I was eight or nine years old, reading an X-Men comic book, when I saw the word balloon where Magneto first called his henchman sidekick, the Toad, a "sycophantic simpleton." I had no idea what "sycophantic" meant, so I looked it up in a big, fine dictionary and decided to use the word as often as possible. I still wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it, but I used it nonetheless.
Now, 55 years later, I'm appalled that "sycophantism" has become ubiquitous across the media landscape, all because Republicans have worshipped at the feet of Trump and his bad behavior for the last four years. My favorite word has become overused and banal, and my use of it is now perceived as cliched.
The years 2020-21 have been tough on my go-to vocabulary. "Sycophant," "cognitive dissonance," and "delusion" have all become American media staples. My job in this brief installment is therefore to give readers a heads up on words and phrases that will soon flood mainstream conversation. Use them now with relative impunity; three months from now they'll be so fashionable as to be memes.
First of all, get comfortable with the phrase "Christian-American Nationalism." As laid out at the wonderful holykoolaid.com site, our sudden surge in state religions features prophets, over the top evangelizing, and a stunning inability to handle (my old favorite and yours) cognitive dissonance. Mainly, though, what is striking is the assignation of biblical heft to actual current political figures. State-worship and religious worship thus blend in a way that would horrify the founding fathers.
A word that ties into "Christian-American Nationalism" is "Revelator." In case you're wondering, "Revelator" seems to be a self-promoting title that sidesteps the "uh oh; I'm nuts," connotations of calling oneself a "Prophet." "Revelator" sounds much more scientific than "Prophet," and at the same time it hints at somewhat less stringent consequences for being wrong.
See, the problem with being a "Prophet" is that the Bible lays out the consequences of wrongness in the prophecy game. Basically, thanks to the Council of Laodicea and others that canonized the Bible, if a prophet is wrong about something, then they were a Satan-filled false prophet. Only people who were correct all the time were vetted into the Bible as prophets. That's the way good editors, councils, and deities prefer things, and that's the way it is. Calling yourself "Revelator Robert" as opposed to "Bob the Prophet" softens the consequences of wrong predictions. Since false prophets have often been stoned, it's an important public relations detail.
So keep on the alert for references to "Christian-American Nationalism" and "Revelators" going forward. I suspect we'll soon be fielding various new words to describe people with varying degrees of compartmentalized delusions. I'll endeavor to keep you abreast. In the meantime, let's all do our best to use fashionable, but not cliched, lingo.
Bob Dietz
January 28, 2021
