Sound and Fury
Our two main presidential candidates sure say a whole lot without actually conveying any solid meaning.
Modern politicians are notorious for their nonsense. Their penchant for logorrhea. Their adoration of the sound of their own voices. Their addiction to blatherskite. Their partiality for mellifluous malarkey. In short, they love to hear themselves speak. And speak. And speak some more. In all honesty, it is very surprising that any of them have any voice left given the number of times they part their lips. They go on press junkets, do media appearances that seemingly never end, and spend so much time blabbering about themselves that it is shocking when they ever shut up. And for political leaders, like the party captains in the Congress or anyone in the Executive, this is even worse. For instance, Chuck Schumer has never met a camera he didn’t seek to befriend, Mike Johnson seems to love the spotlight, Nancy Pelosi practically lives on television, and Joe Biden – before his precipitous mental decline – was a fount of gum-flappery.
But for the most part, politicians actually say things that are meaningful when they open their traps to speak to the public. A lot of it is pablum, yet it still comes with some sort of recognizable meaning that can be parsed and analyzed by the commentariat. Their words, although they may be repeated ad nauseam to the point of ear-plugging boredom, have a basic resonance and sense. You can get the gist of what they mean simply by listening to what they say. Let’s just say that this isn’t exactly the case for the two people vying for the most powerful job in the world.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are infamous for their verbal vomit, but unlike their fellow politicos, their sentences tend to be entirely void of meaning and sense. Neither speaks with any sort of authority behind their words. Their speeches and interviews are replete with nonsequiturs, unsupported conclusions, and repeated lines that have no import. Curiously enough, however, they tend to be devoid of significance in entirely different ways.
Kamala Harris has exactly two rhetorical modes: pull-string repeating doll and total word salad nonsense. The first mode is her go-to when she is on the stump, in largely-scripted interviews, and when talking in prerecorded messages. Harris is well-rehearsed, almost to the point of the audience being able to repeat her verbatim if they had watched previous appearances. She has a few canned lines that she repeats incessantly, especially when she gets a tad flustered. Before her current campaign kicked off in earnest, her use of the line “we can see what can be, unburdened by what has been,” became fodder for comedy relief given how many times she awkwardly plopped it into her regular cadence. Since then, she has largely shifted away from that one and to some others. Recently, she has gained the tic of responding to nearly every question with some variation of “I was raised in a middle class family.” And her second mode – word salad – is somehow even worse.
When Harris loses her place on the teleprompter or simply has to speak extemporaneously, she falls apart entirely. Her gaffes when talking of her own volition and with only her brain to support her are legendary, so much so that conservative websites can have 20-plus part series dedicated to them. This mental block came up recently, when Harris’s teleprompter went out at a rally for less than a minute. She simply could not fill the time without either looking abjectly terrified, cackling awkwardly, or repeating meaningless garbage over and over until her canned stump speech came back online. It was alternately hilarious and disturbing. People have compared her to Selina Meyer on the HBO show Veep, but this may be unfair to Julia Louis-Dreyfus. If anything, Harris is more akin to Billy Madison answering a question he has no clue about in the climax of the eponymous Adam Sandler flick. In that final scene, he fails so miserably at answering an open-ended question about the Industrial Revolution’s impact on literature, that the moderator says:
“Mr. Madison, what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
When Kamala Harris goes off-prompter, we are all that moderator.
Trump, for all of his flaws – and there are more than enough to fill a tome the size of my head – is deeply authentic. He does not say things simply because it is in his actual political interest to do so; he says things because he means them – in the immediate moment. The 45th president’s problem is that he says literally anything and everything every single time he speaks. The man self-contradicts repeatedly, mostly because he simply does not believe in anything for more than five minutes and has never really pretended that he has. Trump was, is, and always will be a New York City carnival barking real estate huckster who has more in common with Victor Lustig than Dwight Eisenhower. Those of us who have resided in and around the NYC/NJ metro area over the past 40 years have known this all along; the star of The Apprentice was never more than a sweet-talking business failure who has no moral or rhetorical compass. Listening to the man for more than instantaneous meaning is an infuriating process that involves more linguistic parsing than a Talmudic scholar could handle.
For instance, if he is confronted with video evidence of him saying something in the past that he now disagrees with – even if that was a few days earlier – he flat out denies it. He claims the video is false, that he never said such a thing, and if he did, so what? And just when you think you’ve got the slippery eel of a politician nailed down, he goes out and entirely reverses himself. His lackeys in the MAGA wing of the GOP pick up Trump’s latest talking point and parrot it as gospel, no matter how facially absurd or contrary to traditional conservative principles. They go out on media hits and say this or that Trump policy is simply perfect, the best ever, without any rival, while they denigrate its opposite number as unpatriotic, despicable, evil trash. Within a day, the policy is reversed entirely, either by tweet or in an off-the-cuff remark at a rally. And the Trump supporters duly follow their Pied Piper in spite of this ritual humiliation. I would feel bad that these people keep getting the limbs they’re out on cut from beneath their feet, but they do keep insisting on climbing out on those damn limbs.
If one single thing about Donald Trump is true, it’s that nothing he says carries any serious meaning. The people who parse his every word – both out of love and out of hate – and invest dramatic amounts of import in them perplex me to no end. Have you all not seen this guy reverse himself over and over? Are we watching the same person speak? Trump lives off the reaction to what he says and plays into it. That is his special sauce with live audiences and why he is such a genuinely charismatic public figure (bad people can have charisma, too). But it also is why investing meaning in his words is a fool’s errand: he says whatever the person in front of him wants to hear at the time he hears it. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s one of the main reasons he is entirely temperamentally unfit for the office he seeks.
The most apt describer of the rhetorical style – or conspicuous lack thereof – of our presidential frontrunners died more than 400 years ago. William Shakespeare, the most important literary figure in the history of the English language, penned a spectacularly famous monologue in what many (including me) consider his best play: Macbeth. In this soliloquy, Macbeth is lamenting the uselessness and futility of life itself, saying:
“It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
And reader? This is what we have on the ballot in November. Two idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Saddle up, it’s going to be a rough four years.