You are spot on with insufficiency of metaphor and language. It seems to me that AI generated text had also contributed to this ongoing dilution and inability to accurately describe and digest the real-time destruction of America as we knew it. Tr*mp speaks in hyperbole to such a degree that words lose their meaning all together. How can we fight back if words don’t matter?
As a history teacher, you reminded me of Primo Levi who also wrote about how difficult it was to put his experience of the Holocaust and extermination camps into words. He tried to do so across multiple books before taking his own life. He bore enormous survivor’s guilt and tried to convey the horrors of what he had witnessed and over and over again found that language and metaphor fell short. The lager was such a bizarro world that it was hard to convey in normative terms to people living in the regular world.
FYI, after World War 2 the German writers got together and expunged from the language some of the phrases that had been used by the Nazis, because their meaning had become utterly Toxic. Gunter Grass wrote a little novel alled "The Meeting at Telgte" set in the middle ages with references to this then-current event.
"we are living in symbol collapse, in which everything is both literal and symbolic, in equal measure. The planes falling from the sky are symbols of a failed regime, but also…they are literal planes falling from the sky. It is endlessly recursive.
As someone with a diagnosed schizophrenia-spectrum disorder (sorry, not trying to trauma dump)-- schizophrenia is like Extreme Symbolism Disorder-- it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether I'm in an episode or not. Reality feels very dream-like. I often wonder what all this is like for 'normal' brains, so thank you for providing a window to that experience.
Coming from a family of politicians I have sympathy for their, sometimes, honest efforts. In ‘red” states, they can occasionally extract some small, reasonable concession from the reigning party. Say, allowing to gay/lesbian people to adopt hard to adopt kids to get them out of the system. It would normally be done by some political slight of hand by Republican leadership so it avoided a direct confrontation of the issue (lest the Religious Right have a fit) while achieving the reforming results. Perfect, hardly. But clearly better for the kids. This was all 30 years ago, but the lesson remains. Performative politics achieves little or nothing. Creative negotiation with awareness of the actual power balance can sometimes make a real difference.
'Performativity' is another structure of language that has undergone many changes in valence since it was proposed by J.L. Austin in the 1950s as 'doing things with words'.
I’m feeling this too. I keep reaching for analogies to explain how terrible things are, but the plain-spoken reality should be terrifying enough, and it just isn’t anymore.
All of our public discourse seems to have been reduced to obfuscating cliches, memes, and outright lies. Thank you for being a lifeboat in this sea of shit.
Oh my goodness. Thank you for this. For saying what's been swirling in my head... without the proper words. Flooding the zone erodes our capacity for language, and that is by design. If we can't name it because our brains are too overwhelmed to even manage basic pattern recognition, we can't fight it. You are still and always a genius and I'm so glad I read this post today.
I think that part of the issue is that so many political commentators used the term "fascist" as a crutch when describing Trump's first admin, that it lost all seriousness. It's become the same as describing something as "awesome:" vague enough to be used for literally anything. In truth, Trump admin 2.0 is more competent than 1.0, but remains the same attempt by a venal, ugly, vulgar political movement to impose itself on society. We must accept that the GOP of today is not an aberration, but a long-festering tumor.
So I won’t try to alter your thinking that all politicians are evil crooks, but I will submit that some are much, much, much more evil than others, particularly the narcissistic, sociopathic ones who have been found guilty of sexual assault and financial fraud and who curry favor with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. People simplifying that all politicians are equally evil is why that got elected.
It was written up in the NYT Magazine that even Robert Paxton, one of the main experts on fascism, did not decide that Trump was a fascist until January 6 and then didn't think it was very useful to say. Part of the aggravation of the arguments over whether Trump was a fascist was that this was the only metaphor available for tyranny to many of the arguers. I am now grappling for the words for why Trump is awful because it was hard to get it across to my British LinkedIn connection who had heard all the cliches before. But there are 3 important points even before I watch this "Law and Democracy in the Trump Era" program at the 92nd St Y.
My sibling saw the writing on the wall after having worked for Congress (both for the budget office and a committee) for 20 years and now works for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation but the presence of Trump has always been an offense to all their hard work devoted to the idea that we can think objectively about policies and details within policy and the government is not just lashing out on behalf of who has ideological power at any given time.
Everyone who had served before Trump in that office had either held elected office or served in the military. Even if they had demons on the level of Nixon they had something they wanted to do for the public. We may really have to except Nixon here but everyone else thought of the republic as a public trust. Trump thinks of the government as a resource that he can exploit to get attention and demand loyalty and punish anyone who crossed him. The American government doesn't work the way it was designed without people in the other two branches being capable of independent judgment and respecting the rule of law but Trump will never respect that.
Everyone who is willing to work for Trump may not believe this but Team Trump is going to do their best to get ordinary citizens to believe that the mythic way that America saw itself in the McKinley era is the best that America is capable of being and to ignore any other inconvenient facts. Team Trump is going to try to monopolize symbol and metaphor. There is also generative AI eating away at the capacity for figurative language by people who do not do literature for a living.
Brandon Taylor, you're like some kind of walking rennaisance--sport, lit, politics/governance, urban nature, our dreadful moment, dash of history--all in a single deeply reflective essay, and with such a lovely tone. We would be fools not to read whatever you have to say about tennis.
You are spot on with insufficiency of metaphor and language. It seems to me that AI generated text had also contributed to this ongoing dilution and inability to accurately describe and digest the real-time destruction of America as we knew it. Tr*mp speaks in hyperbole to such a degree that words lose their meaning all together. How can we fight back if words don’t matter?
As a history teacher, you reminded me of Primo Levi who also wrote about how difficult it was to put his experience of the Holocaust and extermination camps into words. He tried to do so across multiple books before taking his own life. He bore enormous survivor’s guilt and tried to convey the horrors of what he had witnessed and over and over again found that language and metaphor fell short. The lager was such a bizarro world that it was hard to convey in normative terms to people living in the regular world.
FYI, after World War 2 the German writers got together and expunged from the language some of the phrases that had been used by the Nazis, because their meaning had become utterly Toxic. Gunter Grass wrote a little novel alled "The Meeting at Telgte" set in the middle ages with references to this then-current event.
Oh wow, I didn't know that!
"we are living in symbol collapse, in which everything is both literal and symbolic, in equal measure. The planes falling from the sky are symbols of a failed regime, but also…they are literal planes falling from the sky. It is endlessly recursive.
I am in a state of symbolic overwhelm."
THANK YOU for describing this so acutely.
This is brilliant.
As someone with a diagnosed schizophrenia-spectrum disorder (sorry, not trying to trauma dump)-- schizophrenia is like Extreme Symbolism Disorder-- it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether I'm in an episode or not. Reality feels very dream-like. I often wonder what all this is like for 'normal' brains, so thank you for providing a window to that experience.
hooray for drill & play! you moved so quickly! another tip, you can link people directly to https://blgtylr.substack.com/account for them to opt in :)
Thanks!
YOUR MIND!!!
Coming from a family of politicians I have sympathy for their, sometimes, honest efforts. In ‘red” states, they can occasionally extract some small, reasonable concession from the reigning party. Say, allowing to gay/lesbian people to adopt hard to adopt kids to get them out of the system. It would normally be done by some political slight of hand by Republican leadership so it avoided a direct confrontation of the issue (lest the Religious Right have a fit) while achieving the reforming results. Perfect, hardly. But clearly better for the kids. This was all 30 years ago, but the lesson remains. Performative politics achieves little or nothing. Creative negotiation with awareness of the actual power balance can sometimes make a real difference.
'Performativity' is another structure of language that has undergone many changes in valence since it was proposed by J.L. Austin in the 1950s as 'doing things with words'.
The arm wavers in Congress were never taken seriously by the vast majority of
their colleagues and never accumulated real power. Unfortunately, Congress has become a show where it’s about “likes” rather than votes. Sigh.
I’m feeling this too. I keep reaching for analogies to explain how terrible things are, but the plain-spoken reality should be terrifying enough, and it just isn’t anymore.
All of our public discourse seems to have been reduced to obfuscating cliches, memes, and outright lies. Thank you for being a lifeboat in this sea of shit.
Oh my goodness. Thank you for this. For saying what's been swirling in my head... without the proper words. Flooding the zone erodes our capacity for language, and that is by design. If we can't name it because our brains are too overwhelmed to even manage basic pattern recognition, we can't fight it. You are still and always a genius and I'm so glad I read this post today.
I think that part of the issue is that so many political commentators used the term "fascist" as a crutch when describing Trump's first admin, that it lost all seriousness. It's become the same as describing something as "awesome:" vague enough to be used for literally anything. In truth, Trump admin 2.0 is more competent than 1.0, but remains the same attempt by a venal, ugly, vulgar political movement to impose itself on society. We must accept that the GOP of today is not an aberration, but a long-festering tumor.
So I won’t try to alter your thinking that all politicians are evil crooks, but I will submit that some are much, much, much more evil than others, particularly the narcissistic, sociopathic ones who have been found guilty of sexual assault and financial fraud and who curry favor with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. People simplifying that all politicians are equally evil is why that got elected.
Correction: I should have said found liable for sexual assault.
Thanks! Diversion of “cruel and competitive mindset” to tennis is a good call. Sadly I’ve had to leave tennis but use Pickleball for the same purpose.
(I didn't hear anything from this panel yet that I didn't know)
It was written up in the NYT Magazine that even Robert Paxton, one of the main experts on fascism, did not decide that Trump was a fascist until January 6 and then didn't think it was very useful to say. Part of the aggravation of the arguments over whether Trump was a fascist was that this was the only metaphor available for tyranny to many of the arguers. I am now grappling for the words for why Trump is awful because it was hard to get it across to my British LinkedIn connection who had heard all the cliches before. But there are 3 important points even before I watch this "Law and Democracy in the Trump Era" program at the 92nd St Y.
My sibling saw the writing on the wall after having worked for Congress (both for the budget office and a committee) for 20 years and now works for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation but the presence of Trump has always been an offense to all their hard work devoted to the idea that we can think objectively about policies and details within policy and the government is not just lashing out on behalf of who has ideological power at any given time.
Everyone who had served before Trump in that office had either held elected office or served in the military. Even if they had demons on the level of Nixon they had something they wanted to do for the public. We may really have to except Nixon here but everyone else thought of the republic as a public trust. Trump thinks of the government as a resource that he can exploit to get attention and demand loyalty and punish anyone who crossed him. The American government doesn't work the way it was designed without people in the other two branches being capable of independent judgment and respecting the rule of law but Trump will never respect that.
Everyone who is willing to work for Trump may not believe this but Team Trump is going to do their best to get ordinary citizens to believe that the mythic way that America saw itself in the McKinley era is the best that America is capable of being and to ignore any other inconvenient facts. Team Trump is going to try to monopolize symbol and metaphor. There is also generative AI eating away at the capacity for figurative language by people who do not do literature for a living.
Brandon Taylor, you're like some kind of walking rennaisance--sport, lit, politics/governance, urban nature, our dreadful moment, dash of history--all in a single deeply reflective essay, and with such a lovely tone. We would be fools not to read whatever you have to say about tennis.
Beautifully written- thank you.