Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and American songwriter Bob Dylan are the only two people to achieve harmony in literature and film: winning both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize for his play “Pygmalion,” which was made into a movie and is credited with lifting Hollywood from illiteracy to literacy. Shaw claimed to hate the prize, but that didn’t stop him from keeping it on his mantelpiece. “Pygmalion,” later rewritten as “My Fair Lady,” became a milestone in cultural perversion, proving that speaking correct English could solve all the world’s problems.For all the non-Macaulyptians here, My Fair Lady is a musical about a phonetics professor named Professor Henry Higgins, who thinks he’s going to teach a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle how to speak English “correctly” so that she can pass muster at Royal Ascot.When she’s almost ready to give up, Professor Higgins begins to deliver one of the most quotable lines in the movie and the best piece of Albion propaganda:“I know you have a headache. I know you are tired. I know your nerves are as raw as the meat in the butcher’s window. But think of what you want to accomplish—think of what you are dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it is our greatest possession. The noblest thoughts that flow in the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative, and musical mixture of sounds. This is what you are determined to conquer, Eliza. And you will conquer it. “
The above concept is a clear example of what has been called the “Higgins-Macaulay complex,” a colonial mentality that believes that anyone who can speak or write English correctly is inherently superior and a clear substitute for possessing any tangible skills.It apparently stems from Henry Higgins’s notion that “English is the language of the noblest thoughts” and Macaulay’s belief that a single shelf of European literature was more valuable than the entire native literature of India and Arabia.This notion persists in postcolonial societies, where English—and those who can use it—are a sign of politeness and civility. The Higgins-Macaulay complex continues to haunt postcolonial society, but sometimes the English language is strangely prescient.
Take the old Middle English word trumpery.The word first appeared in English in the mid-15th century, originating from the Middle French tromper (trick), which originally meant “deceit, fraud, or trickery” and later evolved to describe “attractive but useless objects, rubbish, or worthless nonsense.”In a delightful 2016 article in National Review titled “Trumpism and Social Darwinism,” MD Aeschliman noted that Samuel Johnson, writing in the Dictionary of the English Language, defined Trumpism as “something that is falsely brilliant; something that is less valuable than it appears.”He writes: “This is a perfect place to start, because Johnson’s definition reminds us of the important fact that Trump’s vulgar brilliance is based on an almost constant stream of rational, rhetorical and moral fallacies. Dr. Johnson’s predecessor Alexander Pope, widely known in the American colonies before the Revolutionary War, said that reasonable people must always distinguish between ‘substantial value’ and ’empty showmanship’: Again, this is the perfect test of Trump, and it is based on overwhelming evidence.” trompe l’oeil (trompe l’oeil), that is, total delusion, widespread, mixed fraud and demagoguery.“Calling Trump a Nietzschean and post-Christian—Nietzsche literally “killed” the Christian God—Eschliman argued that Trump’s worldview was shaped by Social Darwinism, based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which incorporated the concept of survival of the fittest and reflected a deeper decline in civilization and culture. This worldview is not the vulgarity of one man but the leitmotif of Western civilization, which sees the world through the prism of winners and losers, views success as moral proof, despises weakness, and views naked power as a virtue more important than any pretense of principle.Of course, that was a decade ago, when Trump was largely restrained and only causing chaos on Twitter. A decade later, Trump has emerged as an unchecked instinctive man who has wreaked havoc around the world after returning from political exile and now seems intent on making others pay for the interregnum.Take the war against Iran, which was historically and literally hypocritical. No one knows why the United States and Israel chose this moment to attack Iran, kill the elderly Supreme Ayatollah, and plunge the world into chaos. Various reasons for hesitancy have entered the public discourse — including public statements from the White House, private laments from the White House, and unfiltered outbursts from the Truth Society — but none have provided adequate answers.
This is the first real Schrödinger’s war: one that continues even though Trump has won. Each hypothesis so far is more ridiculous than the last. The first is a regime change that has not yet occurred, and Iran’s enemies have clearly underestimated the power that the IRGC exercises in Iranian society. The second one wants Iranian oil. Trump also used historical frameworks, including the 1979 hostage crisis, to justify the action. Followers viewed it as a pre-emptive act of self-defense. Or prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Israel would attack anyway.This is God’s will. All in all, no one still has a clear answer, and we don’t think we will get one.So, let’s try to answer a different question: Yes Donald Trump Live up to his name, bravado, or has his name always dictated his actions?There is a Latin term called “nomen omen” which means that a person’s name is a sign or omen of a person’s fate, character or destiny. That person must live up to his name. The other side of this idea is nominative determinism, which brings causality into it, namely that people tend to gravitate toward jobs or fields that fit their names. One must live up to the name, or one must live up to the name because it is for them.The term nominative determinism was first used in New Scientist in 1994, when the magazine’s feedback column pointed to several scientific studies by researchers with similar names (a book on polar exploration by Snowman and an article on urology by Spratt and Weeden). The idea is slightly older, first proposed by Carl Jung to describe Sigmund Freud, whose surname meant “joy,” although many critics of Freudian pop psychology may argue that the English phonetic version of his name is closer to Freud’s fate.One hypothetical explanation for nominative determinism is implicit egotism, which states that humans have an unconscious preference for things that are relevant to themselves.But in the long run, does it matter whether this is nameless omen or nominative determinism?Because we all still live in this age of hypocrisy, moral vacuum, seeming decline in mental capacity, and suffering from severe gibberish, he keeps saying what he thinks, whether or not it resembles the truth. All of this would be pretty interesting if the same man wasn’t at the controls of the most destructive war machine ever created. To put this into context: When the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it had two weapons, each with a destructive power of about 15 to 20 kilotons. This is enough to wipe out a city and harm future generations. Today, the United States possesses a nuclear arsenal that makes that moment seem almost primitive.
In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins teaches Eliza the correct pronunciation by having her repeat the sentence: The rains in Spain are chiefly concentrated on the plains. Now, this line does not exist in Shaw’s original play. On the other hand, his Nobel Prize-winning and Oscar-winning brother Bob Dylan gave the world a haunting funeral in “A Hard Rain,” which many interpreted as a reference to the nuclear rain during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dylan rejects this notion, referring instead to a “culture of sentimentality, a dark age, a culture of division, evil for evil, a common destiny of humanity going off the rails, a long funeral song.”With our current nonsense, the funeral may come sooner than requested. The Spanish rain once taught us how to speak. Higgins believed that language could civilize the world, one vowel at a time. The impending rain now may determine whether we speak. If it did fall, it would not be in Spain, nor in the plains, but everywhere at the same time.
