It’s a broken record, that’s for sure
Quite a few people have contacted me this week seeking an English translation of President Donald Trump’s recent reflections on Elton John, breaking records, hockey, which people need space and which ones do not, whether the brain is or is not attached to the mouth, and the correct order of importance of different body parts.
“Hey, Chris, you write a lot of meaningless gibberish in the paper,” one fan wrote. “Do you have any idea what the hell Trump is talking about?”
In case you missed it, President Trump was in Great Falls, Montana, last week for another one of his campaign rallies. Have you noticed that when the President of the United States, Donald Trump, is feeling a little low or needy, he schedules a campaign rally, even though he is already the president and doesn’t really need to campaign for any practical reason? His campaign rallies are his “safe space,” where he can feel good about himself, the equivalent of taking himself out for an ice cream at the taxpayers’ expense.
There, he can say whatever he likes with the confidence that the crowd will cheer wildly, whether he is mocking the “me too” movement, making a joke about an ailing former President from his own party, or sneering at a senator with terminal cancer who may well be on his deathbed. On this particular occasion, he was riffing on one of his favorite topics — how much people love him, how big the crowds are that come out to see him, and how unfair the press is not to acknowledge all of this. Here is one excerpt from his speech, which I assure you I am not making up, and could not make up:
“I have broken more Elton John records. He seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical — the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth, right? The brain. More important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.”
Before we dig into decoding Trump’s speech, let’s admit a couple of things up front. First, some of Elton John’s records deserve to be broken, especially the ones he made in the 1980s and thereafter. While it is true that very few recording artists produced more great singles than Elton churned out in the 1970s, by the time the 80s rolled around, he was pretty much spent. Everyone who owned a radio in the 70s remembers “Rocket Man,” “Bennie and the Jets,” and “Tiny Dancer,” but how many people out there remember “Reg Strikes Back” or “Sleeping With the Past?” I didn’t think so. There’s a good reason for that, which is that they are awful, even if Elton did have an organ and “a lot of people helping,” as Trump correctly claims. I may have broken those records myself.
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With that stipulated, what are we to make of the President’s claim that the mouth is the only musical? No one will ever mistake Trump for a theater buff, but surely somewhere along the way, he must have encountered Rodgers and Hammerstein, or seen at least a segment of “The Sound of Music” or “The Wizard of Oz” on some hotel television while waiting for Stormy Daniels to get out of the shower?
As to Trump’s claim that the mouth is attached to the brain, well, this is a matter of no small dispute, as we all know quite well. Most of us would probably say that there are times when this connection — even in ourselves — is a little looser or more frayed than we’d like to admit, especially on those occasions when we speak (through our mouth) before we have fully thought through (in our brain) what we want to say, only to wind up hours later stewing in the bitter juices of deep remorse, muttering to ourselves, “The brain is, after all, much more important than the mouth. So much more important.”
On those occasions, we may want to pull out and break some more of those Elton John records. But not the one with “Honky Cat.” Man, that’s a great song!
That’s a rough translation of the speech for those readers who dislike or have no strong opinion about Trump. For his supporters, no translation is necessary, since they always hear the same message, regardless of what he says: “The media is the enemy. It’s all fake news. Democrats are socialists. Crooked Hillary should be locked up. Obama wasn’t born here. Got it?”
Crystal clear, even without musical instruments.
(Chris Cox is a writer and a teacher who lives in Haywood County. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
