T for President
There are many people, many many people, thousands of people, if I may use the presumptive Republican nominee’s mode of introducing a controversial subject, who are sick of the presumptive Republican nominee’s name. I am one of them.
Every time I hear it or read it, aside from a wave of nausea, I see the face and hands on the screen, enunciating the latest conspiracy theories. The more he warms to the epiphany that the president is in cahoots with the terrorists, and for all we know may be a card-carrying member of ISIS, the more furious the hands wave. It’s as if he is sending out signals from a Manchurian candidate to the other aliens waiting for instructions from headquarters located somewhere deep in his hair. There is something surreal about this line of political rhetoric; no, the word I’m searching for is crazy.
My adverse reaction to the name is something of a problem to me as a pundit with the obligation to mention the presumptive Republican nominee’s name from time to time. It also sticks in the craw of my computer.
I don’t know about yours, but my computer is very smart. Aside from having a brain that can beat me in chess, it also has a heart and shares my opinions.
For some time I’ve been noticing whenever I would type in the name it would come out something like “Frump” or “Mussolini.”
As reliable as it is, Marvelous Marv, as the computer is known in my house, has been known to make innocent errors. In an essay discussing my Id, for example, it came out yid. And Marv keeps mixing up the words “worse” and “worst”. In the sentence “The Republican candidate may be the worse in history” —it should be worst, unless you’re okay with the liver sausage being spelled “liverworse.”
The most egregious sign of my computer’s political bias occurred the other day when an essay was trying to describe the presumptive Republican nominee’s contribution to higher education with the creation of a university endowed with his name, and the institution’s name appeared in print as Fuck U.
Something needed to be done about this orthographic problem which would only get worse or worst in the next six months.
I tried various stratagems to trick my computer into stopping this funny business, such as referring to the presumptive candidate as The Idiot. People in the know knew I was not referring to the Dostoevsky novel of the same name. No, he is America’s Idiot.
For a while, I called him Donald Duck, a suggestion made by a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School. But animal rights activists protested. Fowl language! was the charge. Ducks had enough trouble with the gun lobby.
I thought I’d get around the problem by using initials, as in “DJT.” That was something accepted by the media only for icons like FDR and JFK. Anyway, DJT sounded like a new insecticide.
A similar problem in nameology was experienced with my other major subject this campaign. I got around that by identifying a once leading candidate in the race as His Rotundity or His Immensity, The Incredible Bulk and, simply, Gov. Wide Load. And everybody knew I was writing about the Governor of New Jersey. (See “The Christie Chronicles,” Episode I-XLIII, www.marvinkitman.com)
All in all, it’s very embarrassing to have a computer with a mind of its own.
What to do?
Now I realize it’s the kind of question one should be asking Siri. But I’m on her Do Not Reply list ever since I asked her age.
Just as I was blocked writing about the latest example of the New Insanity called the Republican Party, a reader named Patty Volk came to the rescue.
In the coming weeks whenever I find it absolutely necessary to write about the consumptive nominee — there it goes again, he meant presumptive— the madman will be identified by the letter “T”.
The way this works:
In the sentence “With his record of four bankruptcies, nine failing businesses, the man who could not make money running a casino, a man who is widely known as the real estate mogul who stiffs workers renovating properties, the man who may be the biggest fraud and con man ever to hold office, ‘T’ will add to his laurels as the first goniff.”
“T” stands for you know who. Or is it whom?
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Marvin Kitman
June 16, 2016