Once Upon a Time in Anagrams

And it came to pass that the phrase on everyone’s mind was:

✦ “Make America Great Again”

Contrary Gary couldn’t help but notice –  or resist pointing out  –  that the letters of this slogan rearrange to spell:

✦ “I am a gang; I am a racketeer”

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We might have paid heed had we realized in time that the related claim:

✦ “I alone can fix it”

also is an anagram, consisting as it does of letters that rearrange to spell:

✦ “toxic, inane fail”

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This might be a good time to mention that I don’t “create” anagrams. Either certain letters rearrange in certain ways, or they don’t. We may or may not discover those sequences, but they exist (or not) regardless.

For example, the letters in “Gary Leland Matthews” do not rearrange to spell “Nobel Peace Prize Winner”. I might wish they did, but they never can or will. Not even if I’m someday awarded that very prize.

But those letters of my full name do spell out “mangy swellhead tart”, “a thwarted, smelly nag”, “that man rages lewdly”, and a host of other unflattering descriptions. Would I prefer they didn’t? Probably, but there’s not a darn thing I can do to change the fact.

Speaking of facts:

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There came a time when the phrase on everyone’s lips was:

✦ “alternative facts”

Well, as I just indicated, facts are facts: They don’t come with alternatives. It thus became my task to concede that the letters in “alternative facts” rearrange to spell:

✦ “attractive ‘n’ false”
✦ “fatter, vacant lies”
✦ “vital fatcat sneer”

and other related ideas, as outlined in this blog post.

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Time marching on, “alternative facts” gave way to a new phrase-of-the-day:

✦ “a very stable genius”

Poking through their permutations, I realized these same letters also spell:

✦ “. . . but – senile savagery!”
✦ “vague yet brainless”
✦ “angry, elusive beast”

plus even more. It seemed my civic duty to report those findings, as I did here.

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Somewhen along the way, we learned how the winning campaign had met with Russian spies in a futile effort to get dirt on its opposition. When that went nowhere, and word leaked, Daddy put out this explanation:

✦ “The meeting was about Russian adoptions”

Juggling these letters, one inevitably finds (as I did) that they reshuffle into:

✦ “SOS! A huge, spontaneous, dimwitted narcissist”

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Four years into this mess, and Contrary Gary had neither mentioned any names, nor expressed any political opinions. He simply registered certain indisputable facts about words, the letters those words contain, and what one can and can’t do with those letters.

There came a day, however, after all the wars were waged, all the campaigns fought, all the races run, all the votes counted, recounted, and certified. I then felt obliged to reveal two last anagrams I had discovered, more than a year earlier. (Again, I don’t create these  –  they already existed “out there” in the finite universe of available letter-combinations.)

Here they are. As referenced in another recent blog post, the letters in:

✦ “Trump administration”

rearrange to spell:

✦ “an idiot’s prim tantrum”

as well as

✦ “Damn! I’m Putin’s traitor”

Full circle: When this anagram cascade started in 2016, it opened  –  as noted above  –  with the words “I am a gang…” Little could we then have imagined the MAGA gang that smashed through the U.S. Capitol Building on 6 January 2021 to support an outgoing “law-and-order” regime. A gang that showed this support by killing and maiming police officers (along with its own members), planting pipe bombs, stealing sensitive electronics for sale to Russia, erecting nooses and gallows for elected officials, and so much more.

Sometimes it’s fun to mine current events for anagrams. Sometimes it’s tiring, even scary. Going forward, let’s hope the fun predominates once more!