Now, the Trump Administration has begun censoring language.
They’ve listed seven words or phrases that are banned from use in budget documents for the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The announcement apparently came on a Thursday afternoon — but if the administration was hoping for a low profile, they blew it.
Some advice: If you are going about the business of banning words, make your list six items long. Or eight. Or any number, really…except seven.
Because no sooner have you typed “seven words” into your phone than everyone’s mind leaps — faster than an autocorrect! — to the late George Carlin’s infamous routine about “The seven words you can never say on television.”
Prudence precludes me from listing Carlin’s seven words, but they are readily available on the internet (at least, until the administration’s repeal of net neutrality makes them more expensive than other words).
Luckily for us, Trump’s list can all be printed in a community newspaper:
“Vulnerable; entitlement; diversity; transgender; evidence-based; science-based; fetus.”
Of course, there is a pattern here. They are all, in one way or another, descriptive of things or people the Trump administration does not like to hear about.
The thing is, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
This very point was made by no less a personage than our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.
Supposedly, one day Lincoln asked his Cabinet, “Gentlemen. Let us say that a dog’s tail is a leg. How many legs, then, would a dog have?”
“Why, five legs,” came the unanimous reply.
“Wrong,” said Lincoln. “A dog still has only four legs; calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
And forbidding your public servants to say “evidence-based” does not change the world about which they report.
I find it ironic that this outbreak of Official Mealymouth should come from the administration of a man whose entire campaign was based on “telling it like it is.”
Mr. Trump’s contempt was especially vicious for the careful kind of speech called “P.C.” for “Political Correctness.” No, he could not be bothered with that.
But with this list, he is simply imposing a new correctness all his own: call it “Trumpian Correctness” — or, “T.C.” for short.
Instead of “science-based,” the CDC is told to substitute this mouthful: “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”
Wishes! Most of us learned in childhood that sticking our fingers in our ears and yelling “La la la la — I can’t hear you!” fixed nothing.
But not Mr. Trump.
It reminds me of the long-ago tale of King Canute, who had his throne set upon the beach at low tide and forbade the sea to rise.
Of course, it did anyway. And if the sea could do that to King Canute, who at the time was the ruler of all England, Denmark and Sweden, what do you suppose will happen to all the mealymouths in Washington?
Canute merely looked foolish.
But the CDC has something much more important at stake: the health of the American people. And forbidding scientists to speak honestly about their data is not merely foolish — it is dangerous. To us!
Suppose that recently, you were on the same airplane as someone who just came down with Ebola. Would you want the CDC to be able to tell you whether you’re in danger, and if so, what your best treatment should be? Or would you rather have “what the community wishes”?
Or suppose you are a 71-year-old white man who thinks only of himself. Wouldn’t you still want the best in “evidence-based” science and medicine?
Willfully gagging our agencies seems a move of the utmost insanity. Where would our nation be if Paul Revere had galloped through the Massachusetts countryside, yelling “Nobody’s coming! Nobody’s coming!”
What if he couldn’t shout anything at all because he’d had a gag stuffed in his mouth?
I understand that the Trump administration wants to do away with the concepts of truth and reality altogether, so they can tell us whatever they please — but reality is still coming, like it or not.
Just like the sea.
I only hope that Mr. Trump has something “T.C.” to shout, when his beloved Mar-A-Lago is inundated by several feet of “Nothing to see here!”
And I sure hope there’s something left, stronger than “community wishes,” to save him.
