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A Cure For Deafness Aside From Reading Orwell’s ‘Politics And The English Language,’ by Clancy Sigal

‘You stopped talking my language; you don’t care about jobs.’ ” – Iowa union members quoted by NYT’s reporte

Trip Gabriel, the NYTimes reporter, found many Trump signs in the front yards of loyal union members 
who had been Democrats. 
 
Don’t waste your time worrying about Russian hacks or FBI sabotage or ‘fake stories’ about Moscow whores. 
 
The reason we lost is in plain view:
 
“You stopped talking my language; you don’t care about jobs.”
 
I felt the same way watching Democratic election rallies.  So much of the language – about ‘diversity’, LGBT, 
gun control, abortion, immigrant rights – missed me by a mile.  Painfully, so did some of Bernie’s rote-like speeches 
about “revolution” that thrilled the young and swayed older voters but not by a significant much. 
 
The nail in the coffin was Hillary’s “we're going to put a lot of (you) coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?”  
Way out west in Iowa steelworking union members heard us all too clearly.
 
The Democratic Party top brass couldn’t have cared less about working people  because economically and psychologically 
they’re in the same mind-class as Trump and his swamp gang. They’ve all been to the same good schools.
 
So it’s not the language that’s at fault but what Trump’s propaganda mistress, Kellyanne Conway, urges us 
to pay attention to, not what’s on his lips but in his heart.
 
Our heart was in “cultural issues” not jobs. 
 
A positive step back from the Trump abyss is to exchange our tin ears used to dead language for a pair sensitive 
to the situation of what the English call “JAM”.  Just about managing.  Just about keeping our heads above water.
 
That’s us, surely.
 
                                            
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