Blathering about the birds and the bacon (and commies, too)

An increasingly unhinged candidate flays his foe and wallows in vulgarity

No, wind turbines do not put this at risk. (Photo by James Trenda on Unsplash)

---

Probably I’m one of the last people who ought to be offering career advice, seeing how things went during my 40-plus years in journalism. In fact, 77 percent of newspaper jobs that existed in 2000 have now been lost. As someone whose work until recent years mainly reached people through ink on crushed trees, I’m right up there on the lost cause list, along with pin-setters, lamp-lighters and slubber doffers — the latter being people who removed empty bobbins from looms in textile mills. You slubber doffers, if you can hear me, I feel your pain.¹

But I’m here to tell you that the surest bet for finding a job in 2024 is to move to the Dakotas, where I grew up — mine was South (The Better) Dakota — and get trained as a wind turbine service technician. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that’s the hottest job in the country, with 60 percent growth projected between 2023 and 2033. The Dakotas have by far the most wind energy-related jobs per capita in the country, and since wind energy is growing, the jobs are going to be there for years to come.²

Somebody should tell that to Donald Trump, because he’s still ranting about wind power. He doesn’t like it, apparently since it doesn’t require drilling or digging, the main techniques of energy production back when he was born — which, by the way, was during the Truman administration. Or maybe we should take him at his word — some gullible people still do — and assume that he doesn’t like wind power because turbines kill birds. “You want to see a bird cemetery, go under a windmill sometime,” he told Fox News earlier this year. Trump has been fretting about collisions between birds and blades for years.³

But this week Trump took a new tack, linking wind energy to an assault on bacon. At least, I think that’s what he said. It’s a bit hard to tell what he meant, because, if you ask me, Donald Trump is showing the sort of cognitive decline that prompted Democrats to push Joe Biden off their ticket this summer.

Mind you, I’m just a journalist, as I was saying, not a cognitive scientist — which, by the way, is a field growing at double the rate of other jobs. So you’ll probably want to trust your own judgment, rather than mine, when it comes to Trump’s mental acuity. So draw your own conclusions from what happened.

At a campaign event in LaCrosse, a pleasant Wisconsin city with a fine auto museum, Trump was asked by a young supporter to describe his plan “to make life more affordable and bring down inflation.” To describe that question as a “softball” would malign a fine sport that was unfairly banished from the Paris Olympics — but let’s not get into that just yet. Let’s instead consider Trump’s answer to the inflation question:

“You take a look at bacon, and some of these products, and some people don’t eat bacon anymore,” he said. “And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know — this was caused by their horrible energy. Wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”⁴

Do we have a little problem, indeed? I believe Trump just had one of his mental lapses, and that he was probably trying to say that Democrats are to blame for food price inflation, which occurred because wind energy is more expensive than oil. But even being so charitable, I figure that couldn’t be his point, because it’s not true: Renewable energy has cut fuel bills in this century by $520 billion, according to a 2022 study by the International Renewable Energy Agency.⁵

While we’re fact-checking, we also ought to note this in reference to Trump’s claim that wind turbines are big bird-slayers: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that wind turbines do, in fact, kill between 140,000 and 500,000 birds each year. While that saddens those of us who love birds, we also should acknowledge that domesticated cats kill perhaps 4 billion birds, that buildings (and their windows) kill nearly a billion, and that motorists kill 214 million birds a year.

If you want to blame bird deaths on wind energy, then, you might as well blame golf for Donald Trump’s marriage infidelity: Yes, he met Stormy Daniels in a tee box at a golf tournament, but golf is obviously ancillary to the issue, not causative.

So Americans shouldn’t worry too much about the peril to birds and bacon from wind power. Rather, they should worry that one party’s presidential nominee is increasingly being revealed as a blithering fool. Does anybody think it’s a stretch to suggest that Joe Biden isn’t the only candidate who might have passed the sell-by date for a presidential race?

Inspiring rhetorical skill isn’t a job requirement in politics; if it were, most of the Congress would be in another line of work. Voters will tell you that results are more important than words in those we choose to lead us. But what politicians say, even if their phrases are constructed by smart speechwriters and tested in focus groups, gives us a clue of what direction they’re going to go. And political speech affects how society views the issue at hand. Words matter in politics.

Language is a key to why opinion polls both nationally and in key swing states have swung to Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the weeks since Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. It’s not just the image of Harris that is drawing support; it’s that voters are eager to hear something new.

Both Biden and Trump speak the language of the past. They’re contemporaries, born in the 1940s and coming of age in the early 1960s. Harris is a couple of decades younger, and thus not so prone to seeing the world through the lens of the Cold War and reflecting its impulses in what she says.

Take, for instance, the insult lines that Trump has been market testing as he has struggled to adjust to an opponent so different from his focus for the past half-dozen years. He has called Harris “dumb as a rock” and “real garbage,” as well as “nasty,” a description he has applied to many women. After trying “Laughin’ Kamala” and calling her a “lunatic,” and after boasting that he is “much better-looking than her,” Trump trotted out “Commie Kamala,” settling on something that in his youth was a well-used and potent political attack label from the far right.⁶

But communism collapsed in Europe 33 years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics splintered into 15 separate states. Certainly Vladimir Putin’s Russia is no free state, but it’s also not a place where the government controls all commerce in the name of the working class. Political scientists generally conclude that there are four communist nations now — China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos.⁷

But the fear of communists infiltrating government, which was imbued in youngsters like little Donald Trump in the 1950s, sounds to most Americans these days like a throwback to another era. Trump advisers doubtless cringe at a lot of what their candidate blurts out, but hurling the “commie” label can only reinforce the notion that Trump is seeing a world that’s long gone.

Maybe sensing that the label isn’t playing as well as he hoped, Trump this week squatted more fully in the gutter. On social media, he posted memes blatantly suggesting that Harris’s success in politics — that is, her election as a District Attorney, state Attorney General, U.S. Senator and Vice President — had something to do with oral sex.

If the claim that his opponent is secretly a communist identifies Trump as a child of the 1950s, then the implication that a woman could succeed in politics only by sexually charming a man clarifies that he’s a misogynist — which should horrify anybody with a daughter, sister, wife or mother. The former insult marks Trump as a throwback, the latter as a troglodyte.

Which brings us to a point of contrast. Kamala Harris won’t say anything like that about Donald Trump. In her CNN interview this week with Dana Bash, Harris turned away from a chance to slap back at another of Trump’s insults — that she had “turned Black” at some point in her life. “Same old, tired playbook,” she said. Then, resolutely, “Next question, please.”⁸

That moment of firmness was clarifying. It’s not that a journalist would be satisfied with every response Harris gave in the CNN interview; she evaded answering some questions and offered vague replies in several instances, which invites further exploration in future encounters with the media. But she didn’t make you wonder about her mental capacity or her knowledge of the issues at hand, and she didn’t raise questions about her moral character or, indeed, her fundamental human decency.

She’s living in the present and ready for the future, which is not at all what you can say about the guy who considers windmills a threat to birds and bacon. He’s as much a relic as the slubber doffers, and likewise deserving only of a place in the past.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/12/news-reporters-journalism-jobs-census/

2. https://www.axios.com/2024/08/30/us-jobs-fastest-growing-wind-energy?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2024/08/27/trump-will-hate-this-tech-wind-turbines-that-dont-kill-birds/

4. https://www.c-span.org/video/?537984-1/president-trump-holds-town-hall-la-crosse-wisconsin

5. https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2023/Aug/Renewables-Competitiveness-Accelerates-Despite-Cost-Inflation

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/us/politics/trump-crass-imagery.html

7. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/communist-countries

8. https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/29/politics/key-lines-harris-interview-what-matters/index.html

---

---

NOW, LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS

If you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live class Rex co-teaches that is offered by The Memoir Project. Click below for information. Our next class is coming up on Thursday, Sept. 5, at 5 p.m. Eastern. Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too. 

---

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH