful to practice elementary forms of critical thinking, studying history, rules of social action, structures, processes, from tiny and "private" to global or intergalactic, and the basic concepts related to these--but our heads tremble, tremble incessantly, . . . only to the right. Never back. An amazing feat of overcoming geometry.

So, there. I'm glad I could help.

SEMANTICS--THE STUDY OF MEANING--IS GOOD FOR YOU OFF