I ended my
last piece with a promise not to waste any more words on the self-publicist and
arch-troll Milo Yiannopoulos (see below). I break that promise only to note that Simon &
Schuster have cancelled their contract to publish his book after he was caught
on video joking about clerical abuse and dismissing the significance of sexual
consent. Perhaps the publishers were grateful that he provided them with an
excuse to change their mind.
When I
made that promise I was intending to take a break from the American carnage
that is the Trump administration. I thought I might write about the contrasting
stylistic choices made by various translators of Anna Karenina. But I find myself in Los Angeles and the news
presses in on me. Tolstoy will have to wait.
A growing
movement calling for Californian independence, though extremely unlikely to
lead to anything, is symbolic of the strength of feeling here, where people
voted against Trump in overwhelming numbers. As I learned today from a
sociology professor at the University of California, more than half of the
university’s quarter of a million students are either immigrants or the
children of immigrants. Most people in this diverse and dynamic state know that
immigration is a good thing and reject Trump’s xenophobic vision.
The phrase
“American carnage” comes from the President’s inaugural address. It was
striking partly because we don’t expect such a stark indictment of a country
from its own leader, but also because it sounds incongruously like the title of
a slasher movie, a thrash metal band or a televised wrestling competition. It
was verbally jarring in the context of a formal speech to the nation.
It points
to a striking feature of the current political scene. America is undergoing a kind
of linguistic revolution. From the beginning of his campaign, Trump’s most plausible
promise was that people would be liberated to speak as offensively as they
please. He is doing his best, of course, to shut down criticism directed at him:
his chief strategist has said that on political matters the press should “keep
its mouth shut” and a top White House aide has announced that the powers of the
President “will not be questioned”. But inciting hatred against the weak is to
be encouraged. Trump continues to model this freedom at every opportunity.
In speech,
he is crude, repetitive and often incoherent. And yet no American President has
ever put such stock in the power of language to construct reality. And because
of his position, the consequences of one of his tweets or casual asides can be
enormous. I am reminded of Auden’s poem, Epitaph
on a Tyrant:
Perfection,
of a kind, was what he was after,
And the
poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew
human folly like the back of his hand,
And was
greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he
laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when
he cried the little children died in the streets.
Previously published in the Bangladesh Daily Star
