There is a lively debate about how many words for snow or different types of frozen water exist among the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. The numbers cited range between 30 and 300.
Regardless of the particular linguistic theory to which you subscribe, the point is clear. If you live in a world in which snow is everywhere, you’re going to find many ways to describe it.
For the same reason, those of us living in Trump’s America today would imagine our vocabularies would be as swollen as an engorged intestine with different words for sh-t. In a sh-tstorm, after all, it matters just what type of manure is being hurled your way at any given moment— its origins, its composition, its consistency, its odor and just how long it is going to take to make yourself or your community or our country clean again once we eighty-six the flow at its source.
Consider the all the sh-tty words now are regularly used to refer to our leaders, their actions, their supporters, their policies—and thus have gained new meanings. You know what I mean. If someone said to you, ‘I just heard something from “old sh-t for brains,”’ you’d instantly know who they were talking about. If someone said they couldn’t stand the torrent of “verbal diarrhea” they’re now exposed to daily, you would know the source. Or if someone warned you of another “sh-t sandwich” served up in D.C., you’d expect it was a new executive order or piece of MAGA legislation.
Indeed, with the three branches of our government now under control of the far right, it is hard not to think of the White House, Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court as the upper and lower intestines and rectum of our body politic.
Surely when you think of “number two” you think of J.D. Vance. When someone says “waste, fraud and abuse,” you instantly know that the waste in question is pure undiluted bullsh-t. If I say, name a “turd” who do you think of? Would it help if I said “turd-in-chief?”
And when someone says MAGA is a movement, just what kind of movement do you think it is?
Admittedly, depending on what part of our country you’re from, different words might be used. A farmer referring to the MAGA efforts to shut down rural hospitals as part of their efforts to steal from America’s most vulnerable in order (ordure?) to provide even more for our billionaire plutocrats might condemn the legislative effluviant as a big stinking pile of meadow muffins. Go a little further west and that pile might be seen as buffalo chips. After all, one person’s merde is another’s shiznit.
It’s so bad that you might think kakistocracy is derived from the Latin word “caco,” which means “to defecate.” The reality is that it comes from the Greek “kakistos,” which means “worst” and is actually a term to describe government by the worst people. In the end, works itself out to be much the same thing.
So yes, we’re already well on our way to having more words for sh-t in Trump’s Americas than the Inuit or Yupik or Sami people have for various forms of ice. The impact of this national trauma on our vocabularies is much the same as it is on our digestive systems: a torrent of new meanings and a constant uncomfortable pressure to produce even more.
This is also applicable in areas where the terminology is not scatological—even if the origins are. Nowadays, for example, there are so many disasters that it is essential we use exact language to differentiate between the type we are referring at any given moment.
Let’s flip through the headlines of the past week or so and use healthcare as an example. In just a matter of days we have had or learned of healthcare controversy, healthcare fraud, a healthcare scandal and a healthcare catastrophe.
The debate over whether or not the former president of the United States and his aides covered up the state of his physical and mental decline is somewhere between being just a controversy (because it’s, well, old news) and a scandal (if it helped lead us to the mess we’re in today—and I use that in every sense of the word mess you think I do).
But what about the on-going set of lies about the health of the current president? It began during his first term when his now discredited doctor tried to persuade us that a morbidly obese man was actually the missing Hemsworth brother; such fallacies and misrepresentations have continued through to this day. That’s also a scandal because Trump controls one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals.
If you want to go from scandal to fraud, how about the line that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is trying to peddle—that the devastating cuts his party is inflicting on Medicaid are actually not cuts at all? It’s a sham, because soon enough people will lose their healthcare. Many will suffer and some will die.
That is not just fraud, of course. It’s a catastrophe. Just as is eliminating funding for cancer research and efforts to cure other diseases, putting anti-vaxxers in charge of the FDA and having an ex-heroin addict with a brain worm who has been selling healthcare snake oil for much of his adult life in charge of our national healthcare apparatus. A million died from Covid-19 thanks largely to misinformation and bad policies started under Trump during the pandemic. What if there is another such pandemic? And what if we simply see, as we already are, preventable diseases like measles or smallpox spreading? What are we going to call that? What is worse than catastrophe? Cataclysm? Debacle? Will national tragedy capture the grief and anger we are feeling?
Or are there other terms we need? Will we call them what they are—crimes against humanity? Or will we have come to a point when the words no longer matter, that there are no expletives nor products of the poets among us capable of capturing the losses we have suffered? A moment when all we are left with is the heart-rending unspeakable vocabulary of the loss and horror this current moment of national political failure will have produced?
The post Opinion: What Do We Even Call Our Current Trump Catastrophe? appeared first on The Daily Beast.
