Impure wind

Impure wind
by David Benjamin

“In our age, there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues a political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

MADISON, Wis. — There have been more references to George Orwell during the brief reign of Donald Trump that I can recall in any previous presidency. Just recently, Times columnist Paul Krugman referred to a typical post-campaign Trump rally to the Two Minutes of Hate ritual imposed on the brainwashed masses of Oceania in Orwell’s classic dystopian nightmare, 1984.

Hardly anyone with a high-school education can hear Kellyanne Conway talking about “alternative facts” and not think about Winston Smith’s job expurgating history at the Ministry of Truth. Nor did it take long after Rudy Giuliani said, “Truth isn’t truth,” for fiction readers to remember the mob roar of Big Brother’s believers: “War Is Peace! Freedom Is Slavery! Ignorance Is Strength.”

There is, indeed, a parallel chant favored by the frenzied cultists of Big Orange: “Build The Wall! Drain The Swamp! Lock Her Up!”

Perhaps most ironic in the wake of what Krugman called the “Orwellification” of the White House is that Trump has never read Orwell, nor does he know who that is. Lester Holt could probably sit across from Trump and amiably convince him that George Orwell used to lounge around the Algonquin Club, swilling martinis and trading quips with Dorothy Parker, Frederick Douglass, Cardinal Richelieu and Joey Bishop.

“Orwellian” references have been lately accumulating like — in Orwell’s words — “tea leaves blocking a sink.” This simile appears in Politics and the English Language. Besides being required reading for anyone tiptoeing seriously into English composition, Orwell’s critique of political language foreshadows 1984 and ridicules the hackneyed habits of learned discourse. Orwell’s lessons about speaking publicly with clarity and conviction are timeless.

Orwell’s essay dissects how the “inflated style,” “ready-made phrases,” multisyllabic evasions and “flyblown metaphors” spewed by politicians are intentionally conceived to obscure issues and dodge responsibility. Orwell writes, for example, that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”

The bloated and insincere rhetoric that Orwell deplores appears in the scripted speeches that Donald Trump reads off teleprompters at official occasions. But the essence of Trump’s language abuse is the apparent opposite of this pious bullshit. He uses a deflated, grade-school oratory barely noted by Orwell in the 1940s. But were Orwell with us today, he would show little mercy for what the press calls Trump’s “populism” — a word that repeated misuse has rendered meaningless.

Foreshadowing the confusion that attaches today to Trump’s phony populism, Orwell wrote, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.”

Although his focus was on“pretentious diction” in politics, Orwell understood the bluster of blowhards like Trump who detonate short, explosive words to rouse the mob. Indeed, Orwell hauntingly dramatized this “fake simplicity” in 1984.

Were he alive today, I’m certain that Orwell would find both fascinating and fearful Trump’s power to erase the meaning of a simple word by first distorting it and then repeating it to death. Trump has reduced a small lexicon to blithering nothingness. “Tremendous” has become “commonplace.” “Incredible” and “unbelievable,” which once meant “extraordinary” or “remarkable,” now — from Trump’s mouth — mean, “I’m not credible,” “I’m lying.” “Believe me” means “Don’t believe me…or anyone.” “Fake news” is any information unkind to the naked emperor. “News” itself is a term that now rings false. “Sad” is laughable. “Horrible” is banal. “Treason” has neither definition nor effect, and “loyalty” denotes only suspicion.

Trump has an entire vocabulary of terms that fall loosely under Orwell’s rubric, “dying metaphors,” except that now they would be more accurately perceived as deader than an over-flogged horse. Without “evoking a visual image,” we hear exhausted Trumpisms like “witch hunt,” “big beautiful powerful wall,” “horror show,” “enemy of the people” and, of course, “make America great (or something else) again.” Even loaded terms like “crooked,” “killing,” “flipping,” “fire and fury,” “blood coming out of her eyes” and “grab her by the pussy” incite little more than a roll of the eyes.

Trump, by dumbing down the rhetoric of successful politics, has reversed Orwell’s critique of weaselly euphemism while — ironically — re-sounding Orwell’s alarm. Speech without substance, speech that intentionally avoids substance by turning arguments into slogans and distilling meaning into moonshine, is a timeless threat to the tenuous freedoms we associate with a “democracy” that we struggle to define — both as a word and as an ideal.

Orwell wrote, with an uncharacteristic note of hopefulness, that “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.” But in today’s context, he would add that simplicity employed to achieve a mock dissidence is every bit as dangerous as the pompous doublespeak of the overeducated elite.

If I thought they might read it, I would commend Trump’s true-believers — and, for that matter, those of Bernie Sanders and Paul Ryan — to Orwell’s closing paragraph: “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”