President Donald Trump sent forth a rather bellicose “tweet” to the nutcase Iranian theocracy late Sunday night, threatening “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” if it ever repeats its own usual bellicose rhetoric, and all through Monday all the more seasoned foreign policy hands from both the right and left were tsk-tsking about that. Although we share their consternation about Trump’s foreign policy by temper tantrum and “tweet,” and also fear how foolish America will look when the next inevitable intemperate outburst by the nutcase Iranian theocracy inevitably is not answered by nuclear annihilation, our literary sensibilities were even more offended that Trump blasted his threat entirely in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS WITH EXCESSIVE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!
As old-fashioned conservatives we have always believed that conservatism is charged with conserving the best of western civilization, and there’s little in our rich cultural heritage that we cherish more than the English language, but we see that slipping away. The English language has facilitated great novels and poetry and philosophy, and been used to communicate scientific and technological revolutions that have greatly benefited the world, and we can remember a time in our lives when it even provided profound and persuasive political rhetoric. These days the novels seem ponderously self-indulgent, and the only poetry anyone hears are on those cacophonous rap records, and by now the scientific and technological whiz kids are coining a whole new lexicon of neologisms we are forced to keep up with. As for our political rhetoric, it seems to have been reduced to the illiterate level of the “comments” section of a fever swamp blog or a caller to talk radio show.
This isn’t entirely Trump’s fault, of course, and as far as we’re concerned many of his most vituperative critics on the left bear plenty of the blame. Back in the days of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama we stayed on the good side of our Republican friends by noting how overwrought and hyperbolic were the left’s criticisms of the former and apologia for the latter, and how Obama spoke of “getting in their faces” and “bringing a gun to a knife fight,” and how although his wife later urged “that when they go low we go high” it rang awfully hollow, but both sides by now seem to have decided to sling it out in the mud. We also always took note of the left’s inappropriate capitalizations and excessive exclamation marks and other abuses of our beloved English language, and tsk-tsked about the vulgarity and appalling grammar they confused with authenticity, but from our current hopefully mud-free perspective here on the political sidelines both sides seem equally muddy.
Both sides are by now chanting “lock em” up” about the other side, and they both have persuasive cases to make as far as we’re concerned, so we’ll observe how it all plays out from our hopefully un-muddied perceptive on the political sidelines. In the meantime, though, we”ll hope that everyone restrains from those fingernails -on-a-chalkboard CAPITAL LETTERS! and EXTRANEOUS EXCLAMATION MARKS!!! and start using their indoor voices with the same sort of stodgy English language that has somehow successfully negotiated all of America’s squabbling interest groups to their currently enviable position in the world. We don’t claim to be experts in geo-politics, but we also think that lower-case but more compelling arguments that can’t be fitted into a “tweet” will be needed to avoid a threatened nuclear war with Iran. No matter what, we fear for our beloved English language.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 