Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He serves as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.
Beginning in 1965, the nation tuned into a new television series, “Get Smart,” featuring a bumbling secret agent—Maxwell Smart‚and his misadventures. The program introduced this pre-teen to a new word: KAOS, the name of an international organization of evil. Agent Smart worked for CONTROL, the good guys, confronted weekly by KAOS, both organizational names in capital letters. According to script writers, the name KAOS was chosen because it’s a synonym for evil… and the opposite of chaos is control.
I thought about those bungling Get Smart characters last week when one word kept pulsing out of our nation’s capital. Chaos (same concept, different spelling). Here’s what I mean.
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