This history exemplifies the role of power-structures in the ideological sphere, namely, to squeeze the life out of life - and out of language, and out of dissent, and out of anything that can potentially disrupt the smooth functioning of institutional relations. In World War II shell shock morphed into the more innocuous term battle fatigue, then during the Korean War it was called operational exhaustion, only to become post-traumatic stress disorder in the Vietnam era, or simply PTSD now. Consider the evolution of the old, honest, direct World War I concept “shell shock”.
And in the realm of political kitsch, the use of euphemisms is indispensable.
GEORGE CARLIN YOUTUBE POLITICS FREE
Where power happens - and bureaucracy, and the state, and “the free market,” and atomizing totalitarian tendencies of whatever sort - so does kitsch. Where social atomization happens, so does kitsch. Kitsch, in short, while pretending to exalt all that is wonderful and pleasant in life, manifests the anti-human. In fact, power-centers in any advanced society will impose a regime of political and ideological kitsch on the population, for power has to lie in order to extract some semblance of consent from its subjects. Kitsch is what coheres a consumer capitalist society, with its ubiquitous product-advertisements and self-advertisements (for the self has become but a product to be sold). It is the regulating principle of institutional norms, whether in the intellectual, the political, the cultural, or the business world. It is the impulse that sustains the tourism industry. It is at social gatherings, cocktail parties, academic conferences it saturates interactions between salespeople and customers, and inspires the decor of every shop in the mall. Kitsch is everywhere where fake prettiness - or pretty fakeness - silences authenticity. Both kitsch and euphemisms serve to shield us from unpleasant truths - in other words to disguise reality. The essence of this definition applies equally to euphemisms. Kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” It also overlaps with kitsch, the category that Milan Kundera brilliantly analyzes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This category overlaps with the category of political correctness, but it typically serves rightwing, not leftwing, ends. Our “public discourse” is, and to some extent always has been, polluted by an epidemic of euphemisms. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language,” he kicks off his rant. In a popular video on YouTube, George Carlin aims his caustic wit at the dread political scourge of euphemisms.
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