Wordmongers vs Warmongers

The Iran excursion...

When you are alone in silence, do you hear words or music in your head?

It’s one of my favorite questions to ask people. I have quizzed all of my kids and family members. They all report hearing music rather than words. In fact, my husband doesn’t realize it, but he hums all the time.

An absentminded habit I adore.

But I hear words. An avalanche of words. A constant narrative that can feel overwhelming at times.

When I am driving across the state and the heartland to speak, I notice the words in my head pick up, spilling over until I realize I am saying them out loud. Good practice, I guess…

Words. Words. Words.

I was an English teacher because I graduated with an English degree and decided not to go to law school. There’s just not much of a living to be made as someone whose skills include diagramming sentences except teaching or journalism.

If you think teacher wages are low, you should look at those of journalists…

But more than that, I really did enjoy the act of teaching. I felt like I was making a difference. That what I did mattered. That the world would be a better place if my students read and wrote and understood the world around them through the best thinkers and writers I could put in front of them.

I still think it matters.

I love words, and growing up in rural spaces without cable television left me with hours to fill every day. I crammed those hours with words. I collected them. I researched them. I highlighted them. I showed them off in a vocabulary that didn’t always match my station in life.

My parents didn’t have big libraries, but they owned books which I devoured. I loved fiction, though I can barely read it today. I still adore a good story, but I am so inclined to read non-fiction and news articles these days that I think I should have named my daughter AP rather than Charlotte — my favorite Brontë sister.

Now, most of the words I consume enrage me rather than comfort me. The words I read from the regime especially impact me. The words coming from the grifter-in-chief make my blood boil, even if they are on a third-grade level.

The stupidity of the regime consumes me. I always thought fascism and authoritarianism would be smarter. I thought dictators had more sense. I assumed evil heads of state collected words as well. Terrible words, but words just the same.

I was wrong.

It has been reported on many occasions and through many outlets that Trump has a serious aversion to reading. This is obvious to anyone who has the misfortune to hear him speak, and even more obvious to those of us trained to teach.

Without hesitation, I can say that Trump is less intelligent than most of my students over the years, and you should know I did a brief stint in 6th grade.

Those elementary-age students were much more curious than the current President, and far better read. My former students used a more varied language, and their vocabulary and critical thinking skills were far superior to those of the man with nuclear codes.

Trump is not a wordsmith. Or a reader. Or a thinker.

I spent much of my life teaching words and literacy, and I can confidently say our current President has limited literacy.

Trump’s ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, speculated that Trump has never read a single book in his adult life, not even a book about him or “by” him, of which there are 17. Trump pretends to have written more books than he pretends to have read.

The New York Times reported that National Security Council members had been instructed to keep policy papers to a single page and include plenty of graphics and maps for Trump. In Trump’s first term, his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly called Trump an "idiot" with the intelligence of a "kindergartner.”

I feel like that comparison is offensive to kindergartners.

Trump’s former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called the president “a f’cking moron,” and the former National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn stated: "It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

Reader, I know you already know about Trump’s deficiencies, and I am preaching to the choir here, but the impetus for this essay came two days ago while reading a transcript from a presser with Trump.

On March 10th, Trump categorized the war in Iran as “a short-term excursion.”

“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion. Short-term. Short-term!”

It reminds me of when a Missouri representative wrote “life begins at inception” on his official campaign website. He meant “conception.”

I am very aware of the way in which Republican lawmakers often confuse and abuse the English language, but that obtuse Missouri Representative did not hold the power to make war with other nations. He could not issue Executive Orders to bomb a school and murder 168 little girls.

The commander-in-chief thinks war is an “excursion” because he doesn’t know the meaning of excursion. He also has no schema for war as a five-time draft dodger.

I am also positive that Trump is using the word “excursion” when he means “incursion.”

The regime is desperate to call the war anything but a war, and they have given Trump a vocabulary term to use — it’s just that Trump is functionally illiterate and is using the wrong word.

The Emperor has no clothes, and no one dares tell him. He has used the wrong word for days in multiple instances.

Does it matter to MAGA? Not in the least. But they are also unbothered about his lack of reading or thinking or vocabulary. They are unbothered altogether. They are as incurious as their orange god.

The warmongers are having their day in the sun. They are bombing and killing and maiming, while our citizens have no idea why we are doing any of it. Our President stands behind podiums telling us that the war is a sidenote — a pleasurable little trip.

An excursion.

Sometimes, I think about the two educated women who could have been at the helm, but that just sends me spiraling over the words that could have been.

I’d rather an expressive wordmonger over a vapid warmonger.

~Jess