A brief two point news bulletin
News surrounding the likelihood of criminal charges for former President Donald Trump involving his alleged payments to a porn star—using campaign money in violation of campaign finance laws—has increasingly made headlines in the past days. Indictments may or may not soon be in flight.
Possible charges that Trump may be facing have been orbiting us for many years now. This particular story, however, brings back to my memory an anecdote I try to tell at parties now and then. Here’s the longer version of it, or all the versions written down at once in parallel.
In the 2001 movie Donnie Darko, Drew Barrymore plays a high school english teacher. She has the words ‘Cellar Door’ up on the blackboard in elegant, looping cursive. Jake Gyllenhaal’s character asks about the phrase, she replies “this famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that Cellar Door is the most beautiful”
Cellar door cellar door cellar door. Or, to borrow from Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”; they is, they is, they is. Or Robert Haas; blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. Or Wallace Stevens; I placed a jar in Tennessee.
Many of us have certain word sounds that stay with us, language that, in some strange eddy of the mind, gets caught in a euphonious current. Sounds and words that transcend their own patterned meanings. One phrase I often think of comes from an autobiography by the aforementioned woman that former President Trump allegedly paid off. I imagine her work as largely a defamatory effort to profit from the political moment, which is her prerogative, but I’ve done my best to pay marginal attention to news coming from her corner. But she did write something that fascinates me grammatically, a sentence I think about often. Printed, legally defensible speech that lives permanently in history, a former President of the United States the subject.
A brief study in grammar and politics. Here it is—
He knows. A strong start to the sentence. Pronoun, verb. Declarative, a complete sentence on its own. Given this is a sentence that, if you are anything like me, you will revisit over and over, we know immediately that He is the President. He knows. The President knows. Immediate intrigue— what does he know. Surely the President knows a whole lot. Vague, but suggestive, the sentence pulls us forward.
He knows he has. Pronoun verb pronoun verb. Strong and still declarative. We’re laying in a groove in the present tense here. Rhythmic syntax that is at once staccato and alliterative. Reflexivity lives in this language as well. Our subject knows something about themselves. Moreover, they have something and this object says something about them as a person. Whatever comes next, we’ll witness it, then know this subject also knows this thing about themselves. No dramatic irony here, just lucidity.
He knows he has an unusual. Pronoun verb pronoun verb article adjective. What an adjective unusual is. Elegant, but pejorative. Whatever this man has is a bad thing? A strange thing? Is he ashamed of it? They know they have it. We know they have it. They know we know they have it and so on.
He knows he has an unusual penis. Gorgeous. Excellent ending. Of all the nouns in our language, there it is. Everything we hoped for; the president knows he has an unusual penis. We expected it and it happened and we are still entertained. A fastball count and we all know it’s coming and the pitcher throws a strike right by us. Swinging strikeout. One hundred miles per hour. Nothing you can do, series over. What a sentence. What a world we live in. He knows he has an unusual penis he know he has an unusual penis he knows he has an unusual penis he knows he knows he knows.
This one has stayed with me. I think about it while I sit out in the sunlight and drink my coffee. For some reason, I find this bit of language calming. All our greatest institutions, all our greatest achievements, all of our brave accomplishment—The president knows he has an unusual penis. Like watching the wind catch and fill the sails of some tall, sleek ship. A perfect sentence for our increasingly surreal world. I can’t imagine this sentence memorialized in any other moment in history.
The writer goes on to describe the president’s member as being less than desirable, as having a “huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool.” Also excellent use of language, but it becomes vaguely vindictive. Dislike a man all you want, nobody gets to choose what their body looks like here. Schoolyard insults. But he knows he has an unusual penis… musical. Elegant, old money jab by the American pornstar.
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A secondary point of note; the Silicon Valley Bank has failed and the FDIC has placed nearly $175 billion dollars in customer dollars under the control of federal regulators. At risk of belaboring a point, I can’t help but think Silicon Valley has produced a culture of people who, on the whole, aren’t as smart as they think they are. The wax on these people’s wings has a regular tendency to melt.