Life in the Trumpocracy

Here is this guy who berates people like Megyn Kelly (although there have been rumors of a rapprochement, "Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly met at Trump Tower to 'clear the air,'" CNN, 4/13/16))  and says all this shit, but how does he behave when when he comes home from work? Last Tuesday night CNN’s Anderson Cooper attempted to find out what Trump was like at home and the picture painted by his two sons Donald Jr., Eric, his daughters Tiffany and Ivanka and his five language speaking wife Melania was that of a teddy bear ("Donald Trump: 'rules stacked against me,'" CNNPolitics.com, 4/13/16). If nothing else Trump’s children take the award for self-possession and articulateness outpointing Chelsea Clinton, any of the Kennedys, Eisenhower, Nixon or Reagan offspring. And even as they talked and Trump looked on beatifically, apparently tamed by this new  trump card, you couldn’t help eating it up. Here is what DT wrought…this is the real Trump…he will make America great like his family…everyone will be good-looking educated and well-spoken. If you are "good," he will even adopt you and take you under his big wing. One blot on the seemingly idyllic portrait of the Trump family (Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry is Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit) was the death from alcoholism of his older brother Freddy ("Donald Trump Opens Up About His Brother's Death From Alcoholism: It had a 'Profound Impact on My Life,'" People 10/8/15) Freddy was 42 when he died in l981 and Trump said he never took a drink ("I've never had a glass of alcohol and yet I own the largest winery in the East Coast, it's a crazy thing, but that's okay," Trump said during the CNN get together with his family) and apparently impressed the dangers of drinking and drugs on his children as they grew up. It’s hard to figure out what to say. Not only is the family totally delightful, charming and candid, but they listen to dad when it comes to alcohol and drugs. How is one to process the picture painted on CNN? Will we all have inadvertently landed in Utopia, bypassing Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state, if and when The Donald becomes president? Will there be places for everyone in all of his families and companies and happy solutions to all our problems as long as we work hard, don’t take "no" for an answer and say "no" to alcohol and drugs? "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," Dr. Pangloss says in Candide. Voltaire was parodying Leibniz, but the satire could easily be applied to the all encompassing vision of a Trumpocracy

Panglossian it Over

San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 (photo: H.D. Chadwick)

Have you ever been around the kind of person who has something disgustingly positive to say about everything? There are people who lose the ability to feel pain. It’s actually a serious condition since however nice it might be eliminate the nerve receptors that are sensitive to discomfort, we would also be deprived of one of nature’s warning systems. On the psychic level the same came be said of depression. Pharmaceutical companies make huge amounts of money producing anti-depressants that sometimes provide a dubious service. Numb and Number could be yet another sequel to Dumb and Dumber. But let’s go back to the juggernaut of positive emotions expressed by our hypothetical obnoxious acquaintance. Imagine him or her getting kidnapped by terrorists and attempting to explain the good side of being held incommunicado in a coffin sized box for days. Imagine the self same person being mistakenly detained, undergoing “extraordinarily rendition" and trying to express their excitement about being waterboarded or the glamour of getting maced. Imagine someone describing the joys of a head-on car crash, a mugging or a mountain climbing accident. As far flung as it may seem, you have undoubtedly encountered people who display this kind of disconnect. Their iterations of human existence display a homogeneity and are always recounted in the same sing songy tones. “Daddy was so happy to see all of us, before he finally croaked,” “Bob seems perfectly OK about the loss of his job, his wife and his house,” “I was so happy to get the lousy evaluation at work since I know my boss was right.” You ask one of these creatures how they're doing after their life’s work has come to naught and they exclaim, “I can’t complain!” Sure they can, but they can’t and there’s the rub. Many of these gargoyles are probably deeply traumatized individuals who might murder themselves or others if they faced their so-called feelings. Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss (a stand-in for Leibnitz) who famously said “all’s for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds,” was the pied piper of delusional optimism. And Voltaire’s great work ends with Candide rejecting his mentor’s misguided view of the world.

A Dark Matter

“We must cultivate our garden,” is Voltaire’s famous quote from Candide. The quote is obviously offered as an antidote to the Leibnitzian windmill chasing of his character Pangloss who is always saying “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Adam Frank’s op-ed piece, “Alone in the Void" (NYT, 7/24/12) similarly serves as refutation of the kind of inflated notion of scientific progress offered by titles like Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Sure there’s string theory and quanta, but let’s remember that for now these theories refer to the working of subatomic particles and not flesh and blood creatures who have to worry about shuttling at 42^nd Street to catch the uptown Broadway Local. “From ‘Star Trek’ to ‘Star Wars,’ from warp drive to hyperdrive—the idea of rapid interstellar space travel is such a deep meme for cultural visions of space and our future that Hollywood films don’t even have to waste time introducing them to the audience, “ Frank remarks. The occasion of Frank’s piece is the crossing of Voyager 1 from the solar system to “the icy dominions of interstellar space,” a journey that will have taken 35 years. Frank estimates it would take a space craft nearly a millennium “to reach nearby stars,” in the unlikely event it was possible “to increase the speed of our spacecraft one hundredfold.”  “Think about it,” Frank concludes. “No salvation from population pressure on the shores of alien worlds. No release from the threats of biosphere degradation in the promise of new biospheres. No escape from our own destructive tendencies by spreading out among the stars like seedpods in the wind.”  Herbert, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and Clarke were all wonderful writers and visionaries. However, their futuristic message may also be a good way out of facing more imminent problems—like the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice shelf—that threaten life on earth.

Panglossing it Over

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, and Joshua S. Goldstein,  a professor emeritus of international relations at the American University, wrote an Op-Ed piece in last Sunday’s Times entitled “War Really Is Going out of Style,” NYT, 12/17/11). For Pinker, the Op-Ed  piece seems to be an extension of the argument that he makes in his recently published The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The three reasons that Pinker and Goldstein give for the decline of war are 1) political 2) economic and 3)social. In terms of political boundaries, no one is really the winner. “Since shortly after World War II, virtually no borders have changed by force,” Pinker and Goldstein argue.  Further, economic hegemony has been more effective than geographic invasion. “Today, wealth comes from trade, and war only hurts,” they continue. Lastly on the social front mankind has evolved. “Brutal customs that were commonplace for millennia have been largely abolished: cannibalism, human sacrifice, heretic-burning chattel slavery, punitive mutilation, sadistic executions.”  The natural extension of Pinker and Goldstein’s argument is that benevolence has become naturally selective and that mankind has found a better way of dealing with its aggressive impulses, by making love not war to re-invoke the 60’s. The explosion of pornography might evidence the latter, if the majority of sites weren’t so involved with conquest and submission on an ontogenic basis. Not to be judgmental about playful sex, but the sex on Kink.com makes water boarding seem like a sport. The question is, are Pinker and Goldstein talking about the two new planets discovered orbiting the star Kepler 20 reported by Dennis Overbye in the Times (“Two Earth-Sized Planets Are Discovered, “ NYT, 12/20/11)?  Do we occupy the same planet as these two eggheads ? They sound like  Voltaire's Pangloss, whose reaction to a succession of brutalities, “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds," takes aim at another egghead named Leibnitz.  What about the brutalities perpetrated by the Janjaweed militia in thee Sudan, the brutal dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, whose fortunes are again on the rise due to a windfall from the country's diamond industry? OK Qaddafi was toppled in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt, but even the reports of Qaddafi’s brutal capture create suspicion about the prospects for peace in that troubled land and the recent accounts of the Egyptian military’s sexual humiliations of women protestors seem to show throw doubt on the old  adage that “every cloud has a silver lining.” Make no mistake the lining of Mubarak regime was a military that controlled the economy of the country. We need turn no further than troubled Afghanistan if we want evidence of the fact that age old customs die slowly. Let the women with severed noses and burned faces testify to the progress of the human race. As for our so-called more advanced Western societies, who walked off with the shekels at MF Global and what made such a sterling institution as Goldman Sachs bet against the collateralized debt obligations it was offering its customers? And what about hazing at FAMU where the drum majors now must bang the drum slowly in mourning for a hard working 26 year old who was beaten to death? Go up to the South Bronx and watch the promoters of cock fights placing razors in the beaks of their contenders and then tell us about mankind tempering its aggressive instincts as two hapless birds run around with heads cut off. Happy Holidays!