I had just risen from my bed and held the newspaper in my hands when my eyes almost popped out of sockets upon reading the headline announcing that President Trump had “assured” PM Modi on the sidelines of the G7 meet at Evian that US would stand by India in case we are attacked.
I couldn’t believe it for a while. Then I realized it was of a piece with what you, Mr President, said about Iran:
“We won’t give them any money”, as if they had requested for it. Of course, if by money, you had meant bombs, it would still carry some sense, but that kind of equivalence is unheard of. It isn’t spoonerism or malapropism either. But who can find fault with the mightiest man on earth!
One learns you are dinning into the American heads the right spelling of the word ‘See’ vis-à-vis ‘Sea’. It’s indeed a big issue since true Christians as they are, they tend to think of the Holy See than the Mediterranean Sea! The nasty comedian took an unworthy jibe at you when he said, “America had somehow elected a president who could turn a two-syllable word into a graduation seminar”!
I would rather thank you for supporting the Queen’s English and am convinced that we won’t have to graduate to President’s English from American English!
Again, some nasty guys have adorned you with epithets coined after the sidekicks in Shakespeare’s plays, but I won’t buy them. Buying estates and countries and continents is, after all, your prerogative,
Sir. I say yours is a quite refined way of creating humour, while cutting people to size, like “You don’t have the cards, do you?”.
I never heard you call names or hurl abuses. You love figures and
figurines, and also figurative language, in addition to a lot many things that you profess to love – “I love it”, “They love me,” and all that. Do you mean that always? – I wonder. At times, you are
ironical like “He’s a great friend of mine,” and at the same time, present the gift of a truncated map of India. That calls for an Indian proverb using the word peeth; can’t remember exactly, but why spend time over it? One has only to learn of your love for irony and paradox in order to understand you, Mr. President!
Talking of paradox, didn’t you announce many a time that the deal with Iran was done. Anyway, this umpteenth time should not be surreal even though you and your Iranian counterpart were shown
signing the MoU, sitting thousands of miles apart. It must be true like most of the stuff that you put out on ‘Truth Special’.
With experience, I have learnt why it’s called so – because the kind of truth uttered by you has to be special – It’s a President’s truth, in these – what you called at the start of your term – ‘post-truth times’. So, the two terms put together – ‘post-truth’ and ‘truth special’ should not be taken as an oxymoron, but only as a paradox which, as Cleanth Brooks theorized, carries meaning in poetry: “Irony and Paradox form the language of poetry,” he said.
I do have a great regard for your poetic sensibility, Mr. President! Poets, said Plato, are denizens of another world and they have their own kind of truth – thrice removed from reality. “God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers…”, noted Plato’s disciple Socrates in his book Ion.
So, in order to appreciate the ideas of the first citizen of America – the heavenly Land of Opportunity – one has to be qualified enough to appreciate the logic in chucking out of the migrants and
expatriates for having made America what it is today.
We must understand that a peaceful world is being ushered in through bombings, blockades and bombast! As such, in order to make the world peaceful, one must first find the conflict zones, or if these are not available, then one has to create them. Otherwise, how can you get the Nobel? Remember Charlie Chaplain’s kid had to scour the gulleys and lanes of California in order to shatter window panes so that his master could go and mend them, and keep his home fires burning.
So, you see, those poor arms manufacturers on the Land of
Opportunity have to be given work. Now that the war with Iran is claimed to be over (unless someone wags the tail), fresh pastures or barren lands have to be found to keep their pots boiling. Got any such land near you, dear reader, please inform the POTUS!
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
