Written by Thomas Magstadt   

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." It's one of the most famous lines ever penned in the English language. Not only by Shakespeare. By anyone. Why?

Is it because we all love roses? Or because we idealize romantic love? Is it because we long (or imagine ourselves) to be a dashing Romeo or fetching Juliet? Whatever the reason, this image – the connection between romance and roses, the tragic attraction between a man and a woman – has come to symbolize far more than a fine turn of phrase.

Shakespeare's rose is the mother of all symbols – a symbol of symbols, as it were. The reason that matters so much is that we live by symbols and in today's world whoever controls the mass media has the power to manipulate symbols.

The power to manipulate symbols is now frighteningly close to the power to control minds. To understand the political implications think of Orwell on steroids.

Or any one of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates.

The Republican strategy for defeating an African-American president with a surname that happens to rhyme with Osama and a middle name – Hussein – that puts knee-jerk xenophobes of every stripe on high alert, is to associate him with certain words that strike fear and loathing in the hearts of gullible Americans conditioned by decades of hysterical Manichean rhetoric that "they" (Communists, terrorists, liberals) are out to get "us".

Never mind that Obama has the same name as his father. That's okay if you happen to be a Rockefeller, Roosevelt, or Du Pont . It's not okay if you're father was born in Kenya.

A Rockefeller by any other name smells as white, Aryan, Anglo-Saxon, and Christian (hint: like a rose). A Barack Hussein Obama by any other name…well, you get the point, right? (Hint: like a foreigner with fake birth certificate). It's all-too-easy for most "real Americans" – an ambiguous form of speech often meaning "not Mexican" – that Obama is "African" even though his mother was white, that he is a Muslim even though he says he's a Christian, and that he is a socialist even though many of his decisions and policy stands have greatly disappointed liberals, to say nothing of all the "socialists" in our midst.

Multiple choice: It's easy to say nothing about socialists in the US because

a) there aren't any
b) there are a few but they're afraid to admit it
c) nobody knows what it means to be a socialist
d) everybody knows but nobody cares
e) you aren't a Republican running for the presidency

If you answered "e" you got it right. If you're Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney, for example, it's virtually impossible not to use the word "socialist" in the same sentence as the word "Obama". It's also extremely difficult not to mention the word "Muslim" in the same sentence as "Obama". And don't forget words like "welfare" and "abortion" and "Obamacare" and "food stamps" and, of course, "class warfare". Rick Santorum gave a speech likening the Obama administration to a "drug dealer". He also called him a "snob". (I forgot to mention that one of Obama's disqualifications for the presidency is that he earned his law degree at Harvard and thus is clearly a member of the Eastern elite.)

MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman has pointed out that the one name he has never heard Newt Gingrich call President Obama is "President Obama". He says "It's usually just Obama". That's understandable because it's hard for a dyed-in-the-wool Aryan who once taught history at West Georgia College to call a black man with a white mother and a name like Barack Hussein Obama by a title he himself covets more than his neighbor's pretty young wife.

In fairness, one Republican candidate is different from the others. He's a rich Mormon who speaks French and most Americans don't much like Mormons or rich people or snooty French-speakers so he's uncomfortable calling other people names. But, if challenged to do so, he calls Obama a "big spending liberal" who "takes his political inspiration from Europe" (clearly a bad thing unless we get into another stupid war and have to call upon our NATO allies to join us in a "coalition of the willing").

In fairness, Romney is careful to clarify what he means by "Europe": he's talking about the "Socialist Democrats" in Europe. Not the Social Democrats mind you (they exist in virtually every European country), but rather the "Socialist Democrats" (they don't). Never mind that in existential Europe (not the one Romney is talking about, but the one that actually exists), Social Democrats and Socialists are separate parties with different programs at odds with each other on most issues. That's a technicality which only serves to confuse voters with the facts and heaven knows where that might lead.

Romney is just like the others, except that he doesn't use a sledgehammer to smash the Obama china doll. He does it with a ball peen.

A friend of mine who teaches a course in the Theater Department at a local university devotes two lectures every semester to the importance of names. In that lecture he uses literature to illustrate the importance of naming life experiences. Until an experience has a name, it doesn't exist even in the minds of those who live it, and in the collective mind – the mind of the larger society – neither do the people inside the experience.

So long as the experience of slavery had no name, slaves had no life outside of bondage and no humanity. It was literature that gave slavery a name. If you don't believe it, you haven't read Tony Morison's Beloved, or seen The Color Purple or Driving Miss Daisy. Books, plays, and movies have named the experience of slavery, and made it real in the minds of Aryan Anglo-Saxons who would prefer to sweep it under the rug.

Now comes the kicker. By calling President Obama a Muslim, socialist, drug-dealing, big spending liberal imposter, the Republican presidential candidates are trying to "brand" the experience of having an African American in the White House - to give it a name, one voters will abhor. And in this case there is absolutely no difference between naming and name-calling.