Making Mountains Out Of Molehills - The Progressive Malady, Creating Problems Where They Don't Exist

'If it bleeds, it leads', has been the mantra of American television since the first grainy black and white images of the Fifties; and if nothing is bleeding, then something needs to bleed. 'Catholic Mass for Shut-Ins' will never have a large audience. 

'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' said Leo Tolstoy who understood the art of storytelling, the art of dramatizing unhappy differences.  The Greeks were the original masters at melodrama, the art of making human nature in all its jealousy, rivalries, suspicions, plots, greed, and violence the only show in town.  Greek audiences already knew the stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Helen, and Oedipus, but filled the seats of the Athenian amphitheaters to watch them unfold in all their gory glory. 

Artists did not invent these smarmy, twisted scenarios.  They simply took what they saw around them and gave them stage presence.  Aeschylus was a master of timing - he knew when to reveal the truth that everyone but the main character knew, and when to tease, tempt, and hold it back for maximum interest. 

The best Turkish soap operas are cut from the same cloth.  The producers are geniuses at timing, suggestion, and manipulation.  The central premise is that the audience knows of a character's dishonesty and murderous intentions, but the victim never does until it's too late.  The audience becomes partisan, urging the victim to see the plot unfolding around her, to open her eyes, to see what is happening; but the producer, writer, and director keep up the naïveté, the innocence, and the disingenuous belief. 

The audience is on the edge of their seats - when will she learn? and so it goes, episode after episode of the most devious trickery and bad intent. 

There is enough melodrama in human nature for a thousand tragedies.  The playwright never has to hold his head in his hands and wonder what next.  It is all there for him to choose.  The literary critic Jan Kott noted that if one were to lay all of Shakespeare's Histories down in chronological order, one would be struck by their repetitious similarity - palace intrigues, murders, jealousies, family squabbles, the arrogance and ignorance of power and much more.  But the particular and fascinating ways that all this is played out is what fascinated Shakespeare.  Richard III, Iago, Goneril, Regan, Dionyza, and Tamora are all villains, but each in their own mesmerizing way. 

There is nothing new about human nature.  It is hardwired, permanent, and ineluctable and as long as there are human beings on earth there will be murder, war, devilish plots, dishonest, and cruelty beyond belief.  And there is nothing new about the transformation of those human instincts into melodrama. 

What is new, or at least a modern twist to the obvious, is the creation of horrible things where they don't exist. As if there were not enough problems in the world. 

Progressives have made an art out of inventive fiction.  The world was quite happy with its blizzards and hot spells, floods and droughts, and the natural vagaries of the climate.  It was the way things were, ups and downs, surprises and catastrophes, and the way things would always be. 

Then climate change came along - an invented, seditious idea of political brilliance. If enough people believed that it was man who was causing atmospheric turbulence, provoking an early Armageddon, then billions of dollars could be spent out of public coffers to right the wrong. Capitalism itself was on trial, for what could be more polluting and environmentally destructive than corporate greed passed on in manipulative marketing to encourage more fossil fuel use?

Similarly human beings had gotten along just fine with two sexes - all that was required to keep the human race going - but then people were told that they should be suspicious of a heterosexual theory that has its roots in male patriarchy, bourgeois limitations, and white supremacy.  There is no such thing as sexual normality, all is possible and all is available.  One need only pick and choose from the array of choices on the gender spectrum.  Reproduction is incidental, not necessary, and in fact the very cause of environmental destruction, war, and civil unrest. 

The movement did just champion gay and lesbians, but showered the most attention and praise on transgenders, individuals born of one sex but emotionally, psychologically, and socially the other.  Identity, freedom, and individuality are not just constitutional protections.  They go to the heart of human sexual nature. 

The fol-de-rol is quieting, and most people are no longer edgy and politically sensitive about being straight.  There are two sexes, male and female, and everything else is a freak show, two-headed babies, bearded ladies, dwarves, and midgets replaced by deep-throated runway queens, swish, and costume jewelry. 

Donald Trump is an aggressive, decisive, politically incorrect president who fits no mold of presidents past. He has changed the way presidents operate, disregarded old nostrums of proper behavior and prescriptive notions of right action.  He has no hesitation in using presidential power and is willing to run the risks and take the consequences.  It is not for nothing that he earned his stripes in the bloody battles of New York real estate. 

It is not enough for progressives to call out his questionable policy initiatives - his wars, his dismantling of the Washington bureaucracies, the opening the country up to unrestricted energy exploitation, and the rollback of social programs.  They have invented the concept of an evil man as an all-purpose mantle of irresponsibility.  The US has had presidents that stretched the fabric of the body politic - Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, and Ulysses S Grant were no sweethearts and dealt with summarily.  The system of American governance worked just fine. 

The idea that Donald Trump is evil is something new, not particularly unexpected from a political movement which likes umbrella covers (e.g. climate change=capitalism=exploitation=disaster), but still surprising from those who have disavowed religion.  Philosophers from Aquinas to Kierkegaard to Sartre have pondered the nature of evil, but none have been so pedestrian and insular in their attributions. 

Parsing evil has always been a pastime - was Hitler more evil than Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot who also murdered millions? Is human nature particularly given to evil given its bald self-interest, territorialism, and defensiveness? Etc. 

Few, however, have so distorted the concept of evil, whether religious or secular, as much as American progressives. 'Evil' in their politically disingenuous hands is nothing more than a catch-all for unacceptable political behavior.  An intellectual charade, a mighty boondoggle. 

The evil Donald Trump is a problem that does not exist.  It is 'if it bleeds...' tomfoolery, a fabulist creation from a party which still can't absorb the enormity of its electoral defeat and is fighting shadows and inventing goblins in its hysteria. 

Hindus have it right in one - the world is Maya, illusion, a place of false promise and hopeless dreams.  The sooner one realizes that the world is but a perennial, predictable vale of tears, the easier the path to enlightenment becomes. The Stoics said the same thing in essence - the world and all that it encompasses will forever more be a random succession of events, and each individual within it acts according to the way he has been buffeted by them. Nietzsche notwithstanding, individual will within a deterministic world is folly. 

Yet, progressives simply can't help themselves.  There is something in the air compelling them to do good where no evil exists, to reform what needs no reforming, to act where action is unnecessary. 

What's all the fuss about? Epictetus might well ask; which is why conservatives have more fun. If the world is the way it is and attempts to improve it is just whistlin' Dixie, then why not just enjoy the great human jamboree?