Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

 

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in character, which he does, as you can see, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in kind, which he does, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

It's the Literacy

 New Substack post (not so new for long-time readers here but with a new intro):

Literary Corner: Confidence

Trump in 2018 stumping for Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis in his beloved shtik about how "anyone can act presidential". 

Today, in another blast from the past, somebody tweeted an example of Trump actually attempting to act presidential in the normal sense of the term, during the last presidential campaign, reading a fairly simple statement about the kind of thing presidents normally talk about and getting tripped up by the Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit. Not in the most familiar way when he realizes he's misread a word in the text and tries to cover up the error—in this case he's looking for an error but can't find one; in fact he's not making any mistakes (other than a minor glitch between "the" and "an"), but can't believe it because he doesn't know what it means, what he's hearing coming out of his mouth sounds like complete nonsense to him, and he's really panicked.

So Think of That

by Donald J. Trump, July 2020

consumer confidence
which is great
that's a great number
to me because
that means confidence
is really good

if you don't have good consumer confidence
it's like life
if you don't have confidence
then you're not going to do very well
consumer confidence has risen twelve points
since April and six-month job expectations hit
the all-time
an all-time high
so think of that for a second
with all we go through
with all of the trials and tribulations
that we read about every night
much of it totally fake news
fortunately
and if the consumer didn't get it
you wouldn't have good consumer confidence

we have
consumer confidence has risen
twelve points since April
an all-time high
think of that

Literary Corner: One Small Step For a Speechwriter, a Leap Too Far For a Former Guy

 

Image by Steve Bronstein/Getty Images, via Foreign Policy, August 2017.

A lovely moment from Trump's rally last night in Wellington, Ohio, where he was seeking vengeance against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, one of the Republicans who voted to impeach him in January, backing a primary opponent, former Trump White House aide Maxwell Miller, remarkable for having been

arrested multiple times for assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct and... caught falsifying his personal resume and educational background after stating that he had been a Marine recruiter, which he had not.  

A Brave Young Man From Ohio

By Stephen Miller and Donald J. Trump, 46th President of the United States of America

America is still the nation
that conquered the wild West,
that vanquished the murderous dictators,
that ended the evil empires,
and that sent a brave young
man from Ohio to a plant.

Think of it. You know the man
I'm talking about? Who am I
talking about? You know who it is?
The Stars and Stripes on the face
of the moon, do you know who it
is? Huh? You know who it is.

Yes, I know who it is, and I know what happened here: Miller's awful text for the peroration, an hour and a half in, was building America up to make an elegant reference to a local boy, Lieutenant (jg) Neil Armstrong, and the teleprompter said that America "sent a brave young man from Ohio to plant the Stars and Stripes on the face of the moon," but The Former Guy just couldn't get there through the Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit, or remember Armstrong's name. 

Reading Comprehension: It Is What It Is

I need everyone to watch this. pic.twitter.com/eRPk7Dr1q5

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) August 4, 2020

Trump: “Well what’s your definition of control? Under the circumstances, right now, I think it’s under control.”

Swan: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”

Trump: “They are dying, that’s true. And it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.” (via news.com.au)

We know that the death rate is not "under control as much as you can control it" in the United States, because it's been up above 3 per million population (which adds up to upwards of a thousand per day) and mostly rising here since the end of June, while it's been around zero per million in South Korea, France, Italy, and Germany, and around 1 (less than a third the rate in US) and declining in UK.

Literary Corner: Swiftian

Trump about Operation Desert Storm... at... The fields and jungles of Vietnam: "They delivered a swift and sweepy and you know that sweeping it was swift and it was sweeping like nobody's ever seen anything happened" from r/The_Mueller

One of Trump's reading glitches, when he couldn't lift the word "sweeping" off its spot on the teleprompter, landed him into spectacular territory in his Fourth of July speech:

These Planes

by Stephen Miller and Donald J. Trump

These planes once launched 

off of massive aircraft carriers 

in the fiercest battles 

of World War II 

They raced through the 

skies of Korea's MiG Alley 

They carried American 

warriors into the 

dense fields and jungles 

of Vietnam

they delivered a swift 

and Swiftian—

you know that—

sweeping—

it was swift and 

it was sweeping like nobody's

ever seen anything happen

it was a victory in 

Operation Desert Storm

a lot of you were involved in that

a lot of you were involved

that was the quick one

Somebody's deceptive edit of the video (above) made it sound as if Trump thought Operation Desert Storm was in Vietnam instead of Iraq, but of course there is no evidence of that (his interpolation "that was the quick one" suggests he remembers pretty well, in its contrast to the slow Iraq war, which the speech naturally wouldn't mention at all because it wasn't a victory).

It's Stephen Miller's knowledge that is represented here, not Trump's, and Miller wasn't making anything up, either; he was clearly working from the list of historical planes doing the flyovers that were the evening's main entertainment, allowing Trump to cast himself as a kind of MC for the occasion (last year was a similarly structured guided tour, but the flyovers were ordered by service branch instead of time period). The interpolation "a lot of you were involved" does suggest to me that Trump doesn't remember Desert Storm was 30 years ago, and few of the active military among the "front-line workers and their families" who made up the guest list could have participated in it. 

It's clear, on the other hand, that at the Swiftian moment, Trump isn't himself aware that his text has left Vietnam and moved on to Iraq; the huge font on his teleprompter screen doesn't allow enough words to get him there. And as usual he hasn't read the speech in advance.

I'm the only one who thinks Trump said "Swiftian", by the way. Partly because I long for it to be true, but it still sounds plausible, not that Trump knows the word. I thought it would apply very well all the same to the Vietnam War—savage, sarcastic, scatological, and conducted by higher-ups who wouldn't have refused to consider the costs and benefits of eating babies, if it had been suggested to them.

Literary Corner: Disquieting

Giorgio de Chirico, The Disquieting Muses, print reproduction of a painting originally made between 1916 and 1918, via Wikipedia.

This is out of line with the usual practice of the Literary Corner, not a verbatim extract but a compilation of highlights from Friday's press conference mashed up to look like a single sentence by @twmentality1 in the tweet below.

Then again, the version published by the White House is a bit of a fabrication in its own right, folding some but not all of Trump's glitches into the text in a way that makes them seem superficially normal, and the tweet captured the strangeness of Trump's reading disability and his gradual breakdown as he escapes from a given sentence of his prepared text into improvisation: shifting its meaning into unexpected and disturbing realms. I thought some e.e. cummings–style line breaking and punctuation could achieve a similar effect:

Old, mad, despised

Highlighting by Benjamin Wittes, from 25 January, the day the Senate started hearing Trump's defense in the impeachment trial.

The thing that absolutely struck me about the Oval Office coronavirus address was Trump's/Miller's characteristic effort to blame the "foreign virus" crisis in the US on Europe:

At the very start of the outbreak we instituted sweeping travel restrictions on China and put in place the first federally mandated quarantine in over 50 years. We declared a public health emergency and issued the highest level of travel warning on other countries as the virus spread its horrible infection. And taking early, intense action, we’ve seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States than are now present in Europe.

The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hotspots. As a result a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe...

So that the travel restrictions on Europeans seemed aimed at punishing them rather than protecting the US, something they can hardly help with. anyway, since the horse was already long out of the barn (the outbreak of Covid-19 in the Kirkland nursing home, reported 28 February with the death of the man Trump referred to as a "wonderful woman", can't be traced to any foreign sources, so it's clear the virus was already established in the Northwest by then).

Literary Corner: We Are Funding For New Hampshire

Funding For New Hampshire

by Donald J. Trump

We are funding
for New Hampshire
the New Hampshire Army
National Guard
Readiness Center,
just a few miles from here

in Pembroke
and in Concord.
Concord, I love Concord!
I love Concord, oh, Concord!
You know how famous Concord is?

Concord --
that's the same Concord
that we read about
all the time right?
Concord!

No, as others have pointed out, if you read about Concord all the time it's probably a different Concord. On the other hand Trump may have been reading about the Concord, NH Army National Guard Readiness Center that afternoon, or more likely as he was speaking, from a sheet of talking points, because it got a grant of $6 million to upgrade their aviation facility in November's NDAA. Some bright spark on the staff who has read about the kinds of things normal politicians do thought Trump should try taking some credit for this exciting local development, maybe just in the hope of making him sound for a minute like a normal politician, but what he got instead was this splendid example of Trump realizing that he's just read something that makes no sense to him, and trying to work his way out of it, aspirationally like Monk building a spectacular edifice on what sounded like a mistake, but in reality more like a multiple car crash.

It's the literacy

The big thing you need to know about what happened in Trump's Fourth of July speech was in an AP story—I found it in The Hollywood Reporter, appropriately enough:

The White House did not release a text of the speech that had been prepared for him so it's not known what he meant to say.

They didn't release the text because if they did we'd all have a clear view of exactly what went wrong, and by extension of exactly what's wrong with the president, something as important, maybe, as the narcissistic personality disorder: his reading disability.

I've mentioned this in other venues before, but I think I've never laid it out here, and I'm really annoyed by everybody laughing at Trump for believing there were airports in the period from 1776 to 1814, which is silly and entirely misses the point.

The reading disability isn't something familiar like dyslexia, where the problem is in decoding the letters into speech sounds; he's good enough at that to make it most of the way through reading a 45-minute text aloud. It's in comprehension, recognizing the meaningfulness of what he's reading, and its name in the business is Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit or S-RCD, defined in the DSM as

General Assembly

I know, everybody's talking about this.

I want to ask, first, is it whatever meds he's on or is his reading disorder (S-RCD) getting perceptibly worse? He sounds completely unable to guess what's coming next as he sounds out each word, and I don't think he knew what he was saying here until the sentence was over and the audience started laughing, even though the writer (most will think Bolton, because of the "sovereignty" theme but I'd say Miller, who believes the same garbage anyway) did a good job of putting it in his own voice.

The affable-sounding response to the laughter, "Didn't expect that reaction but that's OK," is extremely angry, I think. In the assertion that he's the one who decides whether it's OK or not. He often says things like that when he's frightened by his own rage—a favorite is when he's calling out some opponent's disrespect and says, "And that's fine." I can't stop myself from suspecting that Miller or whoever put the sentence in there on purpose, knowing how it would be received, to start moving Trump to think about withdrawing the country from the UN altogether ("The Atlantic Charter was the worst deal every made in history!"). The way somebody else tried last Friday to start Trump thinking about firing Rod Rosenstein. It's only the second best way to manipulate him, using his anger, but whoever it is is looking for results that flattery won't achieve.

Also see Aaron Blake/WaPo.