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There was a woman with whom I once worked who had a phenomenal phobia about bridges, which, living in Florida as we did, was something not easily managed.

She had a Golden Rule about bridges: Don’t go unto them, and they can’t do unto you. She would drive to great lengths to avoid a span of any size greater than, say, a 2-lane culvert-crosser.

How many times has it been you? Awaken early, pile into the car and head down the road on a family vacation, excited, weary from a long preparation time, plotting a shortest-possible course across perhaps foreign territory to arrive at your destination.
Your anticipation is racing through your veins, adrenalin pushing it like a chemical locomotive, and you keep your eye on the ever-larger dot on the map as you dash toward its fullness, following that beacon to a place of joy and wonder and happiness.

Last week, while most of you were basting like a Thanksgiving turkey waiting for the oven that was about to surround you at midweek, I decided to do something really snide and snarky and sneak north for a few days, to Minnesota.

And you know what happened: I had to wipe that smile right off my face, as my mother often told me to do.

My first tip came when I ran into Simpsonville Mayor Steve Eden in a convenience store. He asked if I was handling the heat, and I told him I was headed to Viking country.

In 1950, when George Orwell penned his classic book Nineteen Eighty-Four, he envisioned a future where government officials communicated only through deliberately ambiguous or evasive language. Webster’s defines Orwell’s supposedly fictional future language, called “Newspeak,” as “propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution and the inversion of customary meanings.”

I am afraid that Orwell was only a few years off with his timeline and that his scenario has arrived in 2011 America.