Jabberwocky

"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."

For god’s sake get this woman a dictionary!  I’m watching MTG calmly and earnestly double down on her claim that Democrats are pedophiles, and it hits me:  She doesn’t know what the word means.

Here’s the exchange, from 60 Minutes, April 2, 2023.  Lesley Stahl is the interviewer:

(Stahl in voiceover) And things she says that are over the top, like —

Lesley Stahl: The Democrats are a party of pedophiles.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I would definitely say so. They support grooming children. 

Lesley Stahl: They are not pedophiles.  Why would you say that?

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Democrats, Democrats support, even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.

Lesley Stahl: Wow. OK. But my question really is, can't you fight for what you believe in without all that name-calling and without the personal attacks?

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well, I would ask the same question to the other side, because all they've done is call me names and insult me non-stop since I've been here, Lesley. They call me racist. They call me sen, anti-Semitic, which is not true.  I'm not calling anyone names. I'm calling out the truth basically-

Lesley Stahl: Pedophile?

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Pedophi-- call it what it is.

Stahl is dumbfounded (“Wow. OK.”), but looks at her notes, and moves on.  She doesn’t say, “But that’s not what ‘pedophile’ means.”  It’s the kind of maddeningly missed opportunity that mainstream journalism commits all the time.

Listen close.  MTG says: “Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.”  Wait.  What?  What does she mean by “sexualizing”?  It’s slippery.  The word entered the national discourse a couple of decades ago when there was concern about young popstars, Britney Spears most notoriously, being tarted up as objects of sexual desire.  Alarms raised over putting prepubescent girls in glittery outfits and heavy makeup at dance competitions and beauty pageants and calling it cute.  That’s what “sexualizing them” meant.  But it’s not how MTG uses the phrase.  Her twist is that acknowledging the simple fact that even small children are curious about their bodies and the differences in anatomies that they observe, and that responding to those curiosities in healthy, fact-based ways, including scientifically based sex education in schools that acknowledges and accepts the existence of gay and transgender people amounts to “sexualizing” children.¹  People who support this are “groomers” and, therefore “pedophiles”.   

Denotation and connotation.  The specific meaning of the word tossed around inside the swirl of associations that it brings to mind.  What the word denotes can be objectively identified (a pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children), but connotations are subjective (pedophiles do icky sex things to kids).  They’re slippery, arising from context and experience and the varied circumstances under which different people first encounter a word.  So MTG demonizes Democrats with a word that has fearsome emotional resonance.  She dissolves denotation altogether, leaving only connotation behind.  The old Athenian Sophists would be mightily impressed.

But that’s not even my favorite among the many dazzling MTG WTFs.

When she defended herself on the floor of the House, back when she was trying to avoid being stripped of her committee assignments, she vaguely disavowed (some of) the QAnon beliefs that she’d been spouting just a year or two earlier.²  She said that she’d gone online and had been “allowed to believe things that weren’t true”.  She presents herself as genuinely aggrieved that she doesn’t get credit for admitting that she was wrong.  But what fascinates me is the phrasing that she was “allowed to believe”.  Lynn laughs derisively when I bring this up at dinner.  “What a great excuse!  ‘I was allowed to believe that Black man was threatening me, so I had to fight back.’  ‘I was allowed to believe the election was rigged, so I had to take action.’  ‘It’s not my fault!  I was allowed to believe!’”  Lynn has little patience with my attempts to get under the hood of the MTG worldview.

With some effort I can kinda see how “pedophile” got twisted from meaning someone who sexually desires young children to someone who believes in fact-based sex education in schools, but where does “I was allowed to believe” come from?  Is it just clumsiness from someone who simply isn’t very articulate?  Who throws words around for their emotional impact without worrying too much about what they really mean?

MTG is a pure product of the age of social media, unimaginable without it.  Her vague, clumsy and very effectively incendiary language is perfect for Twitter.  Watch how miserable she is trying to defend herself in the well of the House when the task is to compose a logical argument, rather than just piling up disconnected phrases.  She can’t do it.  She’s left with a string of clichés, disconnected bullet points, appeals to her love of God and devotion to everybody’s children.

It's when she’s in front of an audience of her fellow MAGAphiles that she shines, turning her strings of twittified phrases into an escalating chant that excites and energizes her crowd.  Megan Garber expresses it nicely in a piece in The Atlantic.  She’s analyzing Tucker Carlson’s last show before Rupert kicked him out.  Likening Carlson’s monologues to the way Trump uses repetition and idiosyncratic capitalizations in his writing, Garber says Carlson “turns the core message of every segment he airs – they’re coming for you; be afraid – into a rhythmic proposition.  Like a jingle rendered in a minor key, Carlson’s show turns fear into music.”  Turning fear into music – what a fine way of putting it.  The meanings of the individual words don’t matter as much as the emotional power produced by stringing them together in the ways that he – and Trump, and MTG – does.

By her own account, MTG had no particular interest in politics or the culture wars until about 2015.  She’d spent her early thirties working for the construction company she and her husband bought from her dad.  Apparently got bored with that and leapt into CrossFit, first as a trainer and then with her own gym.  In her late thirties got baptized in an evangelical church, had a couple of affairs, separated from her husband but then reconciled,³ started spending more and more time online.  Up to that point, her world had been tightly contained in a culturally conservative upper middle class white suburban bubble outside of Atlanta.  It was a world with clear rules and strong values.  What she found online was shocking.  She hadn’t realized how many in government and in the media were trying to destroy America.  She found QAnon and to the conservative white blank slate that she was, it made perfect sense.   It allowed her to believe many new things that she’d never considered before.  She heard Trump and she knew that he was seeing the same things that she was and that he was determined to do something about it.  She admired his swaggering, bellicose style.  She left her CrossFit gym behind and, now in her early forties, embarked on her political journey to help save America. 

You can’t get inside someone’s head if you don’t really know them, and everyone’s motivations are complicated, so I can’t say with high confidence what moves any of these people.  Still, it’s easy to see Trump as driven in large part by an insatiable narcissistic ego of insecurity that craves to prove he’s better than all those people who made fun of him during those years of his bad boy celebrity in New York. And so many of DeSantis’s decisions appear to radiate a cynical calculation for furthering his political ambitions, but they interleave nicely with his belief that he’s on a mission from God. Marjorie, though, seems more purely a true believer, someone who’s found her mission, a way to channel her energy and determination into saving America from the Muslims and the gays and the groomers and all those who are determined to destroy it.  The story is simple, the heroes are marching on.  They’re well-armed.

MTG’s not dumb, but she is profoundly ignorant.  It's not surprising that people who share her worldview, who’ve lived in similar bubbles and suffer similar fears, would be so terrified of books, literature most of all.  Some three-quarters of the nearly 1,600 books identified by PEN as having been challenged in schools recently are fiction.  Makes sense.  For all the frothing about CRT, it’s in fiction that we get into the hearts of other people, people who might live very differently from us, people whose lives and lifestyles might shock or dismay us, or maybe make us envious with wonder.  Maybe make us uncomfortable.  Uncertain.  Looking in the mirror and wondering who we are.  Good nonfiction may require just as much art and craft as fiction does, but it’s the writer of fiction who’s got to sweat over every word, turning it over, denotation and connotation, listening to how it resonates against all the other words in the sentence, the paragraph, the page.  When you get it right, other worlds full of real people blossom and bloom in the imagination and the reader is forced to see that there are worthwhile and wondrous universes beyond their own.  For those like MTG, this kind of writing is incantatory and dangerous, it’s a threat, it can burrow ideas into your head that were never meant to be there.  They can’t understand it, and it terrifies them.

As well it should.  Just imagine what language like that can do to the children.  Books certainly did it to me.  Small town Wisconsin boy, raised in the shadow of the paper mill, I might’ve been just as badly bubbled as MTG was, but my groomer parents loaded me down with books!  The world I lived in from the time I was three was cosmic, so much bigger than the little Island that was my home.  The myths and legends of the Greeks, gods and goddesses venal and powerful living among us.  From the north of Europe, Odin one-eye and his sons, the power in Thor’s hammer, the catastrophic collapse of Asgard.  The foggy streets of Victorian London, the poverty and corruption of 18^th century Paris.  Robin of Locksley letting loose that last arrow while he dies in Marian’s arms.  Arthur and his knights and his doomed love for Guinevere.  Dangerous Visions and the new wave of speculative fiction, cracking imagination open.  Chinese concubines.  Masai warriors.  The Crusades and the Arabian Nights.  All as real to me as the logging trucks thundering along the street in front of our house.  There was a maple tree in our backyard and I’d climb to a favorite perch, high up, carrying my books and as I read I could look out across the Island, over my little town, out into a universe that I was entirely a part of.  I was never one of those kids who ached to leave their small town.⁴  No need.  I carried worlds inside me.

DeSantis’s legislature just extended the Don’t Say Gay ban through high school.  It was absurd when it was third grade but this is almost demonically comic.  I suppose there are some Moms For Liberty (M4L) who actually do manage to keep their kids in a box until adulthood, but even in Florida kids have gay and nonbinary and transgendered classmates and friends.  They’ll seek out the books and the stories their parents think are too dangerous.  The clever ones will make sure their parents don’t know what’s growing in their brains.

As I’ve been working on this essay I’ve been reading Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, her retelling of David Copperfield set in Appalachia in the early years of the opioid epidemic.  It’s brilliantly written, angry, and deeply upsetting.  It should horrify and shock you, make you mad, make you question, make you quarrel.  It’s got teenage sex, drugs, violence, sexual and physical abuse, raw evil.  And it will get inside you in a way that all of the news reporting about the opioid crisis never could.  It’s perfect for high schoolers.

In the long run the censors never win.  Books defeated the inquisition, samizdat undermined the Soviet Union, Tom Paine’s pamphleteering was far too much for the king to handle.  The books survive.  We’re still reading Lady Murasaki, one thousand and two hundred years after she wrote The Tale of Genji, lovers sneaking into bedrooms after dark, human passion always bursting the bonds that those who believe they know better try to trap us in.  And we’ll still be reading Murasaki long after MTG and DeSantis are minor footnotes in the 21^st century battle for democracy and human dignity.

But that’s the long run. We live in the short run and in the short run we’re right in the thick of it.  There is so much at stake.  How many people did the inquisitors burn, along with all those books?  How many tortured and terrified into obedience?  How much of the history of the 20^th century is the story of genocides?   We speak of the American “experiment” because we still don’t know how it turns out.  And there are plenty of days these days when it doesn’t look good.

And even so, there’s Zooey Zephyr, my hero of the week, sitting on the bench outside the legislative chambers from which she’s been banished, doing the work of representing her constituents.  I saw a headline that said Zephyr’d been “silenced” by the legislature.  Hell, no.  Idiots handed her a megaphone. I look at people like her and wonder, “How does one get to be that brave?”  Of course she terrifies them.

Yes, MTG is a dangerous fool.  But the path to defeating her isn’t to shut her up.  Trying to silence hate speech is as foolish as trying to ban books.  It doesn’t change the minds of the haters, it just makes them resentful and mean and even more determined.  What we need are more dangerous books in the hands of kids and teenagers.  Trust them to find their own minds.  The librarians, the teachers, the writers – these are the heroes of the front line.  The support they need comes from brave and committed people on the school boards and in the state legislatures – if only people will devote the time and energy required to get them voted in.

I cringe when I see people on the left lashing out with the same slick sloppiness as the MAGA-mouths.  It’s so easy to do.  Scoring points on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, as if that’s going to push the needle.  I know that it feels good.  A way to let off steam.  But defending democracy and human dignity requires much more than that. 

We see it through the centuries, again and again the struggle by those who believe in the dignity of all people to develop systems where all people can flourish.  Inevitably, the forces of oppression and repression rise against them, feeding on fear and promising a return to order and security.  Orwell described, with great clarity and precision,⁵ how essential it is for those forces to twist language to accomplish their aims.  We see it now in MTG’s being “allowed to believe”, Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”, the Moms for Liberty determined to “stoke the fires of liberty” by imposing their narrow Christian Nationalism on all students in the public schools.  Turning fear into music.  It’s powerful.  It’s seductive.  To look at America today is to see us at the same tipping point societies have come to again and again.  Which way will the tides of history take us this time?

1. For a slightly more sophisticated example of this shifting of the definition, consider this piece from the Heritage Foundation, which, among other evils, presents Drag Queen Story Hours as an example of sexualizing children, no different from internet pornography and sex trafficking.  We Must Fight the Sexualization of Children by Adults.

2. Which ones?  It’s not quite clear – as is the case with much of what she says.

3. They did finally divorce a decade later, when their kids were about out of their teens.

4. And then left my little town before I was out of my teens and ended up traveling the world.  Go figure.

5. Which is why we keep reading him.