Where you get your words from doesn’t matter. That was the verdict of pundits and newsmen last week on the charges of plagiarism flung back and forth between the candidates.

Maybe.

But. in a time when words are increasingly going astray, a man or woman who makes his living with them can’t afford to fool around. He’d better stick with the ones he picks. And they’d better be his.

Four years ago, the country went to war for words later proved false. Word provided by politicians, pundits and newsmen… who should have known better. Who had a duty to their words – to keep them honest, unadulterated, and organic.

Because we swallow what they tell us.
We live or die by their words.

When words don’t anchor themselves in reality, then they’re only slogans…memes. The stuff of PR. We are dying by PR in this country.

It’s a major theme of Mobs, Messiahs and Markets.
The slogans that drive the mob crazy and pollute the conversation in our country.

If the point of words is to get what you want, then you can pitch them anyway you want. That’s the bottom -line.

But bottom-line thinking isn’t really what a conversation among citizens is about.
That’s what corporations do.

If our country is a business – even a not-for-profit business – run to achieve a social goal, however noble, or meet a production quota, however magnificent, then it doesn’t really matter whether anyone plagiarizes. It doesn’t matter how words are treated. It only matters that they do what we want them to do and take us where we want to go.

But if your country is not a corporation but an association of individuals, then words have to mean something more than slogans to move your listeners this way or that. They have to be more than tools to get your way.
You have to treat them with respect, like the people who speak them With care.

Like fine cutlery at a dinner. You don’t bend them or break them and you don’t pinch them, even from friends.

Real words are an exploration of the changing truths of the heart. They express what we are. They take us to places we did not know existed and let us become what we never dreamed to be.

They make up a conversation between individuals.
Not a script crafted by PR flacks.