A Murmuration of Americans

Deciphering language in difficult times

Photo by Pete Godfrey on Unsplash

One of my favorite writing teachers, Jeannine Ouellette, asks the students in her close-reading courses to “look at what is happening on the page. What is the real work the words are doing?” When I first heard her ask this, I was confused. Words are tools for communication. Clear and concise is best. I was a recovering writer-for-hire/creative writing newb.

With better understanding, I found her questions freeing. While Jeannine is generally talking about use of language in service of craft, art, and beauty, the rule applies equally when examining the news of our life and times. Words alone are not truth. Words work in service of truth if they are doing their jobs honestly. So often lately, they are not. But that bit of mental distance allows us room to breathe and think when words feel overtly threatening on their faces, reminding us what is real and what is manipulation.

I have learned, in increasingly confounding times, to examine the work of language, to parse what is actually being said from what is window dressing. In our current moment of dystopian Orange Chaos, it is often difficult to tell one from the other by design.

From the top, we hear phrases like Make America Great Again, with its intentional ambiguity, and general hyperbolic bluster about the monumental nature of this 47th presidency, a new Golden Age. Notorious or infamous might be more fitting words, but the President doesn’t fact-check his own copy. He is a talking brochure that always sounds something like this:

Have you heard of this place called Gaza? It’s beautiful there. Well, maybe not right now. Americans are gonna love it. There’s no place better. When it’s done, you’ll never know so many people died there. You’ll love it. And if you don’t love it, you are the enemy. You’re dead to America. Gone.

Then, there is the language of his flock. They use vague terminology akin to hyper-masculine sports-speak mixed with slogans that the average acolyte can put on a t-shirt in big red letters and act as though they are on the inside. (Spoiler: They are not.) The chosen few display their obtuseness and rampant disqualification proudly, with flimsy rationales and directives like:

• Flood the Zone

• Shock and Awe

• Drill Baby Drill

• The Enemy from Within

• I Don’t Recall

• Falsely Accused

• More Masculine Energy

• Time to Shake Things Up

• Muzzle Velocity

Meanwhile, left-leaning mainstream media uses the language of authoritarianism to describe an unprecedented period of political overwhelm, with scary words like oligarchy, kleptocracy, and bureaucratic coup, while taking easy aim at the absurdity of it all with newly-coined zingers like broligarchy, Gaz-a-Lago, and my own, Sharpie-first-ask-later lawlessness. If you can’t laugh…

So much of the language we are seeing these days is one of three things: vanity vocab for the unhinged, but fragile ambitions of an aging egomaniac (and his DOGE surrogate) who only cares about his own glorification; the revenge-driven machinations of a newly-emboldened Christian Nationalist Right; or the frantic attempts of reporters and pundits to describe the absurd actions of that same narcissist. The first is not truth, as much as he would like it to be. The second is hate-filled fear-mongering, drunk on power. The third is like trying to put socks on a baby. Crazy-making.

And still, we cannot look away. Our amygdalas will not let slide even badly-crafted threats to our senses of personal liberty. Constant vigilance, lest some new injustice float by under our noses. Should we be truly afraid? The stakes are higher for some groups than others. Some of it is already very real, targeting the people we love, our schools, and our communities.

Before they lost their mojo, the Washington Post was right: Democracy dies in darkness (under a facsimile of normalcy). Terms like rule of law, and checks and balances are off the table in the new American power-grab. The zone has been flooded, and we are swimming against the eddy in a constantly churning news cycle, never quite sure what could happen next.

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Bonus: video editorial from Ezra Klein at the New York Times on surviving the Floodzone: “Don't Believe Him.”

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I recently revisited the work of American essayist, novelist, and travel writer, Paul Theroux. My favorite of his works is a collection of his early essays called Sunrise with Seamonsters. Included in this volume is Theroux’s 1967 story, published in the June issue of Commentary magazine, entitled “Cowardice.”

By his own admission, at the height of the Vietnam War, Theroux escaped the varied fates of 1.9 million of his American age contemporaries by joining the Peace Corps, moving to Africa, and dodging the military draft. Years later, still not totally out of the draft board’s grasp, Theroux penned the essay calling himself a coward.

It has not always been this way. I used to think I was a person of high principles. The crooked thing about high principles is that they can live in thin air. I am fairly sure mine did.

Almost sixty years later, there is truth in Theroux’s assessment of high-minded liberals, many of whom are wringing their hands at present. It’s easy to be principled when your democratic nation holds the biggest stick and allows you to speak freely. I myself have often marched, written letters, and taken small actions of resistance from the safety of my principled, educated, liberal bubble in the last 30 years. But did I actually ever risk anything?

We typically shorthand cowardice as an unwillingness to do what is morally correct in the face of fear. Theroux puts fear at the center and deconstructs its defenses, revealing the fragility of the real emotions beneath:

This is really what a coward is, I believe: a person who is afraid of nearly everything and most of all afraid of anger. His own anger is a special danger to him. He accepts his solitary hardship and pays the price of withdrawing. He knows that each attempt to deal with violence may require summoning all the inhuman bravado he can contain. The bravery is a cover. Its weight intimidates the flesh beneath it. Since bravery implies a willingness to risk death, the fear to be brave becomes the fear to die.….

Because he wants always to think that he will not be harmed (although he is plagued by the thought that he will be), there is no evil in his world. He wills evil out of his world. Evil is something that provokes feelings of cowardice in him; this feeling is unwelcome, he wants to forget it. In order to forget it he must not risk hating it. Indeed, the coward hates nothing just as he loves nothing. These emotions are a gamble for him; he merely tolerates them in others and tries to squash or escape them in himself. He will condemn no one when he is free from threat.

The great irony here, of course, that our current President is one of the most-discussed draft dodgers in history. Coincidentally, he wields that big stick of democracy like a 3-foot summer sausage. Legitimate or not, we can draw an easy parallel between Theroux’s description of cowardice, fear, and bravery, and 47’s early actions from the seat of ultimate power. The language of his first 18 days and his plan going forward is the language of cowardice.

In Theroux’s first paragraph, we could easily substitute the word “ego” for all references to his person and lift the President’s strongman mask. To him, losing face, losing popularity, losing the spotlight is a fate worse than death.

The second part of Theroux’s characterization clearly speaks to 47’s general “I’m rubber, you’re glue” attitude toward all diplomatic elements of his job. If he is indifferent to everyone, he acknowledges no adversaries, no friends. If he doesn’t agree to play, the negotiations cease. If he creates fictional enemies — immigrants, federal employees, transgender people — in place of real ones, he can stack the deck. He does not lead. He bullies from a safe distance. He risks nothing. He is the Coward in Chief.

I have wondered in the last 18 days where I fall on Theroux’s scale. Am I brave, or principled, or a coward? I am probably too mouthy to be a coward. It might actually get me in trouble someday. But maybe that is my own version of tough talk. If our democracy were really at risk, to what lengths would I go to protect it? For now, I am watching the work the words are doing closely.

There is minor solace in knowing that we have two weapons in our language arsenal that are completely foreign to the current powers-that-be: courage and hope. We may not know exactly what those look like in these early days, but it doesn’t feel the same as it did in 2017. We are wiser. What was once totally unpredictable is now neatly outlined in the Project 2025 playbook. There are murmurations of resistance in the states and in the courts.

And a murmuration of starlings is a force to be reckoned with against a flock of sheep and an anti-social wolf any day.

Have a great weekend.

- IWW