In considering the attack on its own citizens which the City Council perpetrated last Thursday, June 24th—a date that will live in infamy--I can’t help but reflect on the word “reimagining,” which the woke folk have cynically trotted out in order to masquerade their real intent: defunding the police. “Reimagine” sounds so sweetly positive, so quaint. It conjures up John Lennon’s iconic song of the 1970s. We imagine a world of peace and love; when we “reimagine,” we double down on the rapturesque vision. No wonder Fife, Bas & Co. renamed their defunding task force “Reimagining Public Safety.”
They knew all too well the awful, angry objection of the American people (and the vast majority of Oaklanders) to the word and concept, “defund.” They met with their public relations hacks around coffee-cup laden tables in the grim depths of City Hall, to plod through a solution to the dilemma. How can they hoodwink the people? Something must be done. They were on the losing side of public opinion, of History. Defund wasn’t working! They needed another word, something…pleasanter. They did not need to change the actual, abhorrent policy; no, what was needed was a symbolic change, a gesture, to soothe, and thus confuse, the electorate. But what?
Examples were offered. None worked; the hacks and flacks came up with objections to each, until—in one of those rare moments when a lightbulb flicks on and casts all into illuminated clarity—one of the hacks (we’ll never know who) said “Reimagine.”
Coffee cups, midway to lips, pause in the air. There is a moment of silence, as dull brains absorb the new information. Finally, someone says, “Yes.” And someone else: “Brilliant!” And someone else: “That’s it!” They have stumbled into the solution. The police will be reduced in number, their budget marauded and plundered, the morale sapped, their ability to protect the people ransacked--this was the hacks’ and flacks’ intention all along--but now the dirty deed will be cloaked behind the burqa of REIMAGINE.
Probably none of the hacks and flacks have heard of Josef Goebbels, but unwittingly they have proven the truth of his utterance: “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.” That was and is the intention of the defund crowd: to “clothe ideas and disguise” the disreputable and make it sound respectable. Goebbels and his fuehrer got away with it until their thousand-year Reich eventually collapsed in the rubble of the bunker in which they died. This awful lie, which is called “defunding,” too will be buried in the wreckage of its own stupidity and corruption. The only question is, how many Oaklanders must suffer and die before the Big Lie deservedly perishes?