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Thursday
Although Donald Trump’s rhetoric grows increasingly Hitlerian by the day, the corporate media continues to sane-wash him. I’m thinking that Jonathan Swift, in my opinion literature’s greatest satirist, would have had something to say about this.
First of all, Swift would point out how Trump dehumanizes migrants, using fascistic rhetoric as he accuses them of poisoning American blood and, thanks to their genes, of committing thousands of murders. As Trump remarked to conservative television host Hugh Hewitt,
How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
In “Modest Proposal,” we counter similar cold-blooded talk about human beings as the fictitious author treats children as marketable assets:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.
I call Trump’s rhetoric Hitlerian because Nazi propaganda about how the German master race was threatened by inferior blood lines may well be behind his thinking. Such pseudo-science, of course, helped provide a rationale for the Final Solution. So how did the New York Times report this? Its headline talked of Trump’s “long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”
Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri was having none of this. As she noted, “That is simply not correct. That’s not genetics! It’s not even science.” And then she thought of parallel situations:
This would be like hearing someone say, “Let’s bleed him to release the humors!” and calling him fascinated with medicine. Sure, if by “fascinated with,” you mean “not paying attention to” — but that is not what those words mean! Unless we are just indifferent to the meaning of words now, something that is always possible.
And again:
Similarly, if someone said, “I sure love that the sun revolves around us every day!” you would not say, “That man is fascinated with astronomy.” You would say, “That man has been in a coma for centuries! Remarkable!”
And finally:
I could go on. I will go on! If someone says, “I’m about to add people to this party by murdering seven!” you don’t call him passionate about arithmetic. You say, “That man is threatening people, and also — way, way down the list of priorities — he doesn’t seem to understand how addition works!”
But the Times was not deterred by the scathing criticism it received. Two weeks later, it was back at it again. At a Trump town hall in which two people fainted, he decided that he would shut down questions and just play his favorite songs. For an extraordinary 39 minutes, he swayed along with the music before leaving. Was this a sign of early dementia, as many psychologists are starting to tell us? Was it, as fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat believes, an authoritarian “basking in a cocoon of adoration, standing in a protected environment of his own design”? Neither, according to the Times:
And so Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned—and, it appeared, for himself—to just listen to music instead.
Mr. Trump had his staff fire up his playlist, standing on the stage for about half an hour and swaying to songs as the crowd slowly dwindled.
Other news organizations had their own version of “improvisational departures.” Associated Press reported, “Trump turned his town hall into an impromptu concert,” while the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Pennsylvania Town Hall Ends in Concert.”
Alexandra Petri was on this case as well:
Not that it was ever exceptionally strong to begin with, but I feel I have lost my hold on reality.
I could have sworn that Donald Trump prematurely ended his town hall (I use the term loosely, because that implies a forum where questions are asked and answered, which this really was not) and instead forced the crowd to stand there while he swayed along to his rally playlist. But it is equally possible that I am hallucinating and my brain is just trying to make me realize that my body is being dissected by aliens in a laboratory.
Then she thought of an analogous situation:
Imagine, by comparison, the audience’s response if Taylor Swift stopped an Eras Tour concert early and decided to play her favorite political speeches instead while she remained onstage, occasionally mouthing along with the words (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and the audience tried to decide whether this was a sign that their idol had finally cracked.
I promised you Jonathan Swift so here he is. This master satirist is brilliant in his ability to take sordid reality and sane-wash it. At the end of “Modest Proposal,” he characterizes his baby-killing idea as follows:
But, as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power…
He even, in his proposal’s defense, assures us that he has no ulterior motive. He offers it to us purely from the goodness of his heart as he does not stand to benefit in any way from it:
I profess in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the publick good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.
My favorite instance of Swift inappropriately using neutral language to describe a horror appears in his Tale of a Tub. It’s short and sweet and therefore devastating. I suspect he is describing a prostitute tied to the back of an ox cart and flogged through the town:
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.
The difference between Swift and the New York Times, of course, is that he means for us to be appalled by his speakers’ underreactions. We are meant to harshly criticize people who, by choosing to suspend their humanity and by failing to fully acknowledge what they are witnessing or proposing, have surrendered all moral authority.
Our corporate media, by contrast, is repeatedly surrendering. Under the guise of what it calls its imperative to even-handedly report on both sides, it fails in its basic obligation to report the truth.
