Warning: Kill kill kill kills

By Wyatt Mason

Last Thursday night I listened to–did not watch–the great rhetorical death-match. Reduced as I was to a pair of absorbing ears, I had little capacity the next morning to engage with reports of the whiteness of one of the participant’s teeth; no opinion on the the dress of the other nor on myriad makeup choices–the lipstick’s shade; the eye-shadow’s abundance–much less any insights into body language–potent comparisons of posture, of stance, of gesture–that each brought to bear when delivering, by the way, their words. Alas, all I had to go on were them thar words. And at the level of language and comprehensibility, and in the wake of the superficial parsings that blocked the wide middle of the commentatorial field, I was reduced, through the weekend, to feeling as though into my oatmeal someone had mortar-and-pestled a mortal dose of pills labeled: “Warning: Kill kill kill kills.”

Somewhat reassuringly, an immersion in today’s chilly e-bathwater suggests that I am far from alone in finding almost intolerable the latest attempt to suggest that a politician who speaks in a vacant, incomprehensible patois is a flag-bearer for authenticity, readiness, sagacity.

All this has me looking backward to last spring, lovely for its pristinely un-Palinated landscape, when I made my first post for this page. Then, I mentioned the work of J. Mitchell Morse (1912–2004), an out-of-print professor of English who wrote intelligently throughout his career, with especial emphasis on the abuse of the English language by our population and how that self-abuse would be the guarantor of the political, moral, and functional decline of our republic. “To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed, good writing is inherently subversive.” Given that statistics tell us that our population does not read any more, another issue this election raises is the extent to which good speaking offers any similar possibility for subversion. At this point, I’d take the negative of that statement, and hope that the insensate maunderings of an (allegedly) attractive fraud will contribute to another, better subversion.