“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.