This academic nails it. There is actually some perspective and insight. Unlike what we have been subjected to by our resident academics who are nothing but talking heads for extremist viewpoints.
The Wax Presidency Wanes as a Human Comes to the White House
To intellectuals, Trump is all too human—and that’s distracting them from important policy debates.
By
Crispin Sartwell
Jan. 29, 2017 6:29 p.m. ET
President Trump at the White House, Jan. 27. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Gettysburg, Pa.
As the inauguration approached in D.C., up here they were auctioning off wax leaders and closing down a once-semi-beloved tourist attraction, the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies. It was good timing, not only because the inaugural moment was a good time to get the best price on the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, but because the American presidency is no longer a wax museum.
Listening to television pundits, reading op-ed columnists, or talking to my professorish friends, I get the impression that many of them don’t want America building walls, cooking the globe, and so on. On many points I agree with them. Yet these policy disputes are disposed of perfunctorily, in part because everyone in their worlds seems to agree. The real visceral loathing, fear and incomprehension arise when they start talking about how Donald Trump expresses himself.
For months they’ve worked themselves into a tizzy, almost every day, about some series of loose tweets, or some teasing riff he’s improvised on the stump or at CIA headquarters. It runs like this: “There has to be an adult in the room. Someone needs to take away his phone!” Or: “It’s one thing for a candidate to insult a celebrity, but the president of the United States can’t do things like that.”
Tweets or casual quips are treated as signs of insanity: He’s a narcissistic sociopath, etc. Or stupidity: Social media is full to bursting with professors insulting his IQ. (Well, that’s what professors do: congratulate ourselves on our own intelligence. They teach you that in grad school.)
These people need to develop some hermeneutic competence. It’s pretty easy on a good day to distinguish the casual verbal sally from the previews of policy. At the CIA he praised and teased the assembled intelligence people, which is very characteristic. They are the greatest people the world has ever known. Except for one thing: He always said they should have taken Iraq’s oil. Maybe they’ll get a chance! It was a casual improvisation, utterly typical. Rachel Maddow interpreted it as a profound change of military policy toward pillaging, and declared an international emergency.
He has a beautiful, beautiful relationship with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi,but when he says things like that, it’s almost always followed by the little twist or insult. Paul Ryan grows on you like a beautiful ornamental vine, or however that went. “Now, if he ever goes against me, I’m not going to say that, OK?”
I don’t know what intelligence is, but I know this: Trump has more verbal improvisational ability than any presidential-level politician in decades. On a typical day, Barack Obama,Hillary Clinton,John Kerry and Mitt Romney express themselves like androids with rudimentary AI: They repeat tested, empty phrases; they reach for focus-grouped generalities; they are so careful that they say nothing at all. It is a heroic task even to pretend to pay attention to them.
That, evidently, is what pundits and professors demand: a wax head perched over a nice suit, with a realistic mouth that actually moves. That’s what they think of as sanity and intelligence. For them, the essence of responsible and inspiring leadership is that you know exactly what your president is going to say before he says it. If a leader expresses himself like a particular human being or behaves like an actual organism, he has no place in the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies.
So, a little advice: Words matter—sort of, sometimes—as these people keep insisting. But talk is cheap. A tweet or a quip is not legislation or an executive order. You’ve made it clear that you loathe the way he expresses himself, but that is not the problem. While you’re sputtering about Meryl Streep or whatever, he’s liable to be doing things, and you’re going to have to pick your spots. Your outrage is indiscriminate and exhausted already.
Even pundits and professors are going to have to develop an ear, or show some basic linguistic competence in interpretation. They’re going to have to start distinguishing hyperbole from serious assertion, comedy from tragedy. And they’re going to have to face the fact that politicians are human beings. Profs and pundits are verbally smart in a standardized, perfect-SAT sort of way; they’re going to have to develop the interpretive skills of a human.
I am worried and angry about many policies that the Trump administration is pursuing. But I could not be happier that the wax museum of the American presidency is defunct.
Mr. Sartwell, an associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, is the author of “Entanglements: A System of Philosophy” due out in March from SUNY Press.
The Wax Presidency Wanes as a Human Comes to the White House
To intellectuals, Trump is all too human—and that’s distracting them from important policy debates.
By
Crispin Sartwell
Jan. 29, 2017 6:29 p.m. ET
President Trump at the White House, Jan. 27. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Gettysburg, Pa.
As the inauguration approached in D.C., up here they were auctioning off wax leaders and closing down a once-semi-beloved tourist attraction, the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies. It was good timing, not only because the inaugural moment was a good time to get the best price on the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, but because the American presidency is no longer a wax museum.
Listening to television pundits, reading op-ed columnists, or talking to my professorish friends, I get the impression that many of them don’t want America building walls, cooking the globe, and so on. On many points I agree with them. Yet these policy disputes are disposed of perfunctorily, in part because everyone in their worlds seems to agree. The real visceral loathing, fear and incomprehension arise when they start talking about how Donald Trump expresses himself.
For months they’ve worked themselves into a tizzy, almost every day, about some series of loose tweets, or some teasing riff he’s improvised on the stump or at CIA headquarters. It runs like this: “There has to be an adult in the room. Someone needs to take away his phone!” Or: “It’s one thing for a candidate to insult a celebrity, but the president of the United States can’t do things like that.”
Tweets or casual quips are treated as signs of insanity: He’s a narcissistic sociopath, etc. Or stupidity: Social media is full to bursting with professors insulting his IQ. (Well, that’s what professors do: congratulate ourselves on our own intelligence. They teach you that in grad school.)
These people need to develop some hermeneutic competence. It’s pretty easy on a good day to distinguish the casual verbal sally from the previews of policy. At the CIA he praised and teased the assembled intelligence people, which is very characteristic. They are the greatest people the world has ever known. Except for one thing: He always said they should have taken Iraq’s oil. Maybe they’ll get a chance! It was a casual improvisation, utterly typical. Rachel Maddow interpreted it as a profound change of military policy toward pillaging, and declared an international emergency.
He has a beautiful, beautiful relationship with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi,but when he says things like that, it’s almost always followed by the little twist or insult. Paul Ryan grows on you like a beautiful ornamental vine, or however that went. “Now, if he ever goes against me, I’m not going to say that, OK?”
I don’t know what intelligence is, but I know this: Trump has more verbal improvisational ability than any presidential-level politician in decades. On a typical day, Barack Obama,Hillary Clinton,John Kerry and Mitt Romney express themselves like androids with rudimentary AI: They repeat tested, empty phrases; they reach for focus-grouped generalities; they are so careful that they say nothing at all. It is a heroic task even to pretend to pay attention to them.
That, evidently, is what pundits and professors demand: a wax head perched over a nice suit, with a realistic mouth that actually moves. That’s what they think of as sanity and intelligence. For them, the essence of responsible and inspiring leadership is that you know exactly what your president is going to say before he says it. If a leader expresses himself like a particular human being or behaves like an actual organism, he has no place in the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies.
So, a little advice: Words matter—sort of, sometimes—as these people keep insisting. But talk is cheap. A tweet or a quip is not legislation or an executive order. You’ve made it clear that you loathe the way he expresses himself, but that is not the problem. While you’re sputtering about Meryl Streep or whatever, he’s liable to be doing things, and you’re going to have to pick your spots. Your outrage is indiscriminate and exhausted already.
Even pundits and professors are going to have to develop an ear, or show some basic linguistic competence in interpretation. They’re going to have to start distinguishing hyperbole from serious assertion, comedy from tragedy. And they’re going to have to face the fact that politicians are human beings. Profs and pundits are verbally smart in a standardized, perfect-SAT sort of way; they’re going to have to develop the interpretive skills of a human.
I am worried and angry about many policies that the Trump administration is pursuing. But I could not be happier that the wax museum of the American presidency is defunct.
Mr. Sartwell, an associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, is the author of “Entanglements: A System of Philosophy” due out in March from SUNY Press.
