CatholicTide

  Last week, President Obama, delivering a commencement speech, advised the graduates not to listen to those voices that say that “government” is the source of all our problems. That would mean, he said, “that our great experiment in self-government had failed,” a conclusion to be avoided at all costs. Better to lay out sixteen trillion dollars in unpaid bills, than reach that terrible conclusion.    I once played the comic villain Parolles for a college production of All’s Well that Ends Well, and one line rings in my memory still. When Parolles, a worthless, vain, swaggering coward, is asked what service he performs for the callow Lord Bertram, his young master, he replies, “I am his corrupter of words.”  It isn’t that Parolles teaches Bertram how to lie. The plain liar depends upon the integrity of words; when he says, “I did not know of any attempt to cover up the break-in at the Watergate Hotel,” he expects you to understand something clear and definite. The words mean what they mean.  But to corrupt words is, literally, to rot them from within. Think of the worthlessness of a hunk of rotten maple wood. You can crumble it in your fists. Words that are corrupted are thus worse than lies

Editor’s Note:  We’re about one-third of the way to where we need to be in our  fifth-anniversary fund drive  this month. Many of you have been taking advantage of the offer of a free copy of the anthology of TCT columns for all donations of $100 or more