The Worst & the Darkest

If America’s Reign of Hate began with a TV show, maybe we can end it with one.

Face it: The combination of cruelty and crudeness of The Apprentice made him appealing to enough Americans to elect him president in 2016. And if you think that was a fluke, then you were in a coma when he won again in 2024.

He is Archie Bunker reincarnated, but with Archie’s harmless hard-headedness turned into the merciless humiliation of “You’re fired!” To those soaked in resentment constantly stirred by Fox News, those two words carried a decisive authority that made Hillary (“Stronger Together”) and Michelle (“When they go low…”) sound like wimps.

Moreover, Archie’s incidental racism is now full-blown white supremacy disguised as a law-and-order effort to control cities. To avoid the charge of racism, it is cast as suburban and rural vs. urban. If you’re still amazed that your Republican friends refuse to acknowledge that the Capitol was invaded by a mob on Jan. 6, it’s because the Republican dictionary defines “mob” as “city.”

The foremost unremarked reality of America today is that what we call Reality TV shows have nothing to do with reality, and yet enough of us are so enthralled by them that we have elected to live in one. Unreality is our new reality. George Orwell’s 1984, intended and always before read as a cautionary tale, is now an operator’s manual.

But enough of the problem we all know. To solve it, let’s start the show:

A friend suggests that we “turn The Apprentice upside down. Call it The Secretary. Instead of ending each show with ‘You’re fired,’ this would have the Chairman saying ‘You’re hired!’ to the worst candidate.”

Might take some effort to find a team of people capable of taking stage directions who are as shockingly pompous and/or ridiculous as Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Steve Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, RFK Jr., Karoline Leavitt, Cash Patel, and Pam Bondi. But I like the strategy of holding up a fun-house mirror to a reality already grossly distorted. There has to be some point at which even those who superimpose The Chairman’s face on the American flag can, oh say, see how anti-American they yet wave.

So, too, the title “chairman” suggesting a corporate CEO (with a subliminal echo of Chairman Mao) is more honest than “president.” But I might prefer a title to highlight the thuggish bent of someone who hints at threats of violence and who has rewarded those who have committed violence on his behalf. Call him “The Godfather.”

Also, The Secretary suggests there’s just one. We want a depraved, demented, delusional team worthy of the one now running the country. Our title should be a warped reversal of Pres. John Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest.”

Could be a variety show (remember those?), but of various TV offerings. Start with a game show. Contestants are asked basic questions such as naming the three branches of government. The one coming closest to “Mar-a-Lago, the Westminster Country Club, and Trump Tower in Manhattan” gets the points.

Then a reality segment of an ICE raid. Describe it as lawful, neighborly, and helpful, and you get points. Then a sitcom of Noem answering questions in her latest costume, hat, lip fillers, basketball-hoop ear-rings, and necklace with cross. Describe her as intelligent, coherent, and honest, and Points R U.

Maybe then a weather forecast to let the Marines know the best time to land in Greenland, or the Navy when to surround Cuba, or the Army when to ransack Seattle. Extra points if you can recommend restaurants and nightclubs where our troops can enjoy themselves.

The highlight would be a segment with Miller & Vance wielding charts to show the need for a forever domestic war. Orwell predicted “forever wars” to sustain a police state, but those were with foreign powers. We, as “Oceania” (America), would have only “Eurasia” and “Eastasia” (Russia and China) to choose from, though we could switch either from ally to enemy or vice versa at any time and insist that it had always been that way, that no change ever happened. Alternative facts beget alternative history.

With a forever domestic war, think of all the cities and states our federal government could attack and occupy where our troops would already know the language and be able to read signs to specific targets like grocery stores and elementary schools. Call this segment “Out Orwelling Orwell.”

The contestants would then be asked for the best course of action based on what they’ve seen. Those reluctant to send US troops into US cities would be gone from the show upon return from the last commercial break. And there would be no lack of ads to accommodate all the Republican donors eager for a piece of the action.

Also banished during commercial breaks will be invasion-curious contestants who have qualms about Congress (whatever that was) or the courts. Left on our screens will be those gung-ho to inflict punishment at home and abroad–though they might want to wear masks.

The last segment will be a rendition of the National Anthem as played by a marching band. Points will be determined by who can keep a straight face while singing “land of the free” and “home of the brave.” Upon those who do, The Godfather himself will bestow the blessing: “You’re hired!”

With the point made like that, Americans might ask not how our current Reign of Hate began, but ask what we can do to stop it.

-760-

L-R, US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem look on as US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before signing an executive order that aims to end cashless bail, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on August 25, 2025. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP)
https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2025/08/25/68acaf5ee4d4d8291a8b459e.html

Death of a Verb

Put aside all the political and social damage that he continues to wreak (which is, of course, impossible), and he is still guilty of destroying one of the most useful, forceful, unambiguous verbs in the English language.

Trump has trumped “trump.”

If we could imagine a deck of cards representing the 52 most glaring debasements of the English language over the past, say, twenty years, “trump” would be the highest trump in whatever game you choose.

Maybe I’m fortunate that the only card game I continue to play is cribbage, a game that has no trump, although getting skunked is reminiscent.

Other cards might come close. Those who answer cellphones in classrooms, in meetings, in theaters, and many other public places have turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of any language.

In Newburyport, another ace would be “accountability,” rendered absolutely meaningless in last year’s election as he who most often proclaimed it openly and successfully avoided it.

Ever taking tricks is one dating back at least to the early-80s when I first heard it o’er and o’er again in the halls of academe. That’s when we went from The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius to The Yawning of the Age of Appropriate.

Before long, “appropriate” clouded the language of business and politics as well, like an invasive species that kills off useful plants while having no use of its own other than to presume agreement. It’s the adult version of the adolescent “cool,” making conformity with our peers seem like discerning individuality.

Once upon an attention span, we readily described subjects as necessary, relevant, ethical, practical, effective, durable, flexible, reliable, useful, pleasing, timely, sufficient, and on and on. Now, we lazily rely on this all-purpose “appropriate.” Test it for yourself: Whenever you hear the word “appropriate,” stop the speaker and ask what it means. Chances are the speaker will need just a moment to give you a clear, precise, honest word.

Be prepared, however, for the question to draw a blank, suggesting that speakers are either inflating the language or do not know what they are talking about. I’m not saying that there is anything necessarily nefarious here, just that “appropriate” is dead from overuse, and has been for 40 years.

As American economist Thomas Sowell told us, “If it means everything, it means nothing.”

Just last year, we heard the debasement of a word that has always seemed harmless, at least as far as this Truman baby can recall. In fact, the man with the most undeserved name claimed to have invented it: “grocery.” Can’t recall the Truman years, but I can tell you that, in the Eisenhower years, supermarkets were still on the horizon of what we called “grocery stores.”

He also boasted that he would “make America affordable again” in his 2024 campaign, although he now calls “affordability” a made-up word, a Democratic hoax. But that’s nothing compared to his 2016 campaign when his stump speeches included pro-longed ridicule of the word “emoluments.” He also called that a hoax, having heard it repeatedly invoked during his two impeachments.

Apparently he never saw it in print. That includes the US Constitution where “emoluments” appears several times because the founders were determined to prevent future presidents from accepting riches that might influence them. The emphasis they put on emoluments is so great that, to say you read the Constitution and then not recognize it, is akin to claiming you’ve been to Yellowstone but can’t recall any geyser.

Those passages drew loud laughter from the MAGA crowds, as Trump trumped the founders with a series of weird and exaggerated pronunciations made with twisting facial expressions–“eeee-MULL-ew-mints,” “eh-mole-U-mince.” All those folks who for years dared that we liberals “Read the Constitution!” themselves do not recognize it.

It’s as if the novel 1984 has been taken and employed as a blueprint rather than as a cautionary tale. George Orwell’s “Newspeak” serves as a precursor for today’s debased English, not just in the limited vocabulary of “Doubleplusgoodspeak,” but in naming and renaming of anything in sight. “Victory Cigarettes” and “Victory Chocolate” may very well be the models for “Big Beautiful Bill” and “Gulf of America.” The brand name, “Trump,” now being stamped on public buildings follows the lead of the ubiquitous posters of Big Brother in Orwell’s “Oceania.”

Orwell’s most quoted line sums it up: “(I)f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” We need heed the line that follows:

A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

And so it is that Americans left and right, educated or not, have allowed our language to be debased. How bad is it? Walmart now claims to be “investing in American jobs” on signs that it places directly above self-checkout counters manufactured in China, and few notice. The fewer who object are dismissed as malcontents.

Could say that we were trumped before Trump hit the scene. But that does not mean that the game is lost. We still have the language and the ability to use it with honesty, precision, and clarity. In effect, we still have cards. And we have turns to bid.

Those turns are called elections where the highest bid calls trump. Might call it “the art of the deal” if only that phrase were not already debased.

-747-

https://sva.design/projects/11458/1984-principles-of-newspeak/

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/trump-selling-99-virtual-trading-cards

Big Beautiful Bullshit

The name all by itself should have been enough to kill it.

George Orwell would have called it doubleplusgoodspeak, but if you are willing to accept a name such as “Big Beautiful Bill” as anything but an insult to public intelligence, you might have at least wondered why the Republican-led US House of Representatives scheduled the vote at 1:00 am.

They pretty much had to wait until it was past all kids’ bedtime on the Pacific Coast. If politics is analogous to entertainment, then what happened last night was XXX-rated.

Call it euphemism if you want, and put your American audience to sleep by the third syllable. Most euphemisms serve to soften. “Big Beautiful Bill” is outright deceit more in line with “pacification of villages” that, as Orwell showed, hid destruction and murder.

Better to describe it with a striking comparison. The Republican name for what passed by a single vote over a unanimous Democratic vote is a gold-plated doorknob on a porta potty.

If you want euphemism, you’ll hear it from every news source–left, center, right–reporting on the bill:

Big Beautiful Billions will be cut from Medicare, Medicaid, Family Assistance, Farm Assistance, Veterans Benefits, Environmental Protection, Weather Services, Park Services, Worker Safety, Consumer Protection…

The disoperative word there is “cut.” What? Does the money disappear? No. The honest word there would be “re-allocate.” Much of what the rich now pay in taxes, already made ridiculously far short of their fair-share by Pres. You-can-have-it-all Reagan, will be re-allocated back to them. The real “cuts” will be tax breaks for the richest of the rich–whose businesses will also benefit from the weakening and termination of laws to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Bill, Baby, Bill!

No time to list every target in the Republican Party’s bid to turn the US Treasury into an ATM machine for their donors, so rather than list the targets you’ve heard of because they will effect you and your neighbors’ wallet–even as the cost of eggs remains high–there’s one very Big but not at all Beautiful provision that needs more attention.

From Newsweek:

A provision “hidden” in the sweeping budget bill that passed the U.S. House on Thursday seeks to limit the ability of courts—including the U.S. Supreme Court—from enforcing their orders…

The provision “would make most existing injunctions—in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases, and others—unenforceable,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, told Newsweek. “It serves no purpose but to weaken the power of the federal courts.”

So much for three branches of a democracy. Checks and balances? Yes for the checks for Republican campaigns, but the balances are for suckers and losers, you know, like habeas corpus and a ban on emoluments, a word that the Republican president ridiculed at length–with mocking, high-pitched, pronunciations–in his 2020 and 2024 stump speeches.

Don’t know about the 1,000-page BBB, but “emoluments” appears with terms such as “checks and balances,” “the judicial Power of the United States,” and “habeas corpus” in a single, much-shorter, and completely honest document.

That would be the United States Constitution, which emphasizes each one of those provisions that the BBB disdains, and that our Republican president ridicules.

No wonder he added all those gold-plated ornaments to the oval office.

-705-

Possibly the most egregious example of a name intended to hide–or deny, or deceive–was intended for the nuclear-powered attack submarine commissioned by the US Navy in the early years of the Reagan Administration. The Navy wanted to name it the USS Corpus Christi, but the Catholic Church went, well, ballistic. Since the ship would be based in the Gulf Coast Texas city of that name, the Navy added “City of…” to the front of the name, and the objections died down.
https://nara.getarchive.net/media/the-nuclear-powered-attack-submarine-uss-city-of-corpus-christi-ssn-705-approaches-9285b4

Ear Candy for All Ages

If we look at the bright side of life here in Soviet America, we might find encouragement in the resurgence of literary parables and satires of authoritarian rule.

Launched like a rocket in 2017 when Mar-an-Ego’s first spokesliar, Jelly-Ban Wrongway, called Ego’s version of inaugural events “alternative facts” despite all photographic evidence to the contrary.

Days later there were reports from coast to coast of George Orwell’s 1984 flying off bookstore shelves. Within a week, a new edition of the 72-year-old novel was printed.

Soon after, Republicans ramped up their attack on Roe v. Wade in anticipation of an Ego appointment to the Supreme Court. Feminists responded by drawing comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1958 dystopian novel, igniting another stampede into America’s bookstores.

From the beginning, Ego drew many comparisons to Captain Ahab who sank his ship in pursuit of the whale that tore off his leg, all for the sake of revenge. And that was four years before Ego coined the name “Revenge Tour” for his campaign.

Eventually, classic titles gaining re-circulation in conversation, in the news, in classrooms and libraries were enough to fill the syllabus of a graduate seminar: Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Road, The Hunger Games, stories from Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, and more.

Another that I surely would have promoted is James Thurber’s The Wonderful O (1957) which might qualify as a cross between Orwell and J.R.R. Tolkien, though the closest comparisons may be The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Wizard of Oz.

A children’s story with no end of loopy language and word play, Wonderful O bites with political satire sure to amuse any parent or grandparent reading aloud. Never heard of it until I unwrapped a birthday gift two weeks ago.

While the premise is simple, the result is as textured and colorful as a Disney animation. And the pace of the narrative gives it a magical ride. As a likely nod to 1984, Thurber begins the tale with a familiar, yet often ominous sound:

Somewhere a ponderous tower clock slowly dropped a dozen strokes into the gloom. Storm clouds rode low along the horizon, and no moon showed.

The rhythmic and rhyming O sounds hint at the book’s premise: An attempt by power hungry leaders to stunt thought and dialogue among the people by debasing language. In 1984, this was called “Newspeak,” achieved by dumbing down vocabulary. Thurber takes the next step with characters, Littlejack and Black, who attempt to ban one letter from all speech and writing:

And so, language and the spoken word diminished as people were forced to speak without the use of O in any word. No longer could the people say Heigh-Ho, Yoohoo, Yo-ho-ho, or even plain Hello…

“We can’t tell shot from shoot, or hot from hoot,” the blacksmith said, in secret meeting with his fellows.

“We can’t tell rot from root, or owed from wed,” the banker said.

From scene to scene, we see and hear the result of this purge applied to various endeavors: gardening, music, farming, science, games, law, and more. Thurber sustains the rhyme and rhythm with a mesmerizing pace right to the end, as when Andreus and Andrea (the good guys) thwart Littlejack and Black by invoking heroes and heroines of legend and lore who begin…

… streaming out of song and story, each phantom flaunting like a flag his own special glory: Lancelot and Ivanhoe, Athos, Porthos, Cyrano, Roland, Rob Roy, Romeo; Donalbane of Burnham Wood, Robinson Crusoe and Robin Hood; the moody Doones of ‘Lorna Doone,’ Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; out of near and ancient tomes, Banquo’s ghost and Sherlock Holmes; Lochinvar, Lothario, Horatius, and Horatio; and there were other figures too, darker, coming from the blue, Shakespeare’s Shylock, Billy Bones, Quasimodo, Conrad’s Jones, Ichabod and Captain Hook–names enough to fill a book.

Add an ending as all-to-real as surprising, and it’s as easy to see as to hear why Harper’s called it the “loveliest and liveliest of parables.” As Ransom Riggs, author of the endearing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, offers in her introduction to a 2017 re-issue, it’s…

… a commentary on world affairs a half century ago, but which feels absolutely (and sadly) relevant today. While balancing all that… it accomplishes feat after feat of linguistic acrobatics–not quite poetry, not quite prose, O is ear candy.

Yes, re-issued in 2017, same year that 1984 was the “Newspeak” of the nation. And given me the very week that Mar-an-Ego’s Littlejacks and Blacks banned 294 words from federal government websites.

Life in Soviet America is so full of coincidence!

-686-

A Whale of a Prayer

First weekend after New Year’s is the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading in New Bedford, as close as I come to a religious observance these past five years.

This year, Recuperation Monday was most unusual. For starters, I finished breakfast at 3 p.m.

Also, because it fell on the 8th, I was acutely aware of my cousin John Hyzuk, a longtime Plum Islander far more popular than I realized judging from the condolences sent my way.

Would have been his 73rd birthday as well as my mother’s 99th. She might have stayed up for the livestream of my reading at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, despite tuning in early for my scheduled time at 1 a.m.

John would have laughed at the thought. In fact, in 2020 and each year since, he did exactly that. But he always pressed me to answer a question he found irresistible when I first told him of it.

He had quite a taste for the unusual, the eccentric, the bold. Pretty sure his favorite song was Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which tells us something.

When I called Ishmael the ultimate “Excitable Boy,” John’s interest piqued. So, upon return from a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave in the Bronx a few years ago, I was eager to tell him of the blank scroll on the tombstone. He immediately asked why?

“It’s a debate that has never been resolved.”

“Debate?”

“Some think it was Melville’s white flag to a hard, cruel world. Others think it was his middle finger.”

John’s reaction left no question as to which side he preferred.

Another local plumber recognized me as soon as I arrived at the Whaling Museum. Was sure to be in the audience for his turn, and like most of the 200-plus readers, he brought the text to life. No matter that he listed the categories of whales, his voice caught the smart-assed mix of whimsy and indignation, humor and reverence we call Ishmael.

When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on a bold premise: If the Bible is “God talking to man,” then Moby-Dick is man’s response. This fascinated a few English profs at South Dakota State, at least when I laid it out over a few pitchers of Grain Belt at a downtown bar.

Admittedly, pure academic speculation with a few quotes leaning my way. Any great work of art will be open to several interpretations, some inevitably contradictory.

D.H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham agreed that it was “written by a man in love,” as one called it. According to biographer Michael Shelden, that was a reference to Melville’s affair with Sarah Anne Morewood, a neighbor whose elderly husband’s devotion to business kept him in NYC most of the time that the novel was written at Melville’s Arrowhead Farm in the Berkshires. On the other hand, male relationships in the book, particularly that of Ishmael and Queequeg, have led others to call Moby-Dick a gay tract.

Moby-Dick has also been interpreted as an atheistic, even nihilistic treatise—a far crow’s nest cry from the accepted categorization of adventure story mixed with industrial manual. Also, “proto-Darwinian,” eight years ahead of Origin of the Species, with Ishmael cast as a “blue environmentalist” and “climate refugee.”

Most relevant today is C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1952) calling it a forerunner of the totalitarianism genre long before Brave New World and 1984. James himself is now a forerunner of numerous pundits comparing Trump’s boast of retribution to Ahab’s bent on revenge.

Whether Melville was responding to God or not hardly matters. As his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried, “He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his disbelief.” What does matter is that he was and still is speaking to US.America didn’t listen then, and 10 years later sank into Civil War.

Save a few hundred Dick Heads who think that New Bedford offers a great weekend getaway in January, nearly half of America is just as deaf now – while many more pay little or no attention.

That would be more than enough cause for a white flag on a tombstone, but I prefer my cousin’s verdict set to the white whale roar of Warren Zevon.

May sound too aggressive for a church, but that’s why this excitable boy is a congregant. And why I call it prayer.

-30-

Every year I also attend the Old South Presbyteruan church on the Friday night closest to Dec. 10, the birthday of William Lloyd Garrison to hear a talk in his honor right around the corner from the home where he was born. Uncomfortable in my disbelief, I bring questions.
Photo by Richard K. Lodge, my former editor at the local paper and one of the organizers of of the annual Garrison lecture.

Comparatively Seeing

Anyone still insisting that no one today can be compared to Hitler needs to see an optometrist. Or a dictionary to tell them that a comparison is not an equation.

So, too, anyone who uses the phrase “apples and oranges” to dismiss comparisons.

Before we get to the mugshot seen round the world, let’s consider these two absurdities that have long passed for conventional wisdom.

Apples and oranges both grow on trees and bear fruit with seeds and peels. Both are nutritious, often the same size, always the same shape (save for the strain of apple called “Delicious” which has a slight taper), and can be turned into juice. The way we use the term “apples and oranges,” you’d think that they were meat loaf and modern drama. Why?

Only reason I can think of is to dismiss comparisons out of hand. Comparisons do require thought, and thought can be taxing. Worst of all, many among us would rather not think at all, resent the very thought of thinking. How else could “woke,” slang for “aware,” become a dirty word?

Reminds me of the English parliament considering a ban on religious satire after a magazine’s Paris offices were bombed due to cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Among those who argued against any ban was Salman Rushdie who carefully but pointedly noted that laughter is a form of thought. Limit laughter and you restrict your ability to think.

Comparisons–whether as metaphors and analogies, or as simple measurements–are likewise a form of thought offering a way to understand a subject. My neighbors who have never been to Annapolis, Maryland, will gain an idea of it when described as “Newburyport on steroids,” as I’ve heard a Newburyport city councilor call it. And if we want to describe home to a friend in New Mexico, we might call our town “Santa Fe with boats,” as did a Chamber of Commerce brochure some years ago.

If I tell you that a tanker on the Great Lakes is 1,000 feet long, you’ll need a moment to conjure up a vague idea. If I say it’s three football fields, including end-zones, it will immediately lengthen right before your mind’s eye.

Of course, this is oversimplified, as these are but hints. Such are comparisons not pretending to be equations. They open doors to understanding and leave us to stand or sit or walk through the room on our own.

The impulse to put Hitler off limits for comparison is understandable. No one has come close to inflicting the horror he brought about. But what of the way he came to power? What of his appeal to so many who followed him no matter what he did? Believed him no matter what he said, no matter how hateful and paranoid his rant and rave?

Would it help to know that, according to his several biographers, he rehearsed his facial expressions and gestures in front of mirrors? Would knowing that have lessened the shock of seeing Donald Trump’s practiced mugshot last week?

Yes or no, it would have prepared us for it.

Just as we might have been prepared for, resisted, and avoided the national nightmare that he has inflicted on us since 2016 had we observed history’s lesson rather than ruling it out of the bounds of polite company. Consider this list:

Not elected by a majority.
Used a direct communication channel to supporters.
Constant blame of others, dividing on racial lines.
Relentless demonization of opponents.
Unceasing attacks on objective truth.
Demonization and ridicule of the press.
Attacks on and distortions of science.
Lies that blur reality–and satisfy bigots who then spread them.
Orchestrations of mass rallies to show status
Extreme nationalism.
Boasting of closing borders.
Embracing mass detentions and deportations.
Using closed borders to protect selected industries.
Cementing rule by enriching elite allies.
Rejecting international norms.
Attacks on democratic processes.
Attacks on the judiciary and rule of law.
Glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths.
Proclaim unchecked power.
Relegate women to subordinate roles.

Now tell me just whom writer Burt Neuborne had in mind when he compiled that list in his book, When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic: Hitler, Trump, or all of the above?

That’s way more in common than apples have with oranges, and still we might add another formidable, tell-tale list:

Alliances with dictators and contempt for elected leaders of free countries.
Suggested threats of violence against opponents at home.
A constant show of machismo rage.
Constant repetition.
Campaigning with a promise of retribution (vergeltung as one kept saying).
Rehearsing poses, expressions, and gestures in front of mirrors…

Just how much more does anyone want? Most unnerving about Neuborne’s book is that it was published four years ago, and yet we were still under this thrall that allowed for no comparison. Perhaps we still are.

So easy to make jokes about the mugshot. Especially now that it is being sold on shirts and coffee mugs with the boast of “Never Surrender!” when we know that it was taken when he literally surrendered to law enforcement at Georgia’s Fulton County Jail.

And just why did they allow him to state his own height and weight as well as posing for what is now a fund-raising PR prop?

Someone on social media likened it to “The Kubrick Stare,” showing it with similar poses of deranged, violent charcters in his films, Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and The Shining. Yes, that’s good for a harrowing laugh–and laughter serves a purpose–but there’s a more helpful comparison to be made.

Within three years of Hitler’s demise, George Orwell wrote 1984. Clearly a cautionary tale against the rise of another Hitler or Mussolini, it described a nation where a stern image of its leader, Big Brother, was posted everywhere the public might look. The expression conveyed almighty power, strength, and control–not just of action, but of thought.

It also conveyed the claim, “I alone can do it,” yet another boast common to both Hitler and Trump.

A cautionary tale? Hate to say it, but 1984 has been taken as a blueprint. Joke about the mugshot all you want, but realize that it already serves them as propaganda. “Never Surrender”? Forget the obvious lie, forget the 215 lbs., and forget the elevator shoes that make 6’3″ possible.

It’s not what the MAGA crowd actually believes, it’s about what they want to believe. Until we lift all bans on comparisons, as well as on laughter, we will have to endure it.

-30-

https://thenewpress.com/books/when-times-mob-swayed

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/08/31/germany-nazis-far-right/608798001/

https://www.fruitfulvineministry.com/relationships-are-like-well-apples-and-oranges/

Unwise Words to the Wise

Once upon a dine, the Port Tavern offered a chicken-curry dish that I not only ordered every time, but recommended to anyone dining with me.

Until one day when a waiter told us it was no longer on the menu. Asked why, he said the restaurant had “a new chef who doesn’t make it.”

The End.

Wait! What the knife and fork was that all about? A fair question from those whose appetites for food I may have whet only to serve up verbal linguine. Rather than describe my disappointment or recall what I had instead, I offer the vignette to pose a few questions:

Did I simply report something that happened, an easily verifiable fact? Or would you describe those few lines as “bad-mouthing” a local restaurant?

Answering this may not be easy for some. One the one hand, it did happen, so you can’t dismiss it as unfavorable opinion. On the other, it does tell of loss, so you can’t call it favorable.

How about the direct quote from the waiter? Have I violated his privacy? Should I report a result without a cause? Or should I include the cause but without quote or attribution? Maybe I could make the reader think there was a notice of the change on the menu:

After searching the menu twice, I took the hint from the new guy with the Greek name and ordered spinach pie instead…

Be that as it may, no one ever accused me of “bad-mouthing” Port Tavern, perhaps because I have continued to dine there with friends, as well as mention it to out-of-towners asking for recommendations in the lobby of the Screening Room conveniently right next door.
,
That was then.

In recent years, increasingly, we hear the word ” bad-mouth” applied, as an active, aggressive verb, to anything that the object of it would prefer to keep quiet. Truth and accuracy have nothing to do with it.

When reporters tell us that Russian jets have bombed Kiev, do we accuse them of “bad-mouthing” Russia? When a Kremlin official justifies the attack, do we expect reporters to ask permission to quote him?

The thought of either is preposterous. Why, then, do we hear the charge on local levels where they turn attention to problems that might be solved into disdain for those calling for attention in the first place?

Paving the way for the recent rise of bad-mouth the verb was–and still is–bashing the noun and verb.

“Bashing” reared its empty head back in the 90s. Don’t know where it began, but it caught on everywhere all at once and across all walks of life. Democrats and Republicans alike have used it as an all-purpose shield. No matter what the criticism, no matter how well-founded, it can be dismissed as “bashing,” which implies that the problem is not the problem, the person calling attention to it is. Yes, the National Rifle Association would be proud.

More recently, the word hater, a noun, has widened the highway of narrow-minded thought, though every lane’s a breakdown lane. What makes it so jarring to people of my generation is that “hate” was always a word to avoid, as negative as it gets.

Notice, too, the parallel proliferation of love. For years, Madison Ave. has conditioned us to “love” certain cars, beers, cereals, laxatives, even insurance companies, and we always knew it was an exaggerated version of “like.” Now we hear political and sports commentators say they “love” or “don’t love” a candidate’s remark or a coach’s decision.

And we wonder why the emotional so often trumps the rational?

What makes “hater” yet more jarring is that this new usage is not limited to describe deep dislike and aversion, but anything less than enthusiastic approval. Once upon an attention span, you could say that you favored The Beatles over The Rolling Stones, and it was understood you still liked The Stones–or vice-versa.

Now it means you “hate” them, which may be a trivial matter regarding musical tastes, but has been a killer in a political system designed for consensus with primaries to winnow out extremists in favor of those with broader appeal. Anything less than 100% approval is all vice, no versa.

Result? Extremists win primaries, and some make it to Congress where they can condemn Jewish space lasers and ask the National Parks Service if it can change the tilt of the Earth’s axis to offset climate change. An entire political party can skip any commitment to a platform at its national convention and instead offer us a terse declaration that can be honestly summed up as Trump uber Alles!

Debasement of language is what George Orwell warned against in 1984 and what George Carlin harped on till the day he died in 2008. Orwell described Newspeak, a dumbed down language that made it impossible to think critically. Carlin traced the devolution of the WWI term shell-shock (“You can hear the bombs falling”) to today’s post-traumatic stress-disorder to illustrate how antiseptic words can numb us to urgent needs.

Where are they when we need them? Oh, say, can we read or hear them when we bemoan today’s “polarization” and “deep division”?

Might they tell us that the very language we use–badmouth, bash, hater, and more–polarizes us to the point that we see everything as all or nothing?

Politics? You can’t even regret out loud the absence of an item on a menu without some people thinking you want to burn the restaurant down.

-30-

https://www.progressive-charlestown.com/2018/02/dumbing-down-america.html

Terms of Beguilement

Though all attention is on Russia and Ukraine, there’s an unmistakable American echo in this invasion. Not rolling in on tanks or flying over in planes, but finessed with language.

When Donald Trump seconded Vladimir Putin’s description of his invading forces as “peacekeepers,” he was echoing the “alternative facts” offered by his faithful advisor, Kellyanne Conway, in the days following his inauguration.

Within days of Conway’s oxymoronic claim, bookstores sold out of 1984, George Orwell’s 73-year-old classic dystopian novel, and the publisher ran another edition. The rush had not so much to do with surveillance and a police state, or with conformity and loyalty oaths, as it had to do with Orwell’s theory of the distortion of words and revisionist history to achieve all of the above.

All those years we thought 1984 a warning against oppression, it never occurred to us that it might serve as a blueprint for oppression.

We like to think that we control language, but as Orwell reasoned, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Indeed, in 2017, many Americans began believing in “alternative facts.” In 2020, it turned into alternative science, and by 2021, who knows how many of COVID’s victims died of it?

We can thank those who parse Putin’s “bizarre” tirade at the start of the invasion for its distortions of history and language, but we need to start parsing equally bizarre language that is taken for granted–sometimes written as law–right here in the USA.

This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of the murder of Treyvon Martin in Florida.

We all know the story and still feel the racial fallout. Rather than rehash, let’s strip it of race and all other detail, and consider only its language:

One person, A, walks past another, B. With a gun, B follows A. A keeps moving away from B. B pursues A. B catches A, an altercation starts, the gun fires, A is dead. B does not deny shooting A. In court, B is acquitted when his lawyer invokes something called “Stand Your Ground.”

In a nutshell, B, who pursued A, is judged to have stood. Unless B left his home and went after A on a conveyor belt (which he himself would have to have owned since the defense was “standing his ground”), this is transparent bullshit.

In any other English-speaking country in the world and at any other time in history, this would be unthinkable. Here in 21st Century America, “Stand Your Ground” is law in many states.

Before long, as most observers tell us, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could determine the fate of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women full reproductive rights.

Anti-Choice activists–to use a far more accurate name for a movement that ignores the necessities of life after birth–have been waiting all these years for a shift in the Supreme Court. When Amy Coney Handmaid Tale Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they had it.

Whether we call them Anti-Choice or Pro-Life, and whether we prefer to avoid the word “abortion” (as I just did) with other terms such as “reproductive rights,” they have made a 49-year habit of using the phrase “abortion on demand.”

Again, strip this of the issue and all details:

A woman seeks medical treatment. Does she demand it? Is any clinic ever obligated to give it? If the clinic says no, is there a consequence? If the clinic says yes, does the woman have to pay? What kind of demand is it if there’s agreed-upon payment? Is the payment on demand?

Let’s apply Anti-Choice “logic” to other services whether we pay out of pocket or are covered by insurance: Do we have hernia repairs on demand? Cavities filled on demand? Oil changes on demand? Our driveways shoveled by the neighbor’s kid on demand?

The only other common use of those two words is a commercial pitch from a company that streams movies into your home. They want you to demand what they have.

Again, you smell the bullshit as soon as you open your nose.

In a courtroom, you’d think that “abortion on demand” would be ruled out of order as prejudicial language, but after 49 years of repetition, judges may no longer notice it.

Just as few notice the gratuitous prejudice in phrases frequently in the news, from “hardline feminists” and “environmental extremists” since the 1970s to “radical left” in recent years. Sometimes it’s done with a change of one word, as when the estate tax is called “death tax.” Or an obscure phrase with a menacing sound used repetitiously to make anything the speaker doesn’t like sound evil, such as “critical race theory.”

Those who do this do not want you to be aware of ills they’d rather live with, that may be to their benefit. But they can’t condemn something as undeniably positive as awareness, so they abbreviate the word into one menacing syllable. Hence, states such as Florida are now passing “anti-woke” legislation.

In the parlance of today, prejudicial language such as on demand has become “normalized.”

As has “stand your ground.” And “peacekeeper,” not in the short time since Putin and Trump used it, but since 1986 when the US developed “peacekeeper” missiles to counter an arms buildup by the USSR. Or since 1943 when the US Navy launched a patrol frigate named “Corpus Christie.”

That last was five years before Orwell wrote 1984. Maybe he took it as a blueprint for his warnings of debased language that flew off the shelves of bookstore weeks after Trump’s inauguration.

Given what has been said since, it’s too bad he’s not around to write a sequel.

-30-