Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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Offensive and Random Discharges

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If traditional rhetoric has rules and assumed courtesies, a verbal spew just happens.  Rhetoric is the product of adaptation and thought.  But spew never passes near the centers of intelligence.

I had a classmate who could empty the contents of his stomach on cue.  On a moment’s notice he could produce  a gross  barrage of undigested material that was never meant to pass a person’s lips. It didn’t matter that this childish gesture could be inconvenient to demonstrate on your mother’s new living room carpet. He didn’t have much sense about when to pick his moment. It was part of the unfortunate grade school freak-show that he had perfected.

This chunky kid was one of several characters at my hardscrabble school located a few blocks from runway 17R at Denver’s old Stapleton Airport. Planes would scream over all day. if the noise or cement playground didn’t nick you up, there were classmates who could do the trick. Happily, most later re-joined the human race in high school.

This kid reminds me of the President. I think of Donald Trump as just a larger hulk of gracelessness: a screamer of sorts, to be sure, but mostly a person who disgorges undigested gut reactions with no apparent shame.  Had he known him, Mark Twain would have gladly written about this curious figure, bloated by self importance and clueless about the rules of civil discourse. I suspect Twain would have tired of him, preferring his presence to be confined to the pages of his satire on manners.

All of this is made worse, of course, by others who work for Trump or his party. Like many unsteady grade-schoolers, they pretend not to notice  bully who could turn on them.

Our most damaging cultural rhetoric now appears at both the top and bottom of our national discourse.

My memory of this kid came to mind a few months back after seeing one of many tweeted insults from the President, this one referring to “a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with. . .”  Never mind that Haberman knows how to use language with precision, and that she shares a Pulitzer Prize in Reporting with several of her colleagues at the New York Times. By his standards, this was hardly the worst of nearly 600  insults that have come from the President since taking office.  But the ad hominem attacks continue to pile up. Against Trump, no insult comic could ever stand a chance.

Traditional rhetoric has rules.  Verbal spew just happens.  Effective public rhetoric is the product of careful adaptation and thought, even when coming from people we might otherwise disagree with.  In every case we have a right to expect a speaker has has at least some capacity to measure the effects of their words.

The presence of this continual vitriol has softened us.  We’ve grown accustomed to graceless verbal gestures.  Indeed, Twitter has perfected them.  We are getting used to putting our nation’s presidency alongside the trolls and dystopians who populate the fringes of the internet. It means our most damaging cultural rhetoric now appears at both the top and bottom of our national discourse. And like adolescents trying to fit in, we mostly marvel to the spectacle in silence, knowing that the nation’s chief executive seems incapable of much more than mimicking the kind of coarseness not seen since our days in grade school.

Virtue Signaling

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                   Presidential Targets in Congress

We know what to say when we seem to be verging out of the broad lanes of acceptable social norms.

A person may say they are fair-minded and not prejudiced, even while some of their behaviors suggest otherwise.  A minister may invoke the authority of “God’s law,” but behave cruelly toward others.  A bigot may proclaim that some of his best friends are black, even while he has a history of not renting his apartments to African American families.

This rhetorical pattern sometimes carries the label, “virtual signaling,” a critical red flag used to assert that a speaker is ‘covering’ for behaviors of questionable conduct. As with all critical terminologies, an old linguistic principle applies: knowing the  term helps us recognize the pattern.

As one colleague accurately noted, “Virtue signaling is, by definition, an expression of virtue over action.”  It’s pretty straightforward. We defend ourselves with expressions of positive intentions that conceal non-congruent behaviors and attitudes. In these polarized times its common for victims of discrimination to call out others for what they see as a form of intellectual duplicity.

All of this is a reminder that communication is largely a matter of conveying signs of good character.  As Aristotle noted, our good name is perhaps the best asset we have for communication. We know what we can say if what we do is characterized as verging out of the broad lanes of acceptable social norms.

Virtue signaling is itself becoming a marker that denies what it affirms.

So what  do we make of the President’s speech and condolences in the face of shootings in El Paso and Dayton? He has persistently attacked African American leaders in Congress, as well as individuals at the southern border seeking to enter the United States.  Many Americans are asking if his expressions of compassion can be legitimate, if he has demonized the same groups. For example, presidential candidate and El Paso resident Beto O’Rourke said President Trump had “a lot to do with what happened” in the city, creating “the kind of fear, the kind of reaction that we saw” from the gunman.

Mourning shooting victims obviously signals respect. And expressions of this kind of positive value remain as important parts of civil discourse.  But at its worst, virtual signalling essentially tries to have it both ways, which is why its essentially an assertion of the user’s hypocrisy.

Either way, what is now apparent is that identity politics in the United States makes it more likely that attempts to honor core American values will ring hallow to many.  It’s an interesting irony that at this moment virtue signaling is itself becoming a marker that denies what it affirms.