COMMENTARY: America has become a nation hungry for eloquence

As a person who loves words, one of scariest things to me in the first few months of the Trump presidency was the possibility that words didn’t mean anything anymore.

It’s true that politicians of all parties have dodged the truth. I’m a 40-something Democrat old enough to remember Bill Clinton testifying under oath and saying: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” So I’m aware that members of my beloved Democratic party have lied and obfuscated as well.

But to me, President Trump’s use of language felt different. It felt to me like he used words in a way that not only stretched the truth, but communicated that a new post-truth era had arrived, that the truth could be redefined and bent by somebody’s will, that a static concept of the meaning of words could be discarded in the age of Twitter.

I’m feeling grateful, as Trump’s presidency goes onward, that words do still seem to matter, in important ways.

I’m grateful that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled when evaluating the Trump administration’s travel ban, that President Trump’s tweets do, in fact, legally matter, even if they were written in the heat of emotion and even if the president says he didn’t really mean them. I’m grateful to our court system for being a last line of defense for words.

I’m grateful for the words of law professors Daniel Hemer and Eric Posner in The New York Times, that have helped me to understand possible charges against the president. They assert that when it comes to proving obstruction of justice, not only words, but intention, matters: If the president’s intention in firing the FBI director was to act corruptly, that intention will also be part of the case against him, whether or not an underlying crime occurred.

I’m grateful for eloquent words being spoken, on both sides of the political spectrum, for Democrat Mitch Landrieu’s powerful speech in New Orleans in May about the removal of Confederate statues from the city, with phrases like: “I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us” and “History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it.”

I’m grateful for the eloquent tone of the words (if not the meaning of all the words themselves) in Republican Senator Ben Sasse’s book “The Vanishing American Adult” in which he says he wants his children to be “vivacious, appealing, resilient, self-reliant, problem-solving souls who see themselves as called to love and serve their neighbors.” It heartens me that a 45-year-old senator from Nebraska would be so bold as to write a book about the problem of “perpetual adolescence” just a few months into a Trump presidency, as a fairly transparent bid for a presidential run, and to position himself as a possible presidential alternative on the basis of his thoughtfulness and eloquence.

As a bookworm, I’ll always be hungry for eloquent, meaningful words. But it seems like Sasse’s and Landrieu’s words are aimed at a whole nation — bookworms and non-bookworms, Republicans and Democrats —that is hungry for eloquence and meaning as well.

President Trump’s words to me are like junk food: They give a jolt and then a crash and, if we have a taste for them, leave us wanting more.

What I think Landrieu and Sasse are betting on, and what I also hope is true, is that, though we might all at times crave junk food words, we have an even deeper hunger for sustaining words — for words that are eloquent and uplifting, that don’t leave us stirred up and starving for more, for words that content us and comfort us and help us on our way.

I’ve been remembering the words of David Whyte in his poem “Loaves and Fishes”:

This is not

the age of information.

This is not

the age of information.

Forget the news,

and the radio,

and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves

and fishes.

People are hungry,

and one good word is bread