In Extremis

In 1935 in It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis warned us that democracy in extremis is indeed susceptible to tyranny and that tyranny will seep into our culture as a salvation led by one of us.

Maybe Nihilism Explains It?

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

Vladimir: I'm beginning to come round to that conclusion.

                      (Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett)

"I believed in nothin' since the day I was born."  Manley Pointer (Bible salesman) to

Hulga Hopewell (PhD. in philosophy)

    ("Good Country People,"  Flannery O'Connor)

"So Teddy, what's all this I hear about being and non-being?"  Max, the irascible father menacingly to Teddy, his son, a philosophy professor.

                      ("The Homecoming," Harold Pinter)

The following is prologue.  Please bear with me.

Having taught literature and drama for 43 years, I learned that literature probably doesn't yield much that can inform us about how to have a successful and satisfying life...or for that matter whether to live at all.  But I did learn that literature and drama give us fascinating collections of perspectives on what being human can do for us and to us.  Much of the literature from the beginning of the 20th century involved the exposition of nihilism as an ultimate human experience, deepening and widening the depictions of frustrations and despair into our times.

My understanding of nihilism as a moral concept or way of perceiving human experience suggests that human life, as a journey, has no intrinsic or extrinsic absolute or overriding meaning or value.  All human efforts to construct meaning, that is, to give meaning to what is perceived and experienced, are vain and, in the case of many plays and stories, pathetically comical.  By the way, if a person perceives these experiences as tragic rather than comical, that perception is that person's construction or "reality."  In other words, perception is reality, but that reality is not an a priori truth.  In a world of nihilism, all so-called truths are vain constructions, which attempt to give meaning to facts and result in delusional and illusory living.  That is to say, what one perceives as reality is a projection of what one is or thinks one is.

Generally, nihilism in the arts (such as in the schools of Dada and Surrealism) demonstrates the absurdity of life once the constructed overlays of meaning, those we impose to create meaning, are stripped away.  The artist (whether literary, visual or auditory) places the parts or particles of the perceived, constructed world into a deconstructed, unintelligible mass. The experience, then,  feels much like a dream or a nightmare, a patchwork of non-meaning.   (This is especially true in the non-verbal arts—music, painting and sculpture.  The verbal arts display the absurdity of the assurance of language.) The Bible salesman believes in nothing, Estrogon and Vladimir struggle to use language to construct a meaning for their treadmill life, and Max mocks his son's meaningless pursuit of meaning.

                        ************************************

I offer this post as a way of thinking about our current experience with the political process and its implications as a nihilistic experience that we in the United States are enduring.  As some commentators have suggested (most recently Roger Cohen), we have experienced times like these in our more stumbling developments as a society.  Of all the attempts to fathom whatever Donald Trump is and/or will be, I have not read or heard anyone suggest specifically what his ersatz style and appeal tell us about the society we Americans live in.  I read recently a piece about why debating or criticizing Trump is so difficult.  Because he represents no substance and because he has no apparent or consistent core of thought or belief and because his language offers pap and empty generalities, we cannot get a hold on him.  As Gertrude Stein said, "There is no there there."  This is the importance of his reality TV persona.  His followers want and need to believe in the constructed parts of that persona.  They seek the feeling of that persona, and don’t want to know anything beyond that, beyond the performance that generates that feeling.  The supporters typically say Trump “tells it like it is” because that "reality" of puff words and trigger images is something that they can believe in, because it overlays the actual dread and fears in their lives.

Trump's followers don't think or want to hear about nihilism; they feel nihilism.  But like so many of us, they seek a way out from that, a promise no matter how general, how vague, and they don't want to listen to any deniers, any facts...that is to say, they don't want to know.  Despite all that some of us have, many of us have an emptiness (witness the epidemics of opioid addiction and suicides).  As Trump's critics attempt to reach into what Trump is or thinks, they find nothing.  And how are they to articulate anything about nothing?  Trump is all surface couched in empty language like "tremendous," "great," "fantastic," “amazing,” “you wouldn’t believe” and so forth.  The closest his language gets to concreteness is in the repetition of such images as his "walls" and "Mexicans" shibboleths.  And because his language doesn't communicate, he never has to defend anything he says.  He says any of his statements are “suggestions”, yes, except when they are not, or when he needs the statement to be part of the persona to believe in.  And that’s the key.  Trump purposely wants not to be understood; he wants to be felt.

We are possibly on the cusp of cultural nihilism.  There's more to Trump's popularity and irritation than electoral politics—more to our fixation, whether positive or negative.  He is the itch we cannot scratch.  He is who we might possibly be, but we feel uncertain and anxious about what that might suggest.  He fascinates even his detractors, the same way we cannot resist the urge to look at a traffic accident as we pass.   Cultural nihilism, in fact, can get very real.  The 20th century experienced it on a global scale.

Trump's life is full of facades: the gauche casinos, the gold everywhere, the nameplates everywhere, the products that represent only his name.  He is all hyperbole, except that even hyperbole must have an antecedent, and Trump is an empty sui generis.  All this implies that much of the emptiness and façade, all that constructs the Trump persona tells much more about our society and culture than about Trump.  Our society and culture provided the petrie dish from which Trump sprang.  

My hope is that the apparent mood of acquiescence in Congress and elsewhere institutionally is not a harbinger of what occurred in Europe and the U.S. shortly after World War I, an explosion of nihilistic cultural manifestations.  Given our current status of anomie and dissociation, the consequences could be far more disruptive and destructive.  Nihilism can look and feel like an absurd joke, but it's not really funny.   Trump is not the clown we had hoped he would be; he’s the mysterious stranger, the Bible salesman, the man behind the curtain, the delusional father.

The Same, Simple

“We don’t want to believe what we know.”     Yann Arthos-Bertrand

I want each day to be the

            Same, simple,

No surprising, No spontaneous me,

Raweno, no, no, no more, Walt.

I can’t see past the needling pain

            Anyway, no way,

Each day, some a little more numb,

Some not, whatever.

Takes five tries to button something

Sometimes, but always shirts,

Velcro flapped sneakers in top

            Five on my shopping list.

Don’t need a plot device now, that’s

            Passed, just lasting

Is enough, it seems, I mean,

            Really, at this age?

All gold-plated goals, crumbled

            To rust and dust,

All people ties and smiles to

            Reap company,

All plastic manners and fans

            And mini-steps,

End in the same mornings’

            Struggles just to move.

So how do we put a smile

            On these days?

You know, what the hopeful preach

Profanely, insipidly, endlessly.

At least look back at all

            The lives you touched,

They say, with just the slightest

            Wink and sneer.

That’s not same, simple, is it?

            (see above)

That’s a road better not taken

            Still, yes, still.

But recall seeps in mostly

            To wonder too,

To wanly pose the question

            What if only…

What if only he had, (that he

            Yes, he back then)

What if he had chosen his want,

            And not his hav-tas,

His dreaming, seaming, maybe

            And not the world?

So you see, even when you know

            You shouldn’t,
You see this is what becomes

            Of thinking,

Of making same and simple

            More and “better”

Of self-absorbed conjuring over

            The loss of time.

And, of course, that’s all

            It is.

In Front of The Mirror: A Trump Re-Set

It's time for a Trump re-set, a cultural and societal look into the mirror.  Let's begin with the givens.  Trump is a puffed-up, bloviating, crass and brash media whore, billionaire asshole who has turned our national politics into a Barnumesque showpiece that expresses the kind of honesty that the political elite sneer at as disgustingly déclassé.  I say honesty, because the rest of our so-called choices to be the voice of our so-called democratic "experiment" are prima facie liars (Cruz, even before Trump gave him the appellation) or very practiced and very stealthy dissemblers  (Hillary Clinton, all the time everywhere).

And why do so many people like Trump?  He is  true-blue American, as much and more than Jeremiah Dickson (more so especially than Delmore Schwartz could possibly have imagined).  In fact Trump embodies the very chest pounding, can-do attitude that we most admire.  And his lofty self-aggrandizing position in our society represents what many among us—perhaps most—aspire to.

Remember:  We're looking in the mirror, all by ourselves, honesty time.

Did I say "asshole?"  Can we seriously elect an asshole for our president.  Why not?  We've done it in the past.  Did it twice in the 1920s—Harding and Coolidge.  And we should all be relieved (but we won't be, because we don't know enough about him) that Andrew Jackson, not only an asshole but a philandering, murderous asshole, will be off the $20 bill.  And of course, Tyler and Buchanan fit the mold, as well as many more.  In some sense I think asshole is almost a prerequisite.  

As for Trump's spurious ways to wealth and the ethics implicit in his "art" of the deal, think of other wealthy people, who awe so many of us.  The names Walton, Broad, Gates, Adelson, Koch and so on represent the pantheon of what we hold most dear.  In fact, if it were not for these people we most likely would not have this kind of two-party faux electoral process.  And that is just exactly the way we seem to want it.  If we don't—remember the mirror here—then why is it so much a part of our societal DNA?  If we don't think the money machine is the best/better way, then why do we so eagerly support it?

I truly don't think we need to be headed for the same old lesser-of-two-evils elections.  As I'm suggesting, I don't think Trump represents the worst parts of us.  I think he simply, well perhaps, vaingloriously, represents us.  From his bleached, duck-tailed, plastered hair to his overly long necktie, from his reality TV personality to his pretentious policy vamps, he is the image of what, I think, Crevecoeur foresaw of how the American democrat, the new world person would evolve, rough-edged and what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

Perhaps all of this is too much for us to accept.  Perhaps we feel we have evolved to a better sort of community.  But I look around, and I read and listen, and so much of what happens is what Trump is and what he promises.  Please, remember the mirror.

No, Bernie, We Don't Like Revolutions

And we never have.  We don't want to change what was promised to us.  We don't want to lose our belief in having more than we need.  We still want to have it all.  That's the way we are.  Basically, unconscionable.  A little like children—fearful, envious, dreamy, and trip-wiry angered.

I'm an old man, a little like you, so I wanted to believe one last time in the pursuit of doing the right thing.  And that's why I sent some cash your way.  That was in the early moments of your campaign's illusory days.  We're both veterans of the halcyon 60s and carry the baggage of those illusions.  That also means we have a large capacity to forget to remember.  We forgot big time that the last visionary in the Oval Office got killed before he could begin to realize his visions.  Barack and Hillary got that message bold-faced.  Your stumble regarding the subway "token" was a symbol of that dreamy forgetfulness.

Oh, about those youth brigades that have stuffed your rallies but not  the ballot slots, you might recall the "power" of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.  You might want to do some research among your vocalizing dreamers: Ask them which among the various toys they rely on to distract them from the dreariness of their various plights they would be willing to sacrifice for the sake of some of the specifics in your proposed revolution.  Plus ca change, plus etc. etc.  I have conversations with several young people ages 25-35, and at bottom they are as pragmatic and as cynical as most of us.  What they like, as we did in the 60s, is the thrill of the spirit of revolution, not the specifics.  That's why they don't bother with the specifics of your policies.

By the way, that same exalting is behind Mr. Trump's success (have you noticed that since he's donned a more acceptable demeanor the info media granted him that Mr honorific?).  The biggest difference between Mr. Trump and you is that he understands the hoi polloi; he's been exploiting them his entire career.  You want them to rise to the level of your expectations.  Even if they wanted to, I don't think they would understand the concept, because it's not an immediate phenomenon.  They seem not to have rising expectations.  They prefer immediate phenomena.

So here we are.  Two old guys contemplating the inevitable.  Most likely, you and I will slide back into the routines that consume the time of our days.  I will continue to try to understand why my fellow citizens can't see and hear what's right in front of them, and I suspect that's how you'll feel working the vineyards of DC.  You mustered a valiant effort.  In fact,  I marvel at your energy over these recent weeks.  I know I could never have done that.  

And I thank you for doing what you did.  Your greatest contribution to the country was to awaken all of us to how trifling we have become, how little concern we have for the institutions that made us what we once were and how blindly most of us move in our meandering towards a future that has so little actual promise. 

Some of us might even look back and say, "Yes, that was a brief period of responsibility...and we squandered it."

What Will They Get After They Get It All?

I had heard about "dark money," sure, but I lacked the temerity to discover what it actually referred to. I suspected, because of the names and groups associated with it, that it would not be good for my country.  But so many things these days are not good for my country that I simply added it to the list. Then today, I finally had the time and courage to find out.  And I guess I wish I hadn't.  A wave of despondency washed over me.

I'm not naive.  I've known for some time who and what controls the U.S., but I always assumed that those people and entities felt they needed the U.S. to be a viable country, if for no other reason than that they needed the place to remain healthy enough for them to exploit according to their whims and avarice.  But as I thought about how this dark money uses and abuses our institutions, apparently with the full force and enabling of those who are supposed to keep us a healthy country, the more I thought that dark money has no such concerns.  Dark money cares about two things: Unbridled money, and the power that the money exerts.

All of this has emerged in the immediate context of the current political circus.  And, as some pundits have observed, both the Sanders and the Trump campaigns have serendipitously shown the spotlight on what many of us have been sleeping through.  Examples abound.  Yes, the 90% really are getting screwed.  Yes, our electoral process has nothing to do with one-person-one-vote.  Yes, the two parties exist solely to keep the two parties in business.  And here's the stealth reality beneath the circus—the reason you don't hear anything from the Koch brothers and their networked co-pirates is that they don't care who sits in the Oveal Office; they know Congress and the Supreme Court will do their bidding.  Thus, we don't even have an ineffectual republic anymore.  What we have is a prima facie criminal enterprise with law enforcement operating at the behest of the criminals.

Well, yes, I can hear the howls of the moderates who still must believe that this is a gross exaggeration and barking into the wind.  In fact, I understand the futility of this kind of focusing on the obvious and accepting how it will be ignored.  So be it.

But consider this.  As those who control this country rabidly continue their avarice, where will it end?  If they have no concern for the country, per se, it follows that they will drain it of its natural and human resources, a la a sort of Grand Disruption and move on to the next place to be exploited and despoiled.  These people don't care about this country.  Most of them have the bulk of their bilked money bags carefully hidden in various other countries.  America has always been considered as the exploitation capital of the world (even and especially before the first settlers arrived).

So, looking at all this mess, what can we expect to happen down the road?  We've had some pretty hefty rebellions in our brief history (American "Revolution", Civil War, etc.), but they were able to be quashed by promises of better things and the hope implicit in the integrity of The Union of the people wrapped in the wholeness of the City On The Hill.  That's all now being placed in severe doubt.  You can hear it in the young voices at the Sanders rallies and the angry voices at the Trump rallies.  This is a shout out and call out regarding the darkness beginning to shroud their lives and the futility that they know in their bones can never do something about those who actually control their lives.

And the dark money doesn't give these voices a nano second of thought.  They don't need to.  But I have a question for those holding the bags of dark money:  What do they think they'll get after they get it all?  They can't build enough jails for the 90%.  They've made guns and bazookas available to the 90%.  They're making basic living untenable for the 90%.  What do they think they'll get, and how long do they think they'll keep it?