Inaugurious

Cosmopolitanism and Nativism in the MAGA Civil War

1.

Living, as I do, in a perpetual La Manche of the mind, a liminal linguistic zone shaped by the tridirectional mishearings of Norman French, Anglo-Saxon, and the various Celtic idioms, I often find myself wondering whether a given word exists in my native English or not. Once I determine that it does not, I next ask myself whether it could have existed, whether the legacy of 1066 might, some centuries later, have caused those keen coiners Thomas Browne or Ralph Cudworth, for example, to write on at least one occasion such a word as “inaugurious”, as on other occasions they might have found it fitting to write “distractious” when their concentration was broken by something, or, when they grew tired, that they were “fatigated”. Neither of these men ever wrote “inaugurious”, as I briefly hoped they might have — but if they had, with the intention of making it mean “not auguring well”, it would have been another beautiful case, of the sort we see most plainly in a word like “impregnable”, of the superposition of two opposite meanings in that humble prefix in-: where to “inaugurate” something is generally understood as bringing that thing into good augury, but can also play the part of what in Greek-rooted words is performed by the so-called alpha-privative — marking something out as lacking in good augury, as wanting of all hope, as, for example, a “most inaugurious inauguration”, such as the one scheduled for January 20.

2.

Here is a memory, likely between 40% and 60% constructed, but real to me nonetheless. (If anyone reading is close to this story, still alive, and disputes its main claims, please let me know — Patti, baby, it’s been too long!). I’m sitting in a condo on P Street in Sacramento. My dad’s girlfriend’s son’s girlfriend is there with me. She’s a runaway of sorts, and I’m a chronic truant from my high school, and both of us use my father’s sleek downtown divorce pad as a sort of hide-out. We watch all the soaps together: Days of Our Lives, As the World Turns, General Hospital, Guiding Light, one after the other, all damned day. I had brought her some McDonald’s earlier, but she is complaining that McDonald’s straws are too wide in diameter to be of much use for snorting cocaine, and is begging me to go to Taco Bell to fix the problem. I tell her maybe, but not until after our daily fix of Luke and Laura. There is a dog there with us too, and it keeps growling at me. This is making me very uneasy.

The dog, you see, had been found not long before on the streets of DC, and had been taken, by our then-president’s daughter and son-in-law, for a visit to the White House. The dog was of an unusually gentle nature, especially for a previously unsheltered adoptee, and the only time it had been known to growl previously was a few weeks before, when the secret service, having heard some commotion in the Lincoln Bedroom, rushed in and discovered the dog, so the tabloids reported at the time, barking furiously at what appeared to be a spectral apparition of Honest Abe himself. Maureen Reagan and her husband Dennis retrieved their new pet soon enough, and brought it back to Sacramento, where they lived next-door to my dad in the P Street condos. When Dennis asked me to dog-sit, I was assured that his dog was just as gentle as they come, and so far, if the National Enquirer is to be believed, had only been known to growl at ghosts of dead presidents.

So what was that mongrel seeing in me?