A word's cacophany*

" Hegemony"

Back to the future - The only previous time I used the word hegemony in a blog post was on 8/13/05. It is entitled "Back on the radar screen-issue updates." Obviously it is time to redo the post for 2006, because the word hegemony remains in the news and my head yet another year.
The issues I followed in 2005, unfortunately, remain far too much on today's radar screen. It took me but a very few minutes to find each of these (linked stories) in my current news aggregator:

• Middle East peace, BBC News - "Hamas closes government offices; the Palestinian government says work will cease in all government offices a day after its headquarters in Ramallah were stormed by protesters. Oct. 2, 2006"
• Iraq war, Reuters - "Bush challenges 'misimpressions' about Iraq Sat Sep 30, 2006 11:41am ET, by Carl Bohan"
• United Nations ambassador, TPM Cafe, Bolton Watch - "The Bully may still get your lunch money, by Michael Roston, Sept. 28, 2006"
• U.S. national intelligence, Yahoo! News - "FBI worries about al-Qaida ties to mob By PAT MILTON, Associated Press Writer Sun Oct 1, 6:53 PM ET"

HEGEMONY. (More about the word from answers.com in the title link above) That cacophanous word is rebounding in my brain. None of us likes it when we cannot stop thinking of a song or of a word.
So I began to explore the problem with a dictionary. This is what it says:

hegemony
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1) - Show Spelled Pronunciation[hi-jem-uh-nee, hej-uh-moh-nee] –noun, plural -nies.
1. leadership or predominant influence exercised by one nation over others, as in a confederation.
2. leadership; predominance.
3. (esp. among smaller nations) aggression or expansionism by large nations in an effort to achieve world domination.

The United States currently fits into definition #3, in my opinion. That is what is bothering me; that is what I am obsessing about. The news continues to report cases of the current administration's efforts to achieve even more world domination that we already have. When I looked in a Thesaurus I found a progression of word combinations clearly illustrating my point: jurisdiction/authority, leadership/guidance, power/control, and reign/rule. I explored further.

Hegemony - from The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia states:

[Gr.,=leadership], dominance, originally of one Greek city-state over others, the term has been extended to refer to the dominance of one nation over others, and, following Gramsci, of one class over others. Conflict over hegemony fills history from the war between Athens and Sparta to the Napoleonic wars, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War. Gramsci's use of the concept extends it beyond international relations to class structure and even to culture.
See K. J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline (1985).

*Cacophony - "1. harsh or discordant sound, dissonance. 2. harshess in the sound of words or phrases." The discordance comes from the belief of may of us that the current administration is not in tune with what our nation has always practiced. This administration has characterized the events of 9/11 in consistently misguided ways: "war on terror," "preemptive war," "the long war," "axis of evil, " "Islamo-fascism," "fight them over there . . . " "we don't talk to that terrorist organization/country," "following UN Resolution number . . . ," etc.

Cacaphony, meet Hegemony!
Tags: 2006 bush iraq islam terrorism war news politics
My "creative post" today at Southwest Blogger is about "collections of old stuff."