Attacking reality with buzz words

Lively arts scene flourishes in Glens Falls

Buzz words are the primary weapons in the assault against democracy now taking place in our country, and no one wields them with more facility than Elise Stefanik.

If Donald Trump picks her as his running mate — a scenario that now seems possible — it will be because of her fluency with the language of anger that has become the way Trump’s followers express themselves.

Speaking or writing, Stefanik’s parade of insults have an impersonal, machine-like quality. She’s a buzz-word saw.

Rivers of text are being written to explain the why of Donald Trump. What forces led to his rise, and why, despite his manifest unfitness for office, do millions of Americans adore him?

Trump is clever at being mean. From his knack for coining belittling nicknames to his way with middle school-style mockery, few can aggravate and enrage like he can.

For a surprising number of people, Trump’s mad monologues have a cathartic effect. His meanness makes them happy.

Even self-professed religious folks have flocked to him, and if you dip into the Bible, you can find echos of his angry language.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” God says in Exodus 20: 3-5. “… Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”

Jealousy and spite have been powerful motivators for millennia.

Stefanik offers a bloodless imitation, more tiresome than aggravating, more exhausting than enraging. Her tirades on X seem to have been generated by AI, her on-air rants are robotic.

But Stefanik’s lack of charisma makes her, unfortunately, an attractive running mate for a man like Trump — constitutionally incapable of upstaging him.

Stefanik did draw some attention recently with the malatrumpism she used in an appearance on “Meet the Press,” where she called people convicted of crimes and imprisoned following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol “hostages.”

Other observers (like local blacksmith and thinker Mike Parwana, who recently joined Substack), have pointed out something that also struck me about Stefanik’s word choice: At a time in which more than 100 people, most of them Israeli Jews, are still being held hostage by the terrorists of Hamas, it’s anti-Semitic to use the word “hostages” to describe convicted criminals.

Stefanik is belittling the agonizing experience of the real hostages and their families, and she should apologize. Perhaps she could explain she wasn’t trying to minimize the horror Israeli hostages are enduring but only trying to curry favor with Trump, a purpose which, for her, has taken priority over all others, including human decency.

Speaking of decency

Robert Reynolds stands on his porch on Knight Street in Glens Falls.

Robert Reynolds, 76, who lives just down Knight Street from me, less than a block away, has put up two large anti-Trump signs on either side of his front door.

“Trump Lies Lies Lies,” says one.

“I’m a never Trumper,” says the other.

Curious, I stopped by his house to introduce myself, then gave him a call to find out what inspired him to put up the signs and what the reaction has been.

“I just get so pissed off about the daily bullshit,” he said. “Especially Trump — he really gets me bad.”

His concerns are larger than tax policy or aid to Ukraine.

“What’s going to happen to democracy?” he said.

No one has thrown snowballs at his signs or yelled insults out their car window.

“I’ve had a few people make comments, in a good way,” he said. “There are some people who still think.”

Reynolds grew up on Cherry Street, where he and his two brothers were raised by his grandmother and aunt.

“We were lucky there,” he said.

His mother died when he was about 4, and his father “kind of just faded into the dust,” and he only saw him “four or five times.”

He went to college and traveled a lot, waiting until he was 41 to marry. He was married for 33 years to a woman who was a nurse, and he was her caregiver when she got sick. She died a year and a half ago.

He stopped drinking three weeks ago, following a bad fall. 

“This time, I got really scared,” he said.

He was a “jack of all trades” when he was working, and politically, he’s an independent, he said — “not that it really matters.”

Politics doesn’t interfere with his friendships, he said.

“I wouldn’t let that come between us,” he said. “Real friends are few and far between.”

Not that he avoids fraught conversations.

“I always talk politics,” he said. “But I’ve been trying to get not so one-sided. I try to listen.”

LARAC party

Bella and I went to the LARAC gallery downtown Friday evening for the opening of its annual members show. We’ve been to previous art openings there, but this one was especially crowded and lively, with barely enough room to move around without bumping into someone. The art was great, too — fun and colorful and diverse, in all sorts of media. Glens Falls has a core of devoted art fans — not all of them over 60 — and of artists, more than 100 of whom have pieces in this show.

Here’s a quick video of the crowd: