Lately I’ve been noticing how many English words are portmanteaus – that is, words created by joining parts of two other words. You know, like “brunch,” which is a smooshing together of breakfast and lunch, or “blog,” which was created from “web” and “log.” There’s a lot of this in America: We get “sporks” at fast-food joints, and we go home to sit next to our “labradoodle” and multi-task by browsing our “email” while watching a “sitcom” or a “romcom” or maybe a “bromance.”
There: nine portmanteaus in that last sentence, all familiar. I like to think of the name of the current President of the United States as a portmanteau – that “Trump” is a mash-up of “truth” and “dump,” because the man in the Oval Office consistently dumps the truth, or showjumps over it. That’s silly, I guess; linguists figure the name “Trump” came from the German “drumpf,” which translates as “drum.” The president certainly beats his.
And what a path of destruction he is pounding out: The careless dismembering of government’s tasks here at home and the retreat from America’s commitments abroad. The attacks on constitutionally-guaranteed free speech by imprisoning a legal immigrant for organizing political demonstrations, and by punishing journalists who don’t use the words he prefers. The hatred he stokes by claiming that the miniscule number of Americans whose gender identity is unclear pose a threat — to what, exactly, is entirely unclear. The peril to all our health with an addled science skeptic overseeing the nation’s health policy. The millions of lives put at risk, and more in generations yet unborn, by the gutting of environmental protections and the retreat from the fight to limit climate change.
But back to the portmanteaus, which came to mind when I came across a thought expressed by the Greek philosopher Plutarch – whose name has always seemed to me to be a portmanteau, and an unfortunate one. “Plutarch” sounds like a melding of “plutocrat” and “oligarch,” both of which we’ve kicked around a bit lately: a plutocracy being a government run by a wealthy minority; an oligarchy a government in the hands of a privileged few.
That may strike you as familiar just now, in the era of Donald Trump and his designated hitter, Elon Musk, billionaires both. Our Congress has yielded its power entirely to their whims, the courts are moving slowly, and the wealthiest Americans have given Trump control of a half-billion dollars in a campaign cache to power the MAGA movement forward even after he is gone. With billionaires in command of the levers of government, we’re ruled by both a plutocracy and an oligarchy; that is, American plutocrats have become our oligarchs. To put it in single syllables: The rich folks are in charge.
But Plutarch – he whose very name seems to be a contemporary slander – wrote about this sort of thing in the first century. Plutarch’s work focused mainly on the influence of character on societies, both good and bad. And in one of his major works, he wrote about the value of perseverance. He suggested that keeping at the task at hand could overcome even the more harsh tactics that the powerful used. Get this, from Plutarch:
“Perseverance is more prevailing than violence,” he wrote, “and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.”
That sounds right to me. The onslaught of many offenses being committed by Trump cannot be met with a single countervailing force; we can’t be waiting for some great leader to emerge as the champion of democracy, one who will take on every bad thing being done by Trump. But consider instead the power of many who refuse to yield. This notion advanced 20 centuries ago by Plutarch is that we might prevail if we move with perseverance, a bit at a time, each of us doing what we can to counter what is clearly a violent assault on our democracy.
Each of us surely has a little place we can find that enables us to be subversive in the face of the power arrayed against us. It may be in supporting our local library, volunteering to help a public broadcaster, speaking up for a threatened university, reading to children in a literacy program, or working for a political candidate. We can donate to a food bank, write letters to the editor, speak up on social media. And to sustain ourselves in these hard days, we can embrace spirit-lifting artistic endeavors that will surely lose public funding — music, theater, visual arts and dance — and volunteer to help human-services groups that are likely on the budget chopping block.
If you’ll permit me just a couple more portmanteaus: You don’t have to be a “brainiac,” or have a “ginormous” pot of money. A little bit at a time, folks – with perseverance, as Plutarch urged. We can do this.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.