A particularly poignant Nietzschean aphorism darts through my head every time I read yet another story on Republican depravity, and prepare to comment: That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts. There is a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.
You're probably afflicted by the same despair: a painfully desperate but hopeless groping for rhetorical precision. How does one find words that convey the illimitable repugnance one feels each time modern conservatism makes itself known? I sense the presence of an abyss, a monstrous darkness, an almost occult vortex of immeasurable ignorance and unthinking malice. It's as though I see the GOP stalking and myself stalking behind, yet when I catch up to it, when I reach the predator, it is but a mist β a disembodied, ungrippable haze of beastly malevolence and wanton stupidity; a kind of violent blankness.
Of course, straightaway, I'm writing in the wrong medium. Such creeping depravity calls for verse, not prose. But I'm no versifier. What's more, could even our strongest lyric poets ever capture the loathing intensity they must feel upon reading "Republican Lawmakers Vow Fight to Derail Nuclear Deal"? Poetry could come closer than enfeebled prose, crippled as it is by rhetorical convention. Yet Nietzsche still haunts: That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts.
Without waiting for the details, Republicans lined up to blast the deal, from presidential candidates to congressional leaders to back benchersβ¦.
[C]ritics were also preparing a large-scale mobilization during the August congressional recess, when lawmakers are in their home states and districts, to stoke opposition to the agreement and agitate for Congress to block it.
Are there words for this? β words that perfectly mirror one's gut again being wrenched? β words that collar with emotional precision the foul, exhausting banality of the GOP plague? Urge a deal, push for progress, pursue a breakthrough, and one is sure to meet the blank, malevolent, violent haze. The beast awakens and roars at even the peep of a safer world. One then labors to depict one's revulsion with a piercing vividness, and yet one fails β every β¦ bloody β¦ time. There are no words.
President Obama, in his interview with Tom Friedman, makes an eloquent stab at a few. But we observe that Nietzsche is haunting him, too; We behold an unmistakable contempt in his act of speaking to Friedman, since words for Republican infamy are already, and inexpressibly, dead in his heart.