and his name shall be in their foreheads
In the intervening weeks I have been hearing that line again and again in my head, like something uttered in a recurring dream, one last bit of senseless torment before waking: girt about the paps with the golden girdle. The phrase’s original meaning has so deteriorated with repetition that now all it brings to mind are the tanned neckfolds of an old man, gathered and shoved down into a suit, like a hastily tied balloon made out of flesh. Golden paps girdled about the girth.
If it has been difficult for me to write lately, it is because language keeps taking on this quality. A vacant authoritativeness, a menacing goofiness, an autogenerated aspect. It’s as if language itself has become so devalued that meaning is constantly displaced from intention and context into random association. This probably has more to do with the rise of AI text generation and my own sense of futility, but it’s hard not to think of the new old President, collective auditory hallucination that he is. Now that the parodic mashups of his language have become actions and events—DEI and plane crashes, Dogecoin and tax cuts—I find myself stalling out between word and deed, between how stupid things sounds and how cruel they are. As if I’m trapped inside his skull, the dentured molars sucking and popping beneath my feet, the fat gray tongue heaving toward the teeth, the outer world rumbling for blood somewhere beyond the frontal bone.
There are new riffs but mainly it is the same. The inflections, the pauses, the syntax, the vocabulary. There is no point in parsing it anymore, that idiot auteurism of the first term, where we picked through the transcripts for outrageous coinages and strange resonances. Now the lodestar is William McKinley rather than Andrew Jackson; now the “most beautiful word” is not “total acquittal” but “tariffs.” We know what it was and what it is gets worse, a Great Awakening kayfabe that gets more violent as it runs out of breath.
In this light, it is not always clear what to focus on, what to take seriously. The President re-renamed Denali to Mt. McKinley, over the feeble protests of Alaska’s Republican senators. He speaks of fondly of that Gilded-Age President, in a wiki-historical, speechwriterly way: “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.” Sure, they are both cronyist imperialists who levied tariffs and got shot at—though, crucially, McKinley’s assassin did not miss.1
The Press, for its part, has seized on these parallels, following the President’s talking points on his own terms. This deep-dive, context-driven, podcasty approach takes for parallel lines what are actually two points along the long arc of empire. Two months after McKinley launched the Spanish-American War in 1898, ostensibly to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule, the US Navy captured a deepwater port to serve as a coaling station for their ships. The port had been visited by Christopher Columbus four centuries before. Guantánamo, from the Taíno: land between rivers. By the time it was a watchword for torture and illegality, half its syllables had been carved out. Gitmo, from its official designation: GTMO.
One of the President’s many executive orders has directed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to “take all appropriate actions to expand the migrant operations center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.” There is currently a large array of tents across the bay from the naval prison. The new Secretary of Homeland Security has suggested that tens of thousands of migrants could be housed there.
This reappropriation of the machinery of the Global War on Terror for an immigration crackdown is not a corruption of its purpose but the next logical step. That vast apparatus of surveillance, detention, and punishment was built to fight an endless war with no clear enemy, a military solution for what Richard Beck has called the “global archipelago of slums.”2 If there is cause for dread, it should not be in the President’s words but in the engine he now sits atop. And if there is value in looking at official language, perhaps we should leave behind the anomalous utterances—the lib-trolling and rambling grievances—and look instead at the language of continuity and recurrence.
For instance. The new head of the Defense Department, an abusive drunk who served at Gitmo in the early aughts, has a tattoo on his bicep that says Deus vult, Latin for “God wills it.” A battle cry from the first Crusade, it has become a slogan of the far-right in recent decades. The man who, two years ago, shot nine people to death outside a mall in Allen, Texas, had the phrase tattooed across his wrists. He also bore a swastika on his chest. In the wake of that shooting, Allen’s congressman said that those demanding gun reform “are people that don’t believe in an almighty God who is absolutely in control of our lives. I'm a Christian. I believe that he is.” In other words: God wills it.
This is the language we should look at: the terminology of a war machine seeking out a new war, the speech of death in the garb of god. At the very least, it should outweigh hand-wringing about norms and etiquette, like whether or not the President will pave over the grass in the Rose Garden.
Somewhere in the City, a faceless man is riding a motorbike around, dangling his two silver canisters, broadcasting the Bible, telling passersby to Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die. I think the idea is to shore up your good works before New Jerusalem arrives. But that will be a long time yet. Nothing seems ready to die.
ben tapeworm
1 Leon Czolgosz’s last words: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people—the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime. I am sorry I could not see my father.”
2 From his recent book, Homeland: “The country faced a series of problems stemming from the authoritarian rule, urban poverty, and social instability that plagued the countries where growth had failed. [...] The war on terror is a tool for managing the very surplus populations that the end of American-led economic prosperity helped to create—people whom the United States now finds itself unable and unwilling to help.”