End the ‘Surge’ Surge

A s the calendar ticks into the slow month of August, and columnists begin to scramble for ideas to write about, I ran into good luck. A mother at our church told me she hated the word “surge.” And she’s right. This word entered our politics 15 years ago and mounted a takeover campaign. We need to end the surge of surges in American life. Because “surge” is used liberally as a verb and noun, we can surge on the surge. History will recall the surge against surging.

You remember it really got started with “the surge in Iraq” in 2007. Which was an attempt to end another surge, though we still mercifully called it an “insurgency” in the Sunni Triangle. If it had been 2022, we would surely have called it the Sunni Surge, a surge that would bring about the Delta wave of dhimmitude to Chaldean Christians in Northern Iraq. But, fatally to our political vocabulary, this time the surge was on our side. General Petraeus would mastermind the deployment of an additional 20,000 soldiers and Marines to Iraq. Oddly, the surge in Iraq was our exit strategy. We can get out of it by going in deeper. This also turned out to be General Petreaeus’s philosophy of biography-writing. America got its exit from that surge. And Petraeus got a flattering biography: All In: The Four-Star Who Surged Me. Just kidding about that subtitle. It really was called All In, though.

And soon afterward, we were deep into the “surge” surge. Mortgage defaults started surging, which caused a surge in defaults on mortgage-backed securities. The Federal Reserve balance sheet then surged in response, and it keeps surging 13 years later. Barack Obama surged in the polls, and then he made America surge in Afghanistan. The surging was so convincing, Joe Biden promised we’d bring the boys home for Christmas 2014. But surging wasn’t just warfare. No no! It was time for a diplomatic surge.

But having become the prevailing — perhaps the only — noun-verb of war and peace, “surge” would inevitably go on to greater things. The surge in Afghanistan and the surge of moderate head-choppers in Syria, followed by a surge of anti-Qaddafi activity in Libya, lead to a lot of new bombs falling. It also led to this cursed word crossing the border into new political territory. In the seas of the Mediterranean, the migrant surge was surging.

You thought no one else could surge? Well, what a bigot you are. Migrants could surge in Europe. Look at the Wall Street Journal this past weekend, there’s a border surge in this hemisphere, too. Perhaps the fourth such surge of the last four calendar year. Oh, and look back to Europe and batten down your hatches, because post-lockdown, you should expect more migrant surges.

And then there’s the pandemic, of course. Cases are surging even now, and where the cases surge, so do the vaccines. In Provincetown bars, a surge of men hit the bars ahead of Bear Week, which led to the Delta surge; the CDC recommendations surged in response. But you’ll be fine; the Bill Gates microchips are surging through your immunized blood right now.

“Surge” just means more. Perhaps our political culture has fallen upon the S-word because it deflects responsibility but still conveys purpose. Surges are good or bad, reassuring or frightening in a salutary way. The war’s going to be bad, so we surge. The pandemic is surging, so we all should get jabbed. It would be easy to go wrong if, Heaven forbid, you picked a new word. One wouldn’t write a headline about the growing accretion of migrants on the border.

Then again, creativity could be good. The bears in Provincetown were massing. The subsequent amassment of COVID cases occurred after they increasingly cumulated with one another. I think that conveys a lot more.

A lot more! would be too honest. How do you like the Iraq War? Not great, huh, Well, here’s a proposal: a lot more of it. No, of course that won’t do. Generals and presidents need to deflect a lot more responsibility. Instead of choosing to surge troops in unwinnable wars, our commanders in chief could simply just gain them. “We’re gaining troops in Anbar Province” sounds exciting. I bet generals could get used to saying that. Or maybe, because nobody seems to care that much about foreign policy, you could just spice it up. We’re bunching troops in Baluchistan. There’s a whole bunch of troops you didn’t know about. Not even President Trump knew about those troops. We’re going to have to surge — I mean gain — withdrawal capacity to handle this bunch. Imagine if General Petraeus had this kind of withdrawal capacity! We should boost the NIAID funding to Wuhan and do some surge-of-function research on him.

Anyway, my advice to headline writers, policy-makers, and presidents is to grab a thesaurus. Read something from before Twitter was invented. Get in touch with your inner-wordsmith and enjoy an efflux of creativity.