Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, along with American songwriter Bob Dylan, are the only two people to achieve literary and cinematic harmony: winning both the Nobel and the Oscar. Bernard Shaw won his Nobel for the screenplay Pygmalion, which was made into a movie and was credited with elevating Hollywood from illiteracy to literacy. Bernard Shaw claimed to hate the award, though that didn’t stop him from plonking it on his mantlepiece. Pygmalion would later be remade as My Fair Lady and become a cultural milestone of metamorphosis, held up as proof that speaking proper English can solve all the world’s problems.For all the non-Macaulayputras here, My Fair Lady is a musical about a phonetics professor named Professor Henry Higgins who deems that he will teach a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle how to speak English ‘properly’ so that she can pass muster at the Royal Ascot.While she is almost ready to give up, Professor Higgins launches into one of the most quotable lines from the movie and the finest Albion propaganda:“I know your head aches. I know you’re tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window. But think what you’re trying to accomplish – just think what you’re dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it’s the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that’s what you’ve set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will.”
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My Fair Lady – Higgins Motivational Speech
The aforementioned notion is a clear example of what one calls the Higgins-Macaulay Complex, a colonial mindset which believes that anyone who speaks or writes English properly is inherently superior, and a clear substitute for possessing any tangible skill.It is obviously derived from Henry Higgins’ notion of English being the language of the noblest thoughts and Macaulay’s belief that a single shelf of European literature is worth more than the whole native literature of India and Arabia.The notion lives on in a post-colonial society where English – and who has access to it – is a marker of civility and civilisation. The Higgins-Macaulay Complex continues to haunt post-colonial societies, but there are times when the English language can be oddly prescient.
Take the old Middle English word trumpery.The word first appeared in English during the mid-15th century, derived from the Middle French tromper (to deceive), and it originally meant “deceit, fraud, or trickery” and later evolved to describe “attractive but useless items, rubbish, or worthless nonsense”.In a delightful piece for the National Review in 2016 titled Trumpery and Social Darwinism, MD Aeschliman noted that Samuel Johnson, while writing in A Dictionary of the English Language, defined trumpery as “something fallaciously splendid; something of less value than it seems.”He writes: “This is a perfect place to start, as Johnson’s definition reminds us of the massive fact that Trump’s vulgar splendour is based on virtually nonstop rational, rhetorical, and moral fallacies. Dr Johnson’s predecessor Alexander Pope, widely read in the American colonies before the War of Independence, said the rational person must always distinguish between ‘solid worth’ and ‘empty show’: again, the perfect test for trumpery, which is based on a vast trompe l’oeil, on full-strength tromperie, pervasive, promiscuous fraud and demagoguery.”Calling Trump a Nietzschean and post-Christian – Nietzsche did ‘kill’ the Christian God – Aeschliman argued that Trump’s worldview was shaped by Social Darwinism, based on Charles Darwin’s evolution, which imbibed the notion of survival of the fittest, and reflected a deeper civilisational and cultural decay. That worldview wasn’t one man’s vulgarity but the leitmotif of Western civilisation that saw the world through a prism of winners and losers, treated success as moral proof, had a contempt for weakness, and held bare power as a more important virtue than any pretence of principle.That was, of course, 10 years ago when Trump was largely restrained and causing chaos only on Twitter feeds. Ten years later, Trump is an unrestrained id, wreaking havoc across the world after returning from political exile and now appearing intent on making everyone else pay for the interregnum.Take the war on Iran, which is trumpery in its fullest historical and literal sense. No one quite knows why the US and Israel chose this exact moment to strike Iran, kill the ageing Supreme Ayatollah, and plunge the world into chaos. Various vacillating reasons have fought their way into public discourse – including on-record statements from the White House, off-record laments from the White House, and unfiltered outbursts from Truth Social – none of which have given an adequate answer.
It’s the first true Schrödinger’s war: one that is waging on even as Trump has already won. So far, the various hypotheses have been more ludicrous than the last. The first was regime change that hasn’t happened, and Iran’s enemies clearly underestimated the power the IRGC wielded in Iranian society. The second has been wanting Iran’s oil. Trump has also used historical framing, including the 1979 hostage crisis, to justify the action. Acolytes have argued that it was a pre-emptive act of self-defence. Or to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. That Israel was going to strike anyway.That it is God’s will. All in all, no one still has a clear answer, nor do we think we will get one.So, let’s try and answer a different one: is Donald Trump living up to the word in his name, trumpery, or did his name decide his actions all along?There’s a Latin term called nomen omen that a person’s name is a sign or omen of a person’s fate, character, or destiny. That one has to live up to one’s name. The flipside of this idea, which brings causality into the picture, is nominative determinism, the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards jobs or areas that fit their names. One must live up to the name, or one lives up to the name because it was used for them.The term nominative determinism was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994 after the magazine’s feedback column noted several scientific studies carried out by researchers with similar names (a book on polar explorations by a Snowman and an article on urology by Splatt and Weedon). The idea is slightly older and was first suggested by Carl Jung to describe Sigmund Freud, whose surname means ‘joy’, though many critics of Freud’s pop psychology could argue that the phonetic English version of his name is closer to Freud’s destiny.One explanation hypothesised for nominative determinism is implicit egotism, which states that humans have an unconscious preference for things they associate with themselves.But in the long scheme of things, does it matter if it’s nomen omen or nominative determinism?Because all of us are still stuck living through this era of trumpery, where a moral vacuum with seemingly failing mental capacities and a dire case of logorrhoea keeps saying whatever is on his mind, whether it resembles the truth or not. All of which would be rather entertaining if the same individual did not have at his control the most devastating war machine ever assembled. To put it in context: when America dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it had two weapons, each with a destructive force of roughly 15 to 20 kilotons. That was enough to erase cities and harm future generations. Today, the United States possesses a nuclear arsenal that makes that moment look almost primitive.
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Bob Dylan – A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Official Audio)
In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins taught Eliza proper enunciation by making her repeat the sentence: the rain in Spain is mostly in the plains. Now, that line doesn’t exist in Bernard Shaw’s original play. On the other hand, his Nobel–Oscar brethren Bob Dylan wrote a haunting funeral for the world in A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, that many interpreted as a reference to nuclear rain during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dylan rejected that claim, instead referring to a “culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, a common destiny of human beings getting thrown off course, one long funeral song”.Thanks to our current trumpery, that funeral might be approaching quicker than required. The rain in Spain once taught us how to speak. Higgins believed language could civilise the world, one vowel at a time. The rain that now looms may decide whether we speak at all. And if it does fall, it will not be in Spain, or on the plains, but everywhere at once.
