President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
This essay has been adapted from a Spiel delivered by Leon Neyfakh on Slates daily podcast The Gist. An edited transcript of the audio recording is below, and you can listen to Neyfakhs Spielby clicking on the player beneath this paragraph and fast-forwarding to the 14:05 mark.
Over Memorial Day weekend, my wife, Alice, and a bunch of our closest friends rented a house in upstate New York with barely any internet, lots of beautiful meadows and mountains to look at, and a big living room where we could sit around until late at night.
Leon Neyfakh is a Slate staff writer.
These are not people I have any trouble feeling like myself around. Hanging out with them is always easy and always natural. I dont ever have to worry that something Ive said has landed badly, or that theyre not having fun with me even though they say they are, or that theyre thinking secret thoughts about me of any kind. These are people who know and get my natural registers. I am legible to them in my authentic state, and I like to think theyre legible to me in theirs.
It was a great weekendwe played Uno, we watched The Wolf of Wall Street on cable, and we tried to get my dog to swim in the pool. Except there was this one thing. Every once in a while, a chill wind would sweep into the house and briefly ruin everything. Now, I dont literally mean that sometimes it was windy, which would not be worth mentioning, though it was quite chilly for most of the weekend. Rather, Im describing a kind of room-transforming social gas that someone would pump into our midst and that infected the air around us. This gas was not emitted by just any someone, but a pretty specific and very famous someone, a guy who has been living in all of our heads for the past year or so, and who now demands our attention every day.
Im talking, of course, about our president, Donald Trump, who came up frequently during our idyllic weekend even though none of us particularly wanted to talk about him. He was like a genie. As soon as his name came up, it was like Trump was summonedlike he was right there with us.
The presidents arrival had an unmistakable and singular effect: In an instant, he would cause us all to stop speaking like ourselves. It was like talking about Trump made our voices come out of our mouths wrongas if, in discussing current events, we were turning ourselves into parrots who generically repeated stuff wed read in the papers, seen on TV, and heard on NPR.
Oh man, I said not long after we all woke up on Sunday morning. Trumps tweeting again.
Whats he saying? my friend asked.
Hes saying, The massive TAX CUTS/REFORM that I have submitted is moving along in the process very well, actually ahead of schedule. Big benefits to all!
Oh, he just got back from his big foreign trip, Alice offered.
He was probably itching to get back to his phone that whole time he was abroad, I said. He was conspicuously disciplined about not tweeting provocative stuff while he was over there.
To engage in krivlyanya means to be artificialto ventriloquize someone else instead of being yourself.
Well, sounds like hes back with a vengeance now, said someone else. OK, back to you, Leon, for the weather and traffic report. This has been Friends Talking About Trump, well see you next time!
OK, so that wasnt a direct transcript of the conversation. But you see what Im getting at: Trump changed us all from human beings into news commentators, spouting off warmed-over reactions to the latest awful thing in the news. Without even meaning to, we would find ourselvesand hear each otherusing phrases and expressing thoughts we would never otherwise say.
A few weeks earlier, Id had the following conversation with Alice while we walked our dog.
I mean, is it time to start thinking about impeachment as a real possibility? she asked.
You would think, but then, the Republicans control all of Congress! Itll never happen, I replied.
True, but even they will eventually reach a breaking point.
Why though? Trumps poll numbers are still finethere is just this one contingent of people who will never leave his side.
Holy shit, what an awful conversation! Afterward both of us felt stupid and, worse, far apart from each other. We had turned into talking heads.
A few weeks after Trumps inauguration, Russian writer Masha Gessen spoke to Slates Michelle Goldberg about life under autocracy. She spoke from the perspective of someone who had left Putins Russia for the U.S. three years earlier and could see more clearly than she used to the toll it had taken on her mind. In the last three years, Gessen said, since I got to this country, I realized what a mental price I had paid for living in a state of siege and a state of battle for a decade and a half. She called this experience intellectually deadening. When you are fighting, you stop learning. You stop reading theory. You stop reading about things that arent part of the immediate fight.
Life under autocracy, in other words, forces everyone to think and talk about the autocrat all the time. By virtue of his power, an autocrat imposes himself onto all of our thoughts, forcing us to adopt his vocabulary and inhabit his mind in order to try to understand what hes doing and why. Ever since his rise to power, Trump has served as a vulgarizing agent. Like a true autocrat, he has situated his stumpy body on all of our shoulders and spends his days burping into our faces while we are forced to connect with the people we love by discussing the tenor and odor of the burps.
I realize this is a lucky way to suffer under Trumpthat millions of Americans who are more acutely affected by his malevolent policies are dealing with much worse. Nevertheless, it feels important to recognize the disfiguring effect that Trump has had on our ability to connect with one another. After all, if we cant talk about Trump six months into his presidency without sounding like dumb pundits, it seems possible that well eventually stop tryingthat well become disengaged from and outwardly indifferent to the obscenities taking place around and above us.
There are two reasons I worry that this kind of intellectual and political retreat might be imminentthat before too long, social engagements and conversations with loved ones will turn into sanctuaries from the news where people like me can avoid the subject of Trump and pretend nothing is happening. One of those reasons is that I dont often have much to say about Trump that qualifies as new or remotely thought-provoking. So much of what the administration does is so obviously corrosive and foolish that it feels pointless to say so. I disagree with the Muslim ban. Congratulations, Leonvery interesting point. Jeff Sessions is dead wrong to try to scale back police reform. Very true, very true. Donald Trump is not competent enough to handle the responsibilities of the presidency. Wow, tell me more about that. I havent heard that one before.
The other reason I worry goes back to my experience over Memorial Day: that saying the words I need to say in order to express my boring and predictable opinions about Trump makes me feel like Im engaged in shoddy, dishonest mimicry.
Theres a Russian word for this, and its one I think about a lot: krivlyatsa. Its a word my parents used with me regularly when I was growing up, always in the context of do not do this. Krivlyatsa: Its a verb that has no direct translation in English, but it means something in the key of acting cartoonishly, in an ugly and inauthentic way. Its often used to describe children who are imitating little phrases and gags theyve seen on TV. Remember when kids used to screech, Did I do thaaaaaat?, copying Urkel from Family Matters? Or when theyd come out of the bathroom and say, "DO NOT GO IN THERE! WOOO! like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective? It happens now with the language of memes: Everything is lit af or so extra or bae. While its possible to use such language with style and charisma, these are all stock phrases made up by other people, popularized by large crowds, and then adopted by individuals who would, in a better world, be expressing themselves through their own personal language.
To engage in krivlyanya, the noun form of krivlyatsa, means to be artificialto ventriloquize someone else instead of being yourself. That is roughly how I feel when I talk to my wife and friends about Trump. Even though Im talking to people who understand me as I am, I inevitably resort to words that arent my own, imitating the beats of other peoples observations and arguments that Ive read online.
Top Comment
No, you pundits were already pretty terrible before Trump. For example, with how you helped elect him through non-critical media coverage, obvious bias, and false equivalency. You could have stopped this beforehand, BUT HER EMAILS! More...
I have to disappoint here, because I dont think theres any good solution to this problem. What are we supposed to do, just not talk about Trump? Obviously notlike it or not, he is our president, and we are stuck talking about him, even if its in a language that is not our own, and which makes us feel alienated from ourselves.
The contrast between that feeling and the feeling of hanging out with my dearest friends this past weekend really sharpened this point for me. And it made me realize that, even in a cabin in the woods, Trump is still going to be there, sitting on our shoulders, and reminding us that life will not be the same until this all somehow ends. Like it or not, were going to have to keep talking about this guy for as long as we live. May it never start to come naturally.
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Donald Trump Is Turning Us All Into Boring Pundits - Slate Magazine