Deconstruction

This is the most deconstructionist thing that has ever happened: Screenshot from the official White House release of the president's remarks on the tragic shootings over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton and not, as I'm sure you have heard, in that other Ohio city:

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary";^[1] that a particular signifier is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but must be used as the constraints of our language offer nothing better.

In the philosophy of deconstruction, sous rature has been described as the typographical expression that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.^[2][3] To extend this notion, deconstruction and the practice of sous rature also seek to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference, not by reference to a pre-existing notion or freestanding idea.^[4]

But which, in the last analysis, are we looking at here, in the rature of "in Toledo"? Is it really "inadequate yet necessary"? or is it more "paradoxical or self-undermining"?


I have to admit I didn't even hear "Toledo" when the address came on my radio this morning, perhaps because I was so taken aback by "May God protect them." Protect them from what, now that they're in the arms of the angels? What was that about?

Luckily, some more useful evidence turned up in the afternoon, in the form of a photo of his teleprompter as he was working through this passage:

Holy Toledo, it wasn’t even on the TelePrompTer. pic.twitter.com/vviFo7vqMw

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) August 5, 2019

And from there it was possible to reconstruct what the president had deconstructed, in terms of our own diagnosis of Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit. Though it still feels pretty improbable. He

• got skunked, for some reason, by the stretch of letters in "Texas and Ohio",
• wrangled the T and two o's into "Toledo" (as Phil Abrams suggested),
• realized he was in rough waters over his head but caught the names of the two states as the prompter text was changing,
• saw the verb "protect" in the next page (that's a guess, maybe some expression like "help to protect their families") and lunged for it,
• tethered it to the state names in a peculiar arc (calling on God's protection from Texas to Ohio brings in Louisiana, Arkansas or Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky);
• and reached the safety of the prepared text.

And then demanded the Heideggerian typography when the text was released.

"How do they continue to be so bad at this?" asked Josh Chafetz, when he saw the thing. The question answers itself: it's Trump, and he's that bad at everything. After the debacle of the rammed ramparts and manned airports on 4 July,  they simply didn't post a text, which was the only choice you could call smart, but Donald didn't want to do that again: he wanted somebody humiliated for the mistake he'd made, and he wanted it to be the author of the words, I presume Stephen Miller (the writing quality is beyond high school six-adjective dreadful, and the talk includes a Millerian or Bannerite extortion demand: we'll allow some action on guns if you allow us to rewrite immigration law).

So he had them set it up to look (to I don't know whom) as if Miller had written the idiotic words, and he himself demanded they be struck out (at least that's how he wants staff to be talking about it among themselves); to invert the truth that he'd put them in himself because he doesn't know how to read adequately. He's trying to deconstruct the truth and make a reality of every nightmare anybody had ever had about postmodernism. Knowing no more about what he's doing than a seven-year-old claiming his brother started it. While people are dying, you know, of Trump's vicious and ill-considered words that he never erases.