Republican

Shod forever in red: two modes of immortality

1. That which never can change:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=eX6e8A9mk-g

Its oriflamme is, “The red shoes dance on.”

2. That which refashions mother memory into statesmanship:Its talisman in words is, “Make [name of myth] great again.”

As if the word again could ever have had a not yet changed meaning – that is, a meaning not yet tangled in myth’s pubic hair.

—

This is an anonymous, unattributed repost of a document dating from about 1938. Its text translates as, “Germanic Civilization and Way of Life: The Knowledge of the Sacredness of the Blood.”

Again, Bobby Jr.

Teaching undergraduate literature at second-tier universities in the late twentieth century, I used to get lucky with “The Use of Force,” a short story by a modernist poet who earned his living as a pediatrician. He wrote it in 1938, as a kind of casenote.

https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/premedical-society/wp-content/uploads/sites/328/2020/10/William-Carlos-Williams_The-Use-of-Force.pdf

“You know,” I’d suggest to the class, “this is a story about rape.”

“No!” the class would roar back. “The man is a doctor! He’s trying to help the little girl!” But then we would start actually reading the words that the doctor actually wrote, and faces would light up.

But after the late twentieth century gave way to the early twenty-first, the lights stayed off. “Big deal,” jeered the 19-year-old healthies seventy years after 1938. “Every male-female relationship is a rape.” So I stopped teaching “The Use of Force.”

And after all, by then there remained few physicians who had ever even seen a case of diphtheria.

But oh, Mr. Secretary Jr.: how wonderful the word “again” may be about to become again.

I didn’t say good.

But I do say wonderful.

“Healthy again” —

physically and (which amounts to the same thing) historically. The air inside the Pullmans was fragrant with smoke, everyone knew their place, and the help spoke Help language. The imaginative concept that had brought forth the text and its art was that not just inside but outside black boundaries, the universe is white.

As white as white flesh sprouting from a brown juice.

—

Life magazine, September 6, 1937, page 116. Life digital archive, New York Public Library.

 

Technical note: why do Republicans talk that way?

Answer: because they talk Calvinist. Paranoia like theirs has been the language of American Protestantism since the days of the Pilgrims, and in the Presbyterian theologian Donald Trump it has found a poet for the twenty-first century. The video shock of his complexion combines with his pulpit-style sing-song audio to evoke a full spectral range of American culture. As of 2023, Trump is the lord of American language: a bard loved as perhaps no poet in English has been since Tennyson. He commands a tradition.

You can tell from the sample of print below, for instance, that the text being communicated through its words is old. But don’t the words themselves seem contemporary?

No doubt, but they date from 1704.  They were transcribed back then by Jonathan Swift, and the “he” on the page is Swift’s character Jack, who stands mostly for John Calvin. It is Calvin who lives on in this Irish page and thousands of subsequent pages by such American thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Woodrow Wilson, and, yes, Donald Trump.

What — you thought the idea of a paranoid atavism was original with Trump? One thing poetry can teach you is that no stimulus to emotion is original. First comes an imageless desire and only then comes its realization in form. For any poet, realization — that is, making real — has always been the hard part. Trump’s achievement as a poet was to realize by transforming his uttering body into a bardic color: the color orange. Calvinists have always reveled in their pain, but Trump taught all America to revel orangely. After Trump, suffering was newly and lovably embodied in orange. Suddenly, at last! it seemed understandable. All you have to do is realize, murmured the TV while America was going to sleep, what color it is that irradiates when a lord of language rolls video and sing-songs, “Let there be light.”