cynic (’sin-ick) n.—One who no longer believes in the comforting illusions and protective half-truths that others use unreflectively to get through their lives.

D

debt, n.—An ingenious device cooked up in the early days of capitalism to promote the work of bankers and others of wealth by convincing people of the counterintuitive truth that owing money is the successful way to ultimate riches; the device has been used by modern American governments largely to make wars by vast expenditures of public money with the promise of ultimate riches, behind curtains that assure that the accumulated expenditures remain illusory.

defense, n.—The act of resisting an attack from without, or the fortifications for such a purpose; cap., a modern American department not for defense of any substantial kind but for waging war (formerly, until 1947 and America’s embarkation on a series of wars every year since then down to the present, the properly named War Department) on a scale so vast that it now acknowledges spending more than the next 25 countries in the world, combined.

democracy, n.—A system of government according to which a majority gets to decide the fate of a minority, regardless of the justice, truth, morality, temperance, and common sense of the decisions, to which the minority has no recourse—until of course it somehow becomes the majority.

dependency, n.—Reliance on others for what you cannot otherwise force from them; the chosen condition for those the state determines to be poor, or insufficiently wealthy, which no amount of free government money, housing, food, healthcare, childcare, and counseling will alter, nor is it designed to, lest the dependent not vote Democratic.

dictator, n.—The head of a state whose people have chosen to do the bidding of a single man or cabal, in return for being relieved of the agony and uncertainty of having to think, learn, judge, and cast ballots.

E

economy, n.—The name given by economists for the state of material life at any given time, which they claim to study and understand, though no pronouncement from them has ever stood the test of more than a few months’ duration; its cumulative impact is said to be gross, as in national product, national income, national debt, and the like, and no one who has ever looked at the workings of economists would ever dispute that assessment.

emancipation, n.—The presumed release of human beings from bondage by another, without necessarily securing their true freedom but only allowing the despotism of themselves as preferable to the despotism of others; in American history, cap., the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which freed not a single slave, nor was it intended to, but served eventually to give the Northern forces a supposed moral cause for the slaughter they visited upon their foes that they could comprehend better than the fight for the abstraction called the Union.

equality, n.—That impossible condition in which everyone is presumed to be the same as everyone else, in quality, degree, rank, value, and/or ability; in American politics, a pestilence visited offhandedly by Thomas Jefferson in an extralegal document, referring to status at birth (“created equal”) that is patently untrue, which various charlatans have subsequently been pleased to refer to as if a condition of the Constitution (where it does not appear) in their quest to increase the power of central government, thus to try to create an equal distribution by government fiat —e.g., in income, rights, opportunity, education, marriage, love, etc.—of that which inherently does not admit of correspondence.

executive, n.—One who sees to the execution of laws, in the sense not of the termination of their lives, though that happens often enough by high-minded executives who disfavor their provisions, but of the carrying out of their instructions; in American government, cap., it is the branch of government that carries out in its own chosen ways (see presidential signing statements) the laws passed by the Legislative until forbidden to do so by the Judiciary.