09-08-2018, 05:50 AM
"I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him!"
(Technically the Romans in pagan times burned their dead and did not bury them, but that was Shakespeare and not Plutarch putting words into the mouth of Mark Antony) .
As they prepared to bury John McCain, the politicians elevated his myth as a bipartisan maverick. He was a very standard politician, not at all liberal. But he had trouble with Trump. Could it be that Trump reminded him of his captors in North Vietnam and perhaps the occasional KGB 'consultant'?
Shakespeare is part of the American heritage. He may have been British, but our political tradition is originally British. When we replaced a King with a President and a Parliament with Congress we fully became American in our politics. But with his rejection of political tradition through demagoguery that would put William Jennings Bryant to shame, followed by his adoption od dictatorial or despotic style, Donald Trump has rebelled against a benign and necessary tradition. He acts like those who win a freaky election in other countries and says of the opposition "We won -- you're done!"
Liberals can do only so much to break the influence of Trump. It is now up to conservatives as upholders of tradition. Maybe liberals must affect, or better adopt, conservative style. Obama may have been ahead of the curve on that, and maybe that scared the Right more than anything else. But those traditions do not imply unlimited indulgence. Even something so basic as good taste implies restraint. Just think of my thread on dictatorial taste, where I lampooned the affectations of grandeur of such horrid people as Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Ferdinand Marcos, Victor Yanukovich, Moammar Qaddafi, and Hermann Goering. It's not power; the White House and 19 Downing Street are simply too bourgeois for such opulence. For similar taste and morals I added such drug lords as Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder. Donald Trump has expressed himself outside of the Presidency in a similar manner.
A hint: the Rockefeller family is comparatively austere in its affectations, and was so even when John Davison Rockefeller II was nouveau-riche. Maybe creating wealth instead of stealing it, or serving Humanity instead of grafting from it is inconsistent with delusions of grandeur.
....We can no longer have Barack Obama as President, but we have him as President Emeritus, and that can be a source of influence. The role of Donald Trump may be to show us how not to lead in a Crisis Era.
(Technically the Romans in pagan times burned their dead and did not bury them, but that was Shakespeare and not Plutarch putting words into the mouth of Mark Antony) .
As they prepared to bury John McCain, the politicians elevated his myth as a bipartisan maverick. He was a very standard politician, not at all liberal. But he had trouble with Trump. Could it be that Trump reminded him of his captors in North Vietnam and perhaps the occasional KGB 'consultant'?
Shakespeare is part of the American heritage. He may have been British, but our political tradition is originally British. When we replaced a King with a President and a Parliament with Congress we fully became American in our politics. But with his rejection of political tradition through demagoguery that would put William Jennings Bryant to shame, followed by his adoption od dictatorial or despotic style, Donald Trump has rebelled against a benign and necessary tradition. He acts like those who win a freaky election in other countries and says of the opposition "We won -- you're done!"
Liberals can do only so much to break the influence of Trump. It is now up to conservatives as upholders of tradition. Maybe liberals must affect, or better adopt, conservative style. Obama may have been ahead of the curve on that, and maybe that scared the Right more than anything else. But those traditions do not imply unlimited indulgence. Even something so basic as good taste implies restraint. Just think of my thread on dictatorial taste, where I lampooned the affectations of grandeur of such horrid people as Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Ferdinand Marcos, Victor Yanukovich, Moammar Qaddafi, and Hermann Goering. It's not power; the White House and 19 Downing Street are simply too bourgeois for such opulence. For similar taste and morals I added such drug lords as Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder. Donald Trump has expressed himself outside of the Presidency in a similar manner.
A hint: the Rockefeller family is comparatively austere in its affectations, and was so even when John Davison Rockefeller II was nouveau-riche. Maybe creating wealth instead of stealing it, or serving Humanity instead of grafting from it is inconsistent with delusions of grandeur.
....We can no longer have Barack Obama as President, but we have him as President Emeritus, and that can be a source of influence. The role of Donald Trump may be to show us how not to lead in a Crisis Era.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.