The revenge of Trump’s word cloud

Where never is heard an encouraging word!

Back a generation or two, everyone played word association, apparently derived from psychoanalysis. It was a verbal Rorschach test. Remember that Elvis Presley movie where a slippery lawyer used word association to trick a naive Elvis, on the witness stand, into proving himself some kind of backwoods degenerate? Neither do we.

The British Daily Mail played word association with a gaggle of Donald Trump supporters. Out of the mouths of his babes came these five words more than any other: “Economy, Power, Revenge, Dictatorship, America.” Proving again that hate is a powerful political aphrodisiac. According to Politico, the British tabloid put its focus group findings in what is known as a word cloud and, immediately, the dictator for a day claimed ownership. In fairness, we do see “Peace” and “Freedom” in Trump’s Word Cloud but it’s over-shadowed by contradictory words like “Revenge” and “Dictatorship.”

 But not words like "Swell," and "So's yer old man." 

That got the faceless bureaucrats at the Policy Werkes to thinking (which is always dangerous). They put a can of Heet in the tank and fired up Ol’ Sparky, our Eisenhower-era mainframe computer, to word cloud (verb transitive) Blaska’s blogge. Yeah, we’ve been thinking about a certain supreme court justice with the word-salad name. We also detect the words “Republicans, impeached, education, choice, schools, and Trump.” Also the word “screwed” but not “royally.”

Anna Anna bo-banna / Banana fanna fo-fanna / Fee, fy, mo-manna. / Anna! — The Name Game.

Ol’ Sparky was hungry for more input. What would Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway’s word salad look like? We took her blog off the city website and found words like “metro, transit, housing, sustainability” and of course “Madison.”

Pretty neat, huh! Let’s do John Nichols! We detect many references to “Justice, strikers, striking, Democrats, ceasefire, and philanthropy.” Comrade John is never so happy as when detouring before a picket line. “Justice” of course, is an all-purpose progressive suffix. Attach it to anything important — food justice, economic justice, social justice, racial justice — and you’re speaking the secret code needed to enter progressive union hall.

"For by your words shall ye be justified." — Matthew 12:37.

As for the holy Bible itself, these words leap from the page most often:

Blaska’s Bottom Line: No, we don’t see “Revenge” or “Dictator” on that list either. Nor do any of the biblical words like “Faith, Hope, Light” and “Mercy” appear in Trump’s Word Cloud.

What’re YOUR fighting words?