Jim Dooley By Jim Dooley The Star-Ledger
on June 29, 2008 at 1:21 PM, updated June 29, 2008 at 1:24 PM

Sometimes it is useful to have an acquaintance with a few words in another language. As rich as the English language is, it doesn't know all the words. In 'trop', the French have developed a word which captures in a way that no word in English does the sense of suffocation when you find yourself in the midst of too damn much of something. I believe the vastly overrated Jean Paul Sartre employed the word to express his reaction to Nature: trop, first the sense of being overwhelmed, followed by the sense of futility, ending in nausea.
It might be observed in passing, though Sartre himself may object, that the word comes into play in the vocabulary of anyone confronting Sartre's unreadable magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, but it's not for here to appraise Sartre's more strenuous exertions and no one cares about this philosophical footnote to Stalin anyway.
But his employment of this word has distinctive merit and should be recognized. The great genius of our own language is that when it hears something good, it takes it for its own and this is a word that it, and we, need to take for ourselves at this juncture of the nation's political life.
Will the French object? Doubtful. In the first place they have plenty of words in which we have no interest, so they will not view this as the start of another hundred years war. There is a small chance they will be flattered, viewing it as our ham handed gesture of reparation for having dissed French fries when their former head man Chirac tried to restrain our head man Warrior from making a fool of himself on the big stage. Finally, they may not notice that we are taking on a new four letter word into our language that rightfully belongs to them. They are preoccupied with a dopey head man of their own at the moment who is badly undermining any claim to seriousness the country may once have had. The guy's latest wife is a celebrity model or songstress or sex machine of some kind and just now has written a song comparing their great man to a hit of dope. The touch of wit may be amusing on our side of the pond, but the guy is their president after all. It is much preferable when the other county's president is playing the role of buffoon.
So now that we have the new word in our political lexicon, I would like to inaugurate its usage.
George W. Bush and all his works and ways: trop.
Neo-conservatism, whatever it actually may be: trop.
The Republican Congress until it was ignominiously retired in 2006: trop.
The Democratic Congress that never showed up in 2006: trop.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, network TV, TV period: trop.
The Mire of Self Service, also known as NJ State Government: trop.
The smoking ruin of most of the Federal Government, including Defense, State, the inaptly described Intelligence Community (both words), the military-industrial establishment: trop.
Predatory Big Business: trop.
Security theater of the absurd, in all its grotesque manifestations, from the trains, the boats, the planes, and the highways and all exhortations to report thy suspicions of thy neighbor: trop.
Whew! It all seems a little strong, and I, we, could have kept going. But unlike the Beckett character, we won't; we have to stop somewhere and start looking for laughs.
Once again we must turn to the French with gratitude. We will revert to eating French Fries for their indulging us with Nicolas and Carla Sarkozy, or whoever she is.