Humpty Dumpty Rides the Vomit Comet

a life of untethered words

Writing about the thirty allegedly devout Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives who’ve just released a statement of religious faith declaring their unlimited support for abortion, I meant to talk about the emptying of moral language and the growing meaningless of descriptive categories. Our “mainstream” discussions have descended into a string of non-sequiturs, as meaningful as barking. Actually, fair play to dogs, barking may be more meaningful.

I’ve been writing in public for three decades, now, to no particular acclaim, and realize today that I’ve always been up to more or less the same thing: I’ve been writing about the emptying of language, and the use of description as a wall rather than a window. Here, as evidence, is a story I wrote ten years ago, discussing the mainstream media coverage of General David Petraeus and his affair with Paula Broadwell. My diagnosis, back then, is my diagnosis today: “Do you trust people who reach this conclusion from the available set of facts to understand or explain anything at all to you?”

Here’s another one from way back there in the 2010s, a long piece examining the flood of adoring Barack Obama biographies and reaching this conclusion: “Political journalism in America operates as a kind of narrative cotton gin, cleanly stripping meaning from events.”

So I’ve been landing my sad little airplane at the same airport for decades, and you have to at least give me points for consistency.

In 2023, Rosa DeLauro is pretty sure that the Catholic faith is centered on the doctrine of relentless abortion, and experts on authoritarianism warn us that criticizing the government or disagreeing with authority in any way is the very gateway to fascism. Disinformation is saying that the Covid vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission, because the Covid vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission but shut up. We’re fighting for democracy by sending weapons and money to Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has banned opposition parties, forbidden public criticism, and suspended elections. Lewis Carroll:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

We’ve attained perfect meaninglessness, taking rhetorical derangement and freeing it from gravity to ascend to new heights. Or depths, or however nonsense works in physical space. It’s quite an accomplishment. And I’ve spent a long time writing about it, so. Today I went looking through the boxes in the garage for old pictures of Chris Bray doing his journalisming, and the only one I could find was from Fort Benning, roughly 25 years ago, after I enlisted as an infantryman but the United States Army (in its infinite wisdom) loaned me to Building 4 from time to time to write stuff:

Interview with a WWII veteran, who jumped out of a variety of airplanes and shot some sons-of-bitches

I am on the left of the photo, there, in case you can’t see me because of the camouflage.

It does occur to me to wonder if there’s a point to documenting an endless stream of absurdities, but here we are. What can you do but live where you find yourself, and describe what you see? If you yearn for more of that, here’s a recent discussion I had with David Gornoski, and a shorter discussion I just had with Trish Wood (starting at around 31:30 in the hourlong show). In both, I discuss the problem of living in “this world of trading symbols,” which I call “a kind of madness.” Good times!

Thanks for reading.