Friday, June 10, 2005


THE ART OF DISASSEMBLY

“Referring to an Amnesty International report harshly criticizing U.S. detention facilities, B--- [elision mine] sought to dismiss its credibility, stating during a May 31 press conference, ‘It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of—and the allegations—by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble—that means not tell the truth.’”

Such verbal gaffes from the voice of America have grated for years now on the ear of any English speaker whose norm is coherence, but the amazing thing here is the newly implicit belief that our vocabularies are even more limited than his own, that we need those big words defined, that we need his help to understand the heady concepts he takes such pride in verbalizing so successfully.

That level of 'disassembly' requires a very high degree of self-delusion.

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