Last week, the preeminent French newspaper, Le Figaro, revealed the results of a study conducted by Professor Frederique Sandretto, an expert in American Culture at the Parisian University, Sciences Po. Based on a careful evaluation of the wording of the last several speeches and off-hand press statements made by the current white house resident, Prof. Sandretto found that his entire vocabulary consisted of a total of only two hundred words. That is comparable, she said, to the capacity of an eighteen-month-old toddler.
President Biden, by contrast, in his last sets of speeches, utilized a vocabulary of 1200 words, a much more adult vocabulary.
What’s next? A ruler on the par of a newborn? It is no wonder that the current guy has worked for decades to underfund education and dumb down the electorate.
Once quoted as saying, “I love the poorly educated,” he understands that, the less they are able to parse a sentence, the less likely they are to distinguish his lies from the truth. This suits him well.
In addition, however, several mental health experts have described his constantly shrinking and repetitious vocabulary as an identifiable sign of worsening dementia.
At least the current Supreme Court Justices who said he was not allowed, unilaterally, to impose tariffs on the world, were not lambasted only as “losers” but as “fools and lapdogs”. That’s two more words. We can be forgiven if we thought he was talking about his Cabinet.
Memory Persists, History Is Malleable
Salvador Dali, in one of his most identifiable works, painted a desolate landscape of cliffs and twigs over which are draped melting pocket watches. The work is titled, The Persistence of Memory. It was painted in Spain at a time of great political turmoil, when the Second Spanish Republic was about to be challenged by a Civil War. A few years later, Franco ascended to power. The melting watches seem to say that time drips away, but memory persists.
George Santayana, too, was a Spaniard. Unlike Dali, who was considered one of the great surrealists, Santayana was held to be a leading critical realist of his time. He grew up in America, went to Harvard and was hired, at that University, as a Professor of Philosophy. Students in his popular classes included Conrad Aiken, W.E.B. Du Bois, T.S, Eliot, Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein.
Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” This made me want to say, as a follow-up, “But those who selectively eradicate and fabricate the past, are doomed to be treated similarly by later historians.”
The minute that the white house pretender is gone, the scrubbing will begin. His name will disappear from everything to which he had it affixed. His bloviations about his own accomplishments will appear only as the ranting of a disappearing mind. Instead, history will report that this Worst of All Presidents committed multiple crimes against humanity, the arts, public health, and every single page of the Constitution.
This will be followed by restorations. Of decency, one hopes, but also of the multitude of contributions by people of color, deleted by this regime, the inventions and art of women, the statues, the portraits, the full and necessary stories of our sins of slavery, internment camps, the attempted eradication of our native population, and the hounding of LGBTQ people. Oh yeah, and add in the finally completed reports on the immorality of Pam Blondie’s DOJ, Garden Noem’s DHS and, of course, the epstein files.
The history of this regime will serve us, like the nightmarish warnings in fairy tales and Edgar Alan Poe stories, as prime examples of behaviors to be scrupulously avoided. We will become those who remember and learn the lessons from the past and do not mindlessly repeat its mistakes. Never, again, will we elect a person of no character. We will make certain that this miscreant is seen as nothing but a blip in history. A pimple on the face of the statue of liberty. The big American mistake.
The memory will persist. The source will melt away into ashes.
Author
About The Author
