Trump And Sanders–Emotional, Visceral Politics At Its Very Best

The Establishment hates Donald Trump.  The National Review, the standard-bearer for American conservatism, has begun an all-out, no-holds-barred campaign against The Donald.  This is a first for the magazine which has always been in lockstep with Republicans.  Although the editors may have had their issues with some candidates and preferred others, they have felt that a Republican victory at the polls would always be preferable to a Democratic one. 


             www.sourcefed.com

That has all changed, and the journal’s true colors – conservative, traditional conservatism – are showing.  The National Review, no more than liberal Democrats, knows what to do with Donald Trump; and their editorial board and publisher – not to say traditional Republicans everywhere - are very worried about their fifty-year protected empire.

In most campaign years the conservative Establishment could count on big money for support.  Candidates all hewed to the same low-tax, reduced spending, big military, private sector platforms so valued by business.  Whether they were evangelicals, economic hardliners, or social disciplinarians, they could be counted on to promote a conservative economic agenda.

Trump on the other hand wants to deport all illegal immigrants, the labor that business depends on for low prices and high profits.  Even the harshest critics of open borders understand that food prices would soar, lawns would never get mown, houses would crack and peel, restaurants would close, and women would have to leave work for childcare.  Draconian anti-immigration policies are anti-business, and since we all like cheap lettuce, anti-American.

Secondly, Donald Trump is an embarrassment to the conservative establishment.  The likes of old William Buckley, Ronald Reagan, William Kristol, and George Will bridle at Trump’s circus antics.  He is a clown, a vaudevillian, a huckster, and an evangelical preacher (sans God) all rolled into one.  He is a dervish, a comedian, and a  rambunctious hell-raiser.  He is a son of Hollywood and Las Vegas not Wall Street and K Street.  These Old Guard Republicans are flummoxed.


                         www.dailykos.com

The vitriolic reaction against Trump by The National Review is very telling, because it reveals both the increasingly shaky foundations of traditional conservatism and angry populist sentiments never before expressed so enthusiastically.

What Trump understands and conservative commentators do not is that today’s voters do not care about issues (if they ever did), but about sentiment, emotion, passion, and conviction.  In a recent article on the election in Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson said, “If Trump does have to speak about the issues, he makes himself sound foolish, because he doesn’t know very much.”  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Trump is no dummy, and he and his advisors could easily write a series of white papers on everything from Syria to tax reform.  He stays with bombast, theatricality, outrage, and personal attacks because that is exactly what the electorate wants. 

Trump speaks in a language of icon and image.  Of course no one takes him seriously when he says that he will round up all illegal immigrants and deport them; or when he says that he will build an impenetrable wall across our southern border, or that he will deny visas to all Muslims.   The message is clear – A Trump presidency will be tough on illegal immigration.

When he throws political correctness to the wind, no one believes that he is racist or sexist; but the message is clear.  The liberal gulag will be dismantled.  All lives matter. Free speech back.  Individualism – free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, and the enshrined American right to say anything at anytime – is back.

The traditional Left is equally threatened by Bernie Sanders who is very much like Trump in his unalloyed progressive neo-socialism.  His supporters do not care about how he will manage such radical transfers of wealth, Wall Street’s reaction to punitive taxes and legislation, or the depletion of already meager government treasuries.  They only care about his calls for justice, equality, compassion, communalism, and a new respect for the real people of America, not the fat cat capitalist, one percenters who gouge, exploit, and humiliate the poor.


                             www.billmoyers.com

Hillary Clinton and her advisors are particularly troubled, for she – opaque, with a history of questionable ethics, chameleon positions, sense of entitlement, and an obvious and exploitive ‘electoral feminism’ – is the anti-Bernie.  For all his impractical, out-of-date, and impossible policies, he is at least honest.  He has held his socialist principles for decades, put his voting record on the line, and has rarely deviated from his positions for expediency or political convenience.

Of course he cannot transform the profoundly and resistently capitalist system of America.  The powers that be are no different today than they were in the Reconstruction South.  There was no way that wealthy plantation owners would ever buckle under to Radical Republicanism; and in a few short decades, the plantation system was almost as productive, functional and intact as it was before the war.  None but the most idealistic and dreamy of Bernie’s supporters believe that anything he does can possibly neuter entrenched, historical centers of power.   Most will vote for him because of his ideals, his vision and his honest sense of purpose.


  www.newworldencyclopedia.org

Trump is an outsized star, full of ego, style, image, and theatrics.  He is untamed, uncowed, aggressive, and combative.  He has made billions and flaunts it, dated bimbos, spent lavishly and without taste.  He loves money, power, acclaim, attention, and beautiful women.  Who says that he does not represent America?

Sanders believes profoundly in human progress.  If only we try harder, he says, show more compassion and understanding, and fight against injustice and  corrupt concentrations of power and authority, America and the human race will be better off.   Government is the solution to the country’s problem because despite its shortcomings, it represents the people and is the sworn caretaker of their interests.   Democracy is enshrined in collective enterprise, not individualism, and together we can make a better world.   Who said that his socialist spirit of commonality, shared interests, compassion, and social harmony is not American?

No wonder Hillary is bamboozled.  “I am doing everything right”, she says while Sanders increases in popularity. She cannot believe that a former First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and a woman could possible fade in popularity and lose traction against an old socialist. 

We have read her position papers and carefully-crafted pronouncements on women’s rights, gay marriage, income inequality, social justice, and all the rest; but we see no blood spilled, no tears shed, no passion, emotion, or anything even resembling principle.   The American voter wants passion and principle, not position papers.


If we are lucky, the presidential election will be between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, for it will mean an end to the stale, predictable, money-ruled, insider trading politics of the past.  The curtain will finally be pulled back on the corruption of the American political system.  Most importantly, the election will allow us for once to revel in what we are good at – image, stardom, and unbounded idealism.

‘Delta Wedding’–What Did Eudora Welty Intend In Her Novel Without Plot Or Drama?

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty is a story about a multi-generational patrician Southern family and takes place in 1923 a few days before the wedding of one of the many children of Ellen and Battle Fairchild, the owners of the plantation.


               
There are no tales to tell, no family secrets, no plots, deceits, or jealousy.  The aunts, uncles,and cousins have no issues.  The wedding is not an event where old scores are settled, nor are there any reconciliations, angry fights over long-hidden resentments, flirtations, or shows of temper.  In fact nothing at all happens.

There are only a few measures of doubt in the family.  The Fairchild daughter about to be married has chosen the overseer of the plantation for a husband, a man without pedigree and breeding; and the wife of one of the uncles runs away from home a few days before the wedding.  Yet the overseer is a good man, unintimidated by but respectful of the Fairchilds; and the uncle’s wife never really ran away, never ran far, and always intended to return to her husband.

Laura, a cousin whose mother has just died is not consumed by grief or remorse.  Ellen Fairchild has eight children and is pregnant with the ninth, but she is neither frustrated nor resentful.  There is no bitterness in the old maid aunts, no insurrection among the Negro servants.   There are no family disputes about property or inheritance.  The land is rich and productive, the plantation is no different than it was before the War.  With only a few exceptions the entire family has stayed in the Delta.

In O’Neill’s  Mourning Becomes Electra  Christine  is in love with Adam, who is actually the illegitimate son of her husband’s uncle, long exiled but reappearing in his romantic pursuit of her daughter, Lavinia – an incestuous pursuit because Adam and Lavinia are first cousins.  Christine has incestuous longings for her son, Orin, psychologically damaged in the Civil War, and long under her influence. 



Lavinia has similarly incestuous longings for her brother, Orin, and she, too has dominated him since they were children. Lavinia’s feelings for her father, the family patriarch are even stronger and more incestuous.  He has been the buffer against what Lavinia sees is the evil predations and ambitions of her mother.

Christine hates her older husband to whom she has been married for many years, and decides with her lover, Adam, to kill him. Lavinia catches the mother in the act with the poison pills, and decides that she must kill her and her lover, Adam.  She enlists her easily manipulated brother, Orin.
Orin and Lavinia set a trap for Adam and murder him; but they don’t have to because she kills herself out of despair.  Orin, feeling so crazed with guilt kills himself.

The Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey into Night  are suspicious, depressive, and wounded.  The men are drunkards and the drug-addicted mother is manipulative, controlling, and selfish.  



Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer are all about sons, daughters, wives, and husbands who are trapped, impotent, frustrated, ignorant, or mad.

Albee’s theater is all about the desperation of living within a bourgeois marriage.  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a story of a savage couple out, in seems, to destroy each other and everyone else.  Their lives have been disappointments.  Martha’s venomous hatred and rage and George’s sarcastic, wounding insults and brutal games are expression of years of mutual resentment and jealousies.

Arthur Miller, perhaps America’s most moral playwright, less interested in human dynamics per se but in the immorality innate in human nature.  He explores themes of deceit, weakness, moral cowardice, and the corruption nature of ambition in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.


           

Lillian Hellman in Little Foxes writes about greed, venality, ambition, and emotional violence. 
In Welty’s Delta Wedding there is none of this.  Although there are some strains within the Fairchild family – the marriage of outsiders Troy and Robbie are potential disruptions to the perfectly-ordered running of the plantation – none of them ever amount to anything.  The folds of the family are too welcoming and absorptive.  It is too big, too old, to established in its traditional ways, propriety, good taste, and humanity not to tame the most rebellious. 

What was it then about Eudora Welty who saw family so differently from Williams and O’Neill?
Delta Wedding not only is the story of a multi-generational, closely-knit family but its simplicity extends beyond the plantation.  Welty chooses not to write about the Civil War or Reconstruction, both of which were only decades before her story of the wedding.  The plantation is a physical and historical enclave.  The only past that has any importance for the Fairchilds is the one of their ancestors.

Welty makes occasional but only incidental references to the Civil War, who went off to it and who came back.  There is nothing about the War itself, the battles that were fought in the Delta, Radical Reconstruction, refugees, the dislocation of the planter class, the difficult restructuring of the slave economy, or the political and social upheavals that resulted.

Welty, then, by writing about a family isolated from the devastation of the War and its consequences and leading an idyllic and romantic existence, had another agenda.  But what?

Was she an apologist for the Old South?  There could be no better defense of antebellum ways than Delta Wedding where old, patrician, Cavalier traditions are kept alive, Negro servants are loving and loved members of the family, no character speaks spitefully or with any suspicion or hatred of blacks. 

Was she only an apologist for family and saw in the Fairchilds the antithesis of any of Faulkner or Williams?  More specifically did she feel that there was something unique and essential about an uninterrupted family history, a primitive nativism but with a much more positive take than the dark vision of Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables)?



None of the Fairchilds are intellectuals or even concerned with intellectual things.  The talk is all about family, relationships, and the preparations for the wedding.  Delta Wedding is not without some reflection and awareness of a wider philosophical world, but it is only incidentally and sporadically so. The world of ideas is far from the Fairchilds.

The family, then, is without intellectual anchor, without engagement in society or country, and free from any of the social or emotional disfigurations that are part and parcel of any social group.  Who are they?

The only character in the novel with any distinction is Uncle George. Although Battle is the head of the family, his brother George is the emotional center.  He is the best of the family, the aunts all say.  Strong, selfless, generous, and fiercely protective of the family.  Everyone retells the story of how he risked his life to free one of his nieces from a railroad tie before an oncoming train, and this one incident – one of the few discrete, memorable actions of the novel – is emblematic of the Fairchilds.

The writer most akin to Welty is Faulkner.  Both wrote about Southern, Mississippi families; yet Absalom, Absalom is a complex story in which character, personality, history, culture, and society are interwoven.  Thomas Sutpen comes out of the Virginia hills to build Sutpen’s 100 – one hundred square miles of Delta cotton plantation.  It is a story of personal will and ambition, a story of American enterprise and desire for wealth and status, a drama of race, sexual demand, and a tale of a man who was brilliant in business and management but ignorant of women, sons, and family.  The Sutpen family comes apart just as tragically as O’Neill’s Mannons but without the melodrama.


 
The Sound and the Fury is also about a Southern family – the Compsons, but his  Benjy, Jason, Quentin, and Caddy are far different from Battle, George, Ellen, and the aunts of Delta Wedding.  The story is dark, powerful, driven by the boy’s incestuous desire for their sister, the overpowering responsibility of family legacy, and the influences of Southern history.

Welty had no interest in creating a family like the Compsons or the Sutpens.  Many critics have concluded that she is a minor writer, far from the artistic genius of either Faulkner, Williams, or O’Neill, and this benign tale of the Fairchilds is all she could muster.

While few critics would put Welty in the same category as Williams or Faulkner, none dismiss her entirely.  She is so elusive, however, and the structure of her novel so indeterminate, that it is difficult to decipher. 

Some observers have noted Welty’s competition with Faulkner, and perhaps as a way of distinguishing herself from him, moved away from the psychologically-oriented short stories of her earlier years to a simpler vision:

Welty's debut novel, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), deviated from her previous psychologically-inclined works, presenting static, fairy-tale characters. Some critics suggest that she worried about "encroaching on the turf of the male literary giant to the north of her in Oxford, Mississippi-William Faulkner", and therefore wrote in a fairy-tale style instead of a historical one. Most critics and readers saw it as a modern Southern fairy-tale and noted that it employs themes and characters reminiscent of the Grimm Brothers’ works (Wikipedia).

More generous critics have suggested that the sense of place was really what gave her later works distinction; and that novels like Delta Wedding were examples of how the ‘place’ of the Delta and the Fairchild plantation was a metaphor for place and family:

Place is vitally important to Welty. She believed that place is what makes fiction seem real, because with place come customs, feelings, and associations. Place answers the questions, "What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?" Place is a prompt to memory; thus the human mind is what makes place significant. This is the job of the storyteller. “A Worn Path” is one short story that proves how place shapes how a story is perceived.

Within the tale, the main character, Phoenix, must fight to overcome the barriers within the vividly described Southern landscape as she makes her trek to the nearest town. "The Wide Net" is another of Welty’s short stories that uses place to define mood and plot. The river in the story is viewed differently by each character. Some see it as a food source, others see it as deadly, and some see it as a sign that "the outside world is full of endurance" (Wikipedia)

Delta Wedding is not a great novel, but a good one.  It is less interesting per se than for a new context within which to consider family and place, one very different from either Faulkner, Albee, O’Neill, or Williams.

Randomness, Chance, And Genes–Who Said There Is Any Such Thing As Purpose?

In the opening lines of Woody Allen’s Match Point, the narrator and main character of the film says:

The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose.

 
                 
Chris Wilton murders his lover and her landlady, and later tosses the old woman's stolen jewels into the Thames.  All but her wedding ring make it over the railing.  It is found by the police in the pocket of a dead drug derelict, conclusive evidence that he not Wilton was the murderer.

At first the police suspect Wilton whom they assume killed his lover and murdered the landlady to suggest robbery. Yet because the wedding ring was found on the addict, they close the case against Wilton.  He, by sheer luck, has avoided capture, conviction, and prison.

Most of us believe in purpose.  The myth of free will, propagated by Christianity, is very hard to ignore; and although Christ intended it to be the faculty by which we would choose between right and wrong and be credentialed through correct choice for admittance into the kingdom of heaven, we have inflated its value.  Nietzsche said it best when he averred that the expression of will is the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world.  Most of us , however, are neither Nietzschean Supermen nor men and women of absolute faith; and have simply and facilely assumed that individual choice is unique, specially valued, and insuperable.

         
Where on earth did this notion come from?

Tolstoy put The Great Man Theory of history to rest in his Epilogue to War and Peace.  Napoleon’s defeat at Borodino was indeed due to the cold that he caught because of wet, cold feet which resulted because of the forgetfulness of his valet who had been distracted by his wayward wife and neglected to put out the Emperor’s gum boots.   Individual actions count for nothing as such.  Resulting from millions of random antecedent actions, who can reasonably say that any one act has a unique value let alone a distinct purpose?

               
Many world leaders who find themselves atop great empires, do not believe they are there accidentally. During the era of The Divine Right of Kings, European monarchs never challenged their divine anointment, and inferred that every action they took would be sanctioned by the God that placed them on the throne. The Catholic Church believes that the Holy Ghost has a hand in the election of the Pope; and although the College of Cardinals may vote for a successor, only God has the final choice. 

George W. Bush at the time of the Iraq crisis, confirmed his belief in divine intervention:

Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did."

Mr Bush went on: "And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East'. And, by God, I'm gonna do it." (The Guardian 10.05

 Deranged serial killers like The Son of Sam claim purpose:

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the "Son of Sam." I am a little "brat". When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. "Go out and kill" commands father Sam. Behind our house some rest. Mostly young — raped and slaughtered — their blood drained — just bones now. Papa Sam keeps me locked in the attic, too. I can't get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by. I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wave length then everybody else — programmed too kill.

           

Purpose and conditioning are muddled in today’s response to crime, violence, and anti-social behavior. Progressives claim that the disaffected black youth in Anacostia had no say in the matter when he robbed, raped, and murdered.  Persistent racism, the lingering effects of slavery, and the consequential dismissal of the black experience by white America are the reasons why they commit crimes.  They use Tolstoy’s deterministic argument to avoid assessing responsibility.  There is no such thing as crime, they say; only reaction to past conditioning.

Conservatives harken back to Jesus Christ, the Temptation in the Desert, and the cardinal principle of free will.  These youths, although influenced by their environment and susceptible to the influences  of the past, are  still human beings with a God-given sense of right and wrong and a divine injunction to act righteously.  Nothing can excuse murder.

                  

For most of us the issues of free will, conditioning, and purpose have little salience. Métro, boulot, dodo – the oppressively routine existence of life- is far  kinder than Hobbes’s description of human existence as  “"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".   All of us muddle through, unconcerned about or unaware of these existential thoughts.  If we ever wonder why we are here or where we are going, such thoughts are quickly dismissed by the priorities of the assembly line, marriage, and family.

All these weighty philosophical considerations mean little, says Woody Allen.  A lot of brainpower wasted in the face of obvious purposelessness.  The ball either goes over the net or it doesn’t.
De Maupassant is a master of coincidence, luck, the unexpected, and the distortion of purpose.  The Necklace and other stories tell of couples who intend one thing which results in another – tales of good intentions gone wrong because of chance, circumstance, and unfortunate fate.

The stories are entertainments, much like many of those of Somerset Maugham.  Red, like the tales of Maupassant, is a story of luck, timing, circumstance, and serendipity – a love story gone right for some, badly for others.  A romantic episode like all others conditioned by happenstance.

              

Either the ball goes over the net on one side or the other – all a matter of inertia, trajectory, parabolas, and pure chance.  We may be purposeful and deliberate, but no matter what actions we take; no matter which roads we choose, our ends and destinations are a matter of both chance and history.  We may arrive at Frost’s fork in the road, but it would be foolish to assume that we have any say in the choice; and even if we did, there would be no assurance of the outcome we hoped for.

What does this all mean? Should we all become nihilists, unconcerned about whether to take this road or that; or to fret about the consequences of our actions? Nothing of the sort. Life in the random lane is the most satisfactory, for it is the path of least resistance.  We needn’t worry about right and wrong, intended or unintended consequences, possible or probable outcomes.  Chance has a way of discombobulating the best laid plans; so it is better to choose arbitrarily, i.e. in self-interest, than to worry about collateral influences.  Morality, after all, is relative; so decisions have no intrinsic value per se.

What? Me Worry?