No More Words

 Tuesday morning this week was particularly bleak. Trump was needlessly torpedoing the global economy and the U.S. alliance system yet again. Markets around the world were tumbling. All I wanted to do was to stay at home and shelter-in-place to wait out the apocalypse, but instead I had to trudge to campus for a long day of class in the middle of a particularly brutal late-winter day. 

But even to describe what I felt that morning on a continuum of ordinary anxiety or disgust or indignation wouldn't quite do it justice. Every day I wake up loathing Trump and what he is doing to this country—and to our partners and allies around the world. But that morning was something unique. What actually went howling through me was something more akin to horror. My inner state could best be depicted as a kind of Francis Bacon painting. 

"A man has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions," as the Polish concentration camp survivor Tadeusz Borowski once wrote (Vedder trans.) "He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He uses the same ordinary words." 

So too, I have been saying the same thing about Trump for a decade now, so it's very hard to know how to escalate my language still further to keep up with the severity of what he's doing now. I've used up my full repertoire of words when it comes to fulmination and denunciation. Everything I could say would just be repeating them—so how to convey that I mean them even more strongly now than I did before? 

I can say all over again how perverse and repulsive it is that he is deporting asylum-seekers to death and persecution, starting unprovoked trade wars against our friends and allies, supporting dictators and selling out the Ukrainians. But—I've said all of that already. What else is there to add? 

What stronger words can one find than the ones one has already used? I almost wish at times I hadn't used up all the strong words so early on. I sometimes feel that maybe I squandered and debased the linguistic coin of the realm. But the thing is—I couldn't have known, could I—how much further Trump would be permitted to go? I didn't realize what words I should have kept in reserve, because I didn't know I would need them. 

I've written before on this blog about the problem that we have "talked our extinction to death," when it comes to Trump (to borrow a phrase from Robert Lowell's poem about the Cuban missile crisis). I've cited Bertolt Brecht's haunting poem about how—the worse an authoritarian regime's crimes become, the less people have to say about them. 

And I find this happening to us now. When Trump first started trying to expel asylum-seekers in his first term, everyone had a lot to say about it. Everyone was disgusted and furious. But now, in 2025, he has simply shut down asylum entirely. People fleeing religious persecution are being disappeared to a jungle camp in Panama. Others are being flown back to Venezuela—a fate that Marco Rubio himself described just a few years ago as tantamount to a "death sentence." 

And yet, people are far quieter about all of this now than they were eight years ago. Where is the outrage? Where are the marches? Brecht's words come to mind: "The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread." (Willett trans.)

Maybe people are scared. Maybe their hearts have hardened. Maybe we have all been warped by the pandemic and the spectacle of our fellow Americans mortgaging our own democracy, so that we no longer believe in the value of moral indignation. David Wallace-Wells suggested—plausibly enough—in a recent newsletter that the collective trauma from COVID-19 has made us all "more self-interested and nakedly transactional" as a society. 

Maybe, that is to say, we've just become completely jaded. Maybe we view world now as a place where—as Matthew Arnold once wrote—there is simply no "help for pain"—and so, we had better look out for ourselves alone, since no one is coming to help us. 

Or maybe—more charitably—our silence is due to the fact that we have simply "talked our extinction to death." Maybe we have just run out of words. We used up all the rhetoric of strong denunciation eight years ago, over the first warning signs of Trump's abuses—and we're bereft of any further words to express what we feel now that he is doing things that are even worse. 

A person "has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions," as Borowski put it. And we used up all of ours too early. How to express what we are feeling now in even stronger language than what we used before? 

Our language is too poor an instrument to achieve such a flexible purpose—to accommodate wordless horrors. It is, to quote Flaubert's famous observation—which Borowski's passage inevitably brings to mind—merely "a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."

We have talked our extinction to death.