The Debasement of Language and the Rise of Violence

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less..”

- Humpty Dumpty

On July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot at the Sixth Street railroad station in Washington, D.C. For two months he lived in agony, the victim of primitive knowledge and medical malpractice. He died on September 19, 1881, just six months after he had assumed the presidency. On February 27, 1882 Secretary of State James G. Blaine eulogized the late president before both houses of Congress.

I bring this up because several people urged me to watch the recent Netflix series, Death by Lightning, which covers the last years of Garfield’s life, and also because Blaine’s eulogy is considered one of the finest speeches ever delivered in Congress.

We now live in a time when language is daily being debased as never before in our history. It is not just that Donald Trump and his administration seem incapable of speaking in complete sentences or following a coherent train of thought, it is that they have forged their inarticulateness into a weapon. Like Humpty Dumpy, their words mean whatever they choose them to mean. Language is no longer a means of communicating with each other; it has become, instead, another way to attack each other. The more I read Trump’s presidential orders and listen to his toxic, repetitious meanderings, the more I realize they say nothing. And that is why they are so dangerous, for their emptiness points the way to violence, bigotry, and hatred, nothing else. Language has consequences, even when it is inarticulate.

And so, I return to Blaine’s eulogy of Garfield – to the final two paragraphs of his long speech in which he paints the last moments of the life of his sometime rival and longtime friend, in which he demonstrates that words can heal as well as harm:

“Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's  interest, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death – and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunnedand dazed, he could give up  life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeksof  agony, that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he  looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell! –  what brilliant broken plans, what baffled high ambitions, what sundering of strong warm  manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behindhim a proud,  expectant nation, a great host of sustaining friends; a cherished and happy mother, wearing the  full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the  little boys not yet emerged from childhood's day of frolic; the fair young daughter; the sturdy  sons just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a  father's love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demand. Before  him, desolation and great darkness. And his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled  withinstant, profound, and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the  center of  nation's love, enshrined in the prayers of the world. But all the love and all the  sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the wine-press alone. With unfaltering  front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of  the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divinedecree.

“As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had  been to him the wearisome hospital of pain; and he begged to be taken from its prison walls,  from its oppressive, stifling air, from itshomelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the  love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die,  as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With  wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's  changingwonders – on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low  to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes  read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the  silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore, and felt  already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.”