There’s a reason that 1984 comparisons to the Donald Trump regime are so popular. The famous lines of “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” resonate with the way that Trump and his team seem to constantly forget that words have meaning and facts matter. It’s the same reason that Merrim-Webster, the site you mostly frequented to make sure you were spelling “argument” properly, somehow became a hero of the resistance.
In comes “Fantastic Words and Where Not To Find Them,” a segment that is “Part news, part performance art, entirely nonsense,” as Full Frontal “examine[s] Trump’s bastardization of words and language.” So what happened to language, once the tool of poetics, logic, and purpose? Bee looks at some of the biggest victims of the decimation of words, like leak, lies, and classified as well as some other casual damages, like Ivanka Trump’s attempt to re-categorize complicit.
Of course, this includes “fake news,” a term that actually might’ve lived a long life as a term for the wave of deliberately deceptive hoaxes, but got curb-stomped in a dark alleyway by Trump to become something you scream when erroneous predictions pop up or when you want to shallowly dismiss any news story or outlet that refused to become your propaganda machine. No, it’s not just you constantly yelling at your phone/tv/computer screen about the weird stream-of-consciousness that seems to spout off his team and it’s somewhat cathartic to see Bee similarly just exclaim, “I don’t fucking know!” Because I don’t, I don’t know.
“Journalists now huddle in a tiny lifeboat of a heaving ocean of pure gibberish arguing with their doppelgängers,” says Bee. Please, our we can not sustain ourselves and have turned to eating our tortoise shell glasses. Send help. “Resistance is futile, government is the deep state, expertise is dangerous elitism, language is dead,” says Bee.
It’s like we’re living in an even bleaker Theatre of the Absurd.
(via Vulture, image: screencap)
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