Congressional Gormandizers

Because words with multiple syllables aren’t compatible with text messaging — used constantly by young people — I fear that my freshman composition students are unknowingly reverting back to a monosyllabic communication method not far removed from the grunts and gesticulations of their caveman ancestors. To combat this trend, I include a list of vocabulary words in my newsletter, e-mailed to them weekly.


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This list improves my own vocabulary. Recently, I learned that greedy people are gormandizers, a word that accurately defines those politicians who not only allow, but also profit by the financial fiascos that periodically cripple this country.
  The Roman poet Horace said, “Those who are greedy are always in want.” Said another way, they are enslaved to an insatiable desire for money and the things money buys, a lust that invariably creates suffering for them (the greedy) and for the needy.
  If the suffering was limited to gormandizing politicos, it would be just and fitting, but often those who suffer the most are wage earners. They suffer because the gormandizers no longer govern “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” but “of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists.” 
  Americans would not have to suffer through economic meltdowns if crooked politicians obeyed the people instead of special interest groups. In prostituting themselves to deep-pocket lobbyists and abandoning all notions of loyalty to their constituents, corrupt legislators on both sides of the aisle ignore some of the warnings in “The Ten Cannots,” a pamphlet written by Reverend William Boetcker (1873 — 1962), often regarded as the father of today’s “success coaches.”
  Following are a few of those warnings:

• You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift;
• You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer;
• You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich;
• You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money;
• You cannot avoid trouble by spending more than you earn;
• You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

Obviously, the spinoffs swirling around the efforts of some congressmen to line their pockets while simultaneously rewarding corruption fly directly in the face of these admonitions. 
  Inevitably, bad apples spoil the barrel, and the bad apples in Congress have established a readily refillable swill trough for the political boars and sows betraying those who keep the trough filled. And from this trough, “rivulets” in the form of entitlements trickle down, seek their lowest level, and pool up, so that millions who “could and should do for themselves” have a place to slake their thirst and swill to the point that if the source of the swill — working folks’ money — were stanched, riots would likely spread across the nation.
  American jurist Louis D. Brandeis warned, “If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.” 
  Sadly, to the detriment of American workingmen and women, Brandeis’ words are unheeded by congressional gormandizers.