Faster than Words

Death and life are in the power of the tongue,

And those who love it will eat its fruits.

-Proverbs 18: 21

You could say that the one thing that sets us apart from other animals is our use of words.  Other animals communicate and we can teach certain words to dogs and other intelligent creatures, but we're the ones who make the words, we're the ones who use the words, and we're the ones who fight over the words.  Bill Clinton famously obfuscated in his testimony about the meaning of the word "is." Politicians have regularly been abusers of the conventions of language, to the point where "spin" is a universally accepted euphemism for justifying lies.  Trump's half-hearted walk back of his Helsinki faux pas is entirely believable from two angles: 

1. I can absolutely believe he said a word he didn't mean to say.  He is an imprecise speaker in the vein of Sarah Palin, whom John Stewart hypothesized wrote her speeches by throwing darts at a board of random words.
2. I don't think he ever really means what he says.  One thing I strongly suspect is true of Trump is that his word is NEVER his bond.  His famous straight shooting is really only ever exercised when he sure of the room.  His vulgarity comes out with Billy Bush who was rolling with the "locker room talk." His prejudiced view of the world comes out when he is crowing to a rally of people in American Flag shirts and red MAGA hats.  I have come to the conclusion that his nature as a salesman is the dominant feature of his personality, he will do anything to sell something.  He was selling something to Vlad Putin the other day and cameras were rolling.

The thing that worries me is the destructive power this sort of thing has on our ability to communicate.  Trump is a symptom of a disease that started a while ago and has exponentially accelerated in the internet age.  Since I was a kid though our discourse has been steadily deteriorating even as we have more and more channels through which to talk, we value the actual words less and less. I'm not just talking about the liberal use of acronyms in place of words like FWIW or LOL, I'm talking about the lack of thoughtful engagement with the thoughts behind the language.  People talk in slogans and slams.  Ever try to have a meaningful dialogue on Twitter or Facebook? Sometimes  you can actually do it, but it is a near inevitability that someone will jump in the middle of a feed with some comment that is clearly intended to just shut the thing down.  Whataboutism that I discussed the other day is a hammer that is frequently used.

See people don't use these frankly amazing platforms that we have to actually discuss, they use them in Trumpian fashion, to "score" points, to "burn" their interlocutors and to generally do anything and everything but actually learn in the process of conversation.  Debate and dialogue used to be a thing we did rather proudly and rather well.  The Lincoln-Douglas debates are a high point of American political discourse, but of course they didn't stop the Civil War.  G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw had immensely intellectual (and humorous) debates about the nature of faith and the existence of God.  There were profound disagreements that were not settled in some pollyannish "everybody's right in their own way," fashion.  People used words to sort these things out and move forward, even if they never came to agreement.  Agreement isn't always the goal, articulation with integrity was the benchmark that was agreed upon.  Edifying discourse, seriously I almost get a little choked up thinking about that phrase.  Many people seem to have accepted the notion that someone speaking of ideals and high values is an elite snob and not to be trusted.

Consider the difference between our current President and the last one.  Obama rarely if ever had to apologize for saying something, he was almost humorously careful and even in his tone and his word choice (look up Obama's anger translator by Key and Peele if you don't mind some PG-13 language). I used to give my kids dinner table lectures about getting good grades and making the right choices in my Obama voice, and it worked.  Eight years without a scandal, even though we had to dig out of a recession, deal with global terrorism and nightmares like Benghazi (yeah I said it, it was a disaster, but not a scandal).  In this administration, we can't even get through eight days without some thing or other making us all look like either morons or sociopaths.  It's not all about words mind you, but it starts there, if you can't even manage the basic things like communicating accurately, why on earth should we trust you with anything else.