I’ll take a rare, reluctant excursion into a topical area I most often avoid (contemporary politics), but I do so in the interest of the worthy topic of language, specifically words, their use and abuse.
I’ve read that during the presidential administration of Gerald Ford, Hollywood comic Don Penny was brought into the White House communications office to improve the president’s wooden delivery.
Now, Gerald Ford was a good man. His transitional tenure in the highest office in the land was marked, as I remember, by steady, mostly uncontroversial initiatives (if you rule out his pardon of Richard Nixon, for which even the liberals ultimately gave him an award and told him he did the right thing in declaring an end to “our long, national nightmare,” i.e., Watergate.
He said of himself, after assuming — in a most unassuming way –the Oval Office ( going from vice president to president in the wake of Nixon’s resignation) that he was “a Ford, not a Lincoln.” He was a humble man.
But it is true — his delivery of speeches put you in mind of another word — soporific (sleep enducing).
So it has been written that, after one trying session with Ford, Don Penny said, “Mr. President, these are words. They mean something.” It was a joke, meant to cure Gerald Ford’s inarticulacy.
But yes, we must all remember — words DO mean something.
The current president is part way through a second term in his broken tenure. His inarticulacy is well-known and, one might suppose, deliberate. He comes under enough fire from the Left without me repeating one wag’s suggestion that he functions with a fourth grade vocabulary. His supporters would say he is plain-spoken. You may notice that he repeats himself often, seemingly in a failed search to find a better. clearer way to say what he’d just said. One might also theorize that this is calculated to drive him point home — twice.
Nonetheless, in Donald Trump’s and all of our mouths, words DO mean something, whether you like them or not. Among the things for which he will be remembered is extreme rhetorical recklessness. This has been noted often by friend and foe alike, and it is clear he never intends to change, short of a divine rhetorical intervention –such as God having Lincoln, Gladstone, or even just Ted Sorensen appear to him in a dream to scold him like a Christmas ghost. “Mind your words, Donald!”
His most recent venture into rhetorical recklessness was to suggest that some members of Congress should be executed for, in an undeniably blatently political gesture, creating a video in which they remind military service members that they don’t have to obey illegal orders.
Well, this is true, if an order can objectively be judged to be illegal. That, of course, is not at all a clear, easily recognizable matter to determine. It could be decided after the inevitable courtmartial.
The subsequent furor among Democrats and the liberal media was a predictable — and partisan – tempest in a tea pot. But even Trump’s partisans were inclined to call it –reckless. Another in the inumerable instances of rhetorical recklessness on the part of Donald Trump. It does not serve him — or the nation — well.
This sort of thing is boundless in our society now dominated by the impulsive world of social media. Trump is our first truly social media president.
There is a way to discuss all matter — to object, affirm, criticize — that is powerful, creative, respectful, useful — if the president would only pay attention to the impact and value of his own words.
To which I’ll add, in despair, ‘ain’t never gonna happen.’ Trump is Trump –rude, crude, ineducable on this score. (How did he ever pass the verbal SATs to get into Yale??) And he is reckless. One prays his recklessness is a superficial calculation to shock on the surface while, again, one prays, he is actually more deliberative in private when he makes the decisions that affect our national and international fortunes. The jury is still out on that.
TRump is given to insulting people. I dislike that very much. That’s recklessness. Perhaps he could at least learn to be creative in his insults and denigrations, like John Randolph of Roanoke who, in describing the corrupt nature of another politician’s speech, famously said, “thy words stinketh like a mackerel in the moonlight.”
I guess that would be an improvement. Better still, Mr. President, how about you just stop hurling insults?) It stinketh!
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