“I
think the rhetorically-challenged person hears ‘truth’ and thinks, ‘literal
truth in correspondence with the facts.’ In that regard, he sees a picture of
Donald Trump riding a war horse over a corpse labeled CNN while a cartoon
frog-pope waves, and sees no truth at all. Literally, nothing in that picture
is true, so that’s bad, maybe even Leftist.
But rhetorically, that picture is completely true, and a better, more
persuasive representation of the truth of that situation than you could convey
in any amount of dialectic.”
Now, like everyone else, I too can be sold
by a grand rhetorical flourish, but that’s fairly unusual. Generally I’m
inclined to skepticism. So here’s the meme to which Cail is referring.
You decide:
I don’t know if you see what he’s getting
at, but I think I do. The liberal media, CNN among them, is telling us lies on
an epic scale. President Trump is calling them out. In this he is very vaguely
reminiscent of the crusader of old.
Really? Yes, really.
Sure, it’s propaganda. Sure, it’s
exaggerated. Sure, it’s rah-rah. But there’s something essentially accurate
about it. It captures the spirit of Trump’s one-man windmill-tilt of a presidency. Incontestably it’s way more on-the-nose than the relentless PC virtue
signaling of the journalist class. And ‘Pope Pepe’ up there in the ether reminds
the reader that Trump has millions of voters still out there cheering him on as
he continues to upset the Beltway apple cart (exactly how many millions still
to be determined).
It’s yet another Internet meme, and it
drives the Left crazy. They’re losing, at least for now, and this sort of thing
is yet another unexpected faceful of right-wing schadenfreude. Getting meme-bombed when they misbehave is not the sort of response they’re conditioned to receiving from conservatives, and they have no idea what to do about it. So they rage and fume and mutter “it’s inaccurate”, “it sets a dangerous precedent”, and especially “it’s unpresidential”.
That sort of combustible nit-pickery is even found in scripture once in a blue moon, and it’s not commendable even when it has a point.
For instance, the CNN account of David’s repatriation of the Ark of the Covenant might have read something like “Queen Scandalized by Tawdry Royal Display”,
with the obligatory shot of King David dancing in the streets sans vêtements, probably looking half baked out of his gourd, as the majority of candid snaps
taken by the paparazzi tend to appear. Certainly the Bible leaves us in no doubt
that Michal saw her husband’s grand public gesture in exactly this sort of
unflattering light. Rather than rejoicing in the ark’s historic return, Michal saw nothing of note in the events of the day beyond her own humiliation.
But does such a fussy, aggrieved, self-absorbed reframing of events give us the whole story? Not at all. Many
students of scripture agree it was Queen Michal who stepped out of line, not
the King. She remained childless to the day of her death.
Coincidence? Possibly.
Or perhaps, like devotion, truth can be expressed in strange ways now and then.
No comments :
Post a Comment