The First Draft
There’s a funny quality about words: when you repeat them over and over, they begin to sound like nothing at all. The same words that have always sounded right to you quickly devolve into meaningless syllables and absurd three-letter sound bites, making you wonder why their combined absurdity once firmly stood, in your mind and in the minds of all those around you, for a certain type of pasta or an expensive garden manicuring device.
The funniest part about this funny quality of words is that when we speak, we are purposefully ignoring it. Of course some random collection of syllables sounds like gibberish when repeated over and over - that’s exactly what words are, gibberish. Gibberish that we have collectively decided means something. Words are, quite simply, normalized gibberish.
In the past few years, we’ve normalized many different kind of gibberish. Not ones that are fundamentally unintelligible, as you’d expect with what we would normally consider gibberish, but ones that makes no practical sense, even as they’re making literal sense.
OUTRAGE
A stereotype that has arisen in the past few years is that of the crazy Facebook relative. Everybody seems to have an uncle who still posts pictures of himself with multiple assault rifles in front of a proudly hung confederate flag in order to show his solidarity with those who still believe in “Southern Pride,” or a cousin who just does not seem capable of restraining herself from sharing anything and everything published online by PETA. At one point in time, their outrage about whatever issue they were posting about seemed justified and genuine, but now, three years after they made their Facebook account, it appears as though they just react the same way to every issue that catches their eye: with anger, disbelief, and outrage.
It now seems as if the key facet of this stereotype, outrage in the face of less-than-legitimate issues, has spread beyond the grandmother who only shares her feelings with caps lock on and the mother who hasn’t learned that you don’t have to sign off every comment you make on the internet, to even those of us who believe ourselves particularly adept at navigating the internet in all of its glory and stupidity. Thanks to our keyboard-crazy relatives, internet media has learned that outrage sells. And since outrage sells, outrage is what we get.
And that’s okay when it’s genuine. It is an issue that sea turtles are dying in droves because their stomachs fill up with the plastic we pump out into the ocean. It is a problem that we live in a country that cannot come to terms with the systematic racism built into its foundation. The problem is that because we have gotten so used to expressing the same emotion for two very different problems, we have lost all depth perception in the way we experience them. While I care about the health and wellbeing of sea turtles, I care more about the health and wellbeing of minority groups in the United States, and I would like to assume that the same can be said for a large majority of Americans. But if we’ve run out of different ways to express our differing levels of outrage at these two very different injustices, how are we to not only distinguish between the two, but also decide which one takes precedent over the other? Which one we’re supposed to act on more seriously?
IGNORANCE
While I hate to keep returning to the internet for examples, as anyone who uses it will know that the internet is the best place to find the worst people and the worst in people, it is also the medium through which we can most easily access and examine genuine rhetoric, and so to the internet I go. The best and worst thing the internet does is allow for virtually universal access. This means that practically anyone can share their opinion about practically anything, and I’m not sure if you interact with the average person very often, but “practically anyone” is not who you want partaking in any sort of intellectual debate. What this leads to is lots and lots of nonsense input and uninformed opinions flooding practically all internet forums. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem for a cautious reader with a discerning eye, as the intelligentsia and their ideas would naturally rise to the top, but as the internet is so saturated with people, anything even remotely intelligible becomes a part of the minority that might be considered intelligentsia.
Take, for example, Donald Trump’s chosen style of rhetoric, one which seems to follow a reverse “boy who cried wolf” strategy. His speeches and rallies are devoid of facts, devoid of policy, devoid of anything that sounds even a little bit presidential, and therein lies the strategy. He doesn’t need to cram his public appearances full of anything that might make him seem presidential; within his flurry of ‘something’s going on’s and ‘we’re losing, we’re losing’s, all he needs is one or two sentences that contain some sort of legitimate content to keep us, or some of us at least, believing that he is a viable contender. Because he has set the precedent of a rhetoric filled with such absurdity and fluff, the instant he says something that sounds similar to something a career politician might say, we instantly equate the two together.