You know who I’m talking about. His words and actions have been referred to as – and this is not an exhaustive list: nuts, crazy, unhinged, mad, barking, bizarre, cracked, daft, weird and bonkers. These labels come not from social‑media agitators but from mainstream opinion writers and the more serious unsensational podcasters. I’m deliberating avoiding social media pundits who express everything in extremis. Nor am I going to rant about enacting Article 25 to oust a US president who is clearly mentally unfit for office – no point discussing it if Congress doesn’t step up to the plate (to use an Americanism). I am, as a linguist, going to say something about how we communicate this situation.
The main problem lies with these words to describe insanity. They have a built-in amusement factor that dilutes their force when applied to someone who is really mentally unwell. Bonkers, for example, was first used in Britain in the early part of the 20th century and is derived from the verb to bonk, meaning to hit someone on the head (Oxford English Dictionary). The person who is bonkers is disoriented from the blow and not making a lot of sense. The cartoonish image – complete with whirling birds – undercuts the seriousness of cognitive decline in the most powerful political figure in the world.
The situation is made worse when these same fun words are used hyperbolically in everyday life. How often I’ve heard myself say of someone with a worldview different from my own, ‘he’s crazy’ or ‘she’s loopy.’ I don’t think these people should resign from their jobs and seek psychiatric treatment. Bizarre and weird also share a bed with eccentric and peculiar, rendering them understatements for a US president who posts images of himself as Christ being protected by military-action-hero angels.
Mainstream media has also contributed to this quagmire of communication. Trying to sound objective, news outlets avoid the more amusing and colloquial language only to replace it with sterile euphemisms that miss the mark. The president’s words have been described as ‘digressions,’ ‘ramblings’ and ‘incoherent statements.’ His vulgar expressions and penchant for creating offensive images are placed into the realm of normalcy and treated in the same way as legislative or policy remarks. Writing about Tr*mp’s mental state and volatile temperament, Alan Rushbridger in The Independent rightly summed-up this media response as sane-washing.
Of course, if the media starts investigating the president’s sanity with the same rigour they have to corruption and other acts of infamy, we know the response from this White House – ‘fake news.’
What I’ve been reading
Between 1997 and 2002, Apple had the grammatically annoying slogan ‘Think Different,’ which was credited with reviving the company at a time when it was losing money and market share. Some 25 years later, the idea of thinking differently is enjoying a resurgence. Contemporary thinkers argue that solving today’s global problems requires a revisionist history – that is, thinking differently – to understand what went wrong and a surge of invention and ingenuity – again, thinking differently – to move forward. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance fits into this tradition. In their call to action, they add a crucial step – deploy. There’s no point in having brilliant inventions if governments are tangled in bureaucracy, beholden to corporate interests and fundamentally risk‑averse. Though Klein and Thompson are left-of-centre, they note that the bind that America (and most other countries) are in is not one-sided – progressives and conservatives have done their share of damage.
I’ve also read – sort of – Virginia Roberts Guiffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl. To clarify, I had read so many excerpts from this book and news stories about the high-profile men Guiffre encountered, I wasn’t interested in reading any more. Then a friend told me that she found it necessary reading. When it popped up on Spotify as a free audiobook, I thought I’d give it a go. Despite not being a fan of audiobooks – too slow – my impatience got through the estimated 13 hours of listening by cranking up the speed to 1.2 (more than that made the reader sound like she was on helium) and skipping sections that I had already read or heard about ad nauseum (Prince Andrew, the Paris apartment, etc). It’s a riveting listen/read. Giuffre recounts her experiences of sexual and emotional abuse, her escape, her confrontation with trauma, and the gruelling legal obstacles she faced in seeking justice. Underlying all of this is her psychological journey, which for me was the true take-away – a reaffirmation of the healing power of psychotherapy and meditation.
The anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston once said,‘There are years that ask questions and years that answer.’ Both books, in their own ways, ask urgent questions about our society, and both depend on the years ahead to answer them.
Paola Trimarco 