Names and Naming

We love naming more than names, and some of us strive to coin them, as if names suffice, though they can, shedding light on the idea that is said to be represented by the thing that gets said, where once cued we step up the ladder (of false consciousness?). But with every naming comes a death, an edge, a hard line made where once there wasn't; the idea reified, defiled, the remnant tossed and now unrecognizable from its source. There's a word for what gets tossed, and that's dross.

Trump's presidency seemed designed to upend the very system that elected him (the byzantine electoral college process that brought him into power, which he didn't seem to mind, and the one that saw him out, which he did), leading many to argue as if in favour of a liberal democracy we know is contradictory, hypocritical and arrogantly so, rife with Clintons and Bushes. The alternative? A despot, the kind only a confessional poet can reduce: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you."? (Sylvia Plath, "Daddy", 1960). Or a king, like we have in Black Panther.

Alberta premier Jason Kinney appears to have deployed a similar tactic during his current term. After all, what better way to install a private healthcare system than to create an environment where your federally-subsidized public healthcare system is in tatters and requires military intervention. Because that's what Kinney seems to be doing with his ill-timed lifting of restrictions designed to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 and its variants, not to mention his most recent idea: a 3% wage rollback for Alberta nurses.

So a name to describe these actions, more so than a name to describe those who foment and perpetrate them. What word or words can we summon to reduce complexities into manageable rungs? Or is it pointless to try? As another poet once wrote (as prose): "I can't go on, I'll go on." (Beckett, The Unnamable, 1959).