334. Explaining Trump's Followers

It's not Donald Trump who needs explaining, it's his followers.  How can so many Americans go for such an empty entertainer?  Have they lost their minds?

No, no, they can't have, not after so many years of education, so many hours in civics classes, so much time reading history assignments, so much attention — oh God, the pain — going over writing that had to be logical and coherent and responsible enough to satisfy English teachers. 

Now those teachers can't bear to watch, and listen, and take in the roars of support.  Half of them in my retirement home are in tears.  Did the seed just all fall on stony ground?

No, there are other explanations, and I would like to offer one, but finding a welcome for it will require some doing.  Everybody with an axe to grind is jumping in now with an explanation that will sharpen his.  Mad at Republican elites? mad at the media? mad at liberals?  Blame them for producing Donald Trump.  There are so many columnists doing this that, according to Noah Berlatsky (LA Times, 3-10-16), there is now a "pundit genre" named "Trump-blame think pieces."  Some blame Clinton's open-trade policy, some Bush's tax cuts, some Obama's bank bailouts.  Among people blamed are John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh, John Kasich, and Al Franken.  All in some way responsible, directly or by backlash, for the Trump phenomenon.

Since the person I am going to add to that list cannot, without risk of immediate turn-off, be named, I want to begin my blaming at a distance, with your memories of a backlash.  Did you ever come out of Sunday School and right away hear somebody say, "Shit!"?  And did you ever feel a tingle at that?  And sense other boys feeling tingles?  Well, if you did, I think you were feeling what a lot of Trump's followers are feeling.  And if it's strong enough you'll run over and give him a cheer.

What is that boy lashing back at?  If you are a philosopher, tracing everything to its ultimate source, and indifferent to turn-offs, you'll say "Jesus Christ."  If you're a pundit, required by circulation levels to avoid turn-offs, you'll stop short and say "love," or, pushing it, "Christian love."  And if you're a reporter, less concerned with deep traces, you'll just say, "his Sunday School teacher."  In any case it's a voice for love, and the boy is sick of it. 

That sickness is what we're trying to understand, and in doing so we constantly need the reminder from the reporter: our responses to love depend a lot on how it's channeled.  It came to Huck Finn, for example, through the  Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who put him on a chair and taught him how nicey-nice he had to be to other people.  He got sick of it and lit out for the woods.  Nietzsche's two maiden aunts taught him much the same way.  He got sick of it and wrote The Genealogy of Morals.  I know there's room for debate over what caused Nietzsche's indigestion, whether it was the food itself, Christ's beatifying of the weak, or whether it was the way of feeding, but certainly the way of feeding has a lot to do with it in Huck's case.  And, I think, the case of Trump's followers.

What, equivalent to what was delivered by Miss Watson and Nietzsche's aunts, have those followers been hearing?  No, not what is being delivered, but what a man of shaky education will hear as being delivered?  A lot of nicey-nice.  You don't just meet your responsibilities to the poor and the imprisoned and the enslaved, you've got to have affection for them, all of them, everybody you (or they) can call an Other, of whatever race, gender, class, mentality, or capability.  You've got to recognize how they can be hurt, and oh in so many ways you never thought of.

Consider how a man, sensibility undeveloped and testosterone flowing, will now be going through life.  There are unprecedented hazards all around him.  Stereotype here, offend there, accidentally code in front of this one, signal wrong to that one — oh my God she's going to faint — and he's in trouble.  What are those circumlocutions that keep the well-educated safe, the formulas that certify right thought and good heart?  He'll never learn them.  And up ahead so many Others.  Well, he'll try to tiptoe past.  Again.

All right, are you in that fellow's shoes?  Here's Donald Trump walking onto the scene, looking at Megyn Kelly, and saying, "You're a bimbo."  Then at Hillary Clinton and saying, "You're a total phony."  Then, pointing at President Obama, saying, "Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”  Haven't  you seen him before?  He's the kid who walked out of Sunday School, stuck a wad of tobacco in his cheek, and said, "Shit."  If you tingled then you'll tingle now, and just might join the roar for Donald Trump.

333. How can we live on the same planet with such people?

Here we are, on an earth made small by our jets, with communication made instant by our electronics, and destruction made sure by our physics, trying to live alongside people who, because they are true to their faith, want to come together from around the world and destroy us as quickly and surely as they can.  Why do we do it?

Because in our faith, I would say, putting the problem in the most general terms, the skeptical can live alongside the credulous and survive.  Our saints believe that we must live alongside them, and love them, and help them. 

It was through our skepticism that we came up with the physics and the engineering that the credulous, because they have lived among us, are now able to use.  The distinction between the skeptical and the credulous is no small thing; it's one of those profound distinctions, like Scott Fitzgerald's between the sick and the well, that lets you divide all mankind.

Both ancient Jews and Muslims were what David Hume, in a time when one could indulge in such accuracy, called "a barbarous people" — that is, extremely credulous.  They thought God made things work.  Then skeptical Christians figured out how things really worked, and then figured out how to live alongside credulous Christians.  I don't know how this happened, but I see it as the genius of their civilization.  And maybe credulous Christians get the credit.  Maybe by theological moves, re-conceiving God (as in France); maybe by ethical moves, re-theorizing hypocrisy (as in England); or just by falling into apathy, they did it.  I don't know.

Anyway, it's something Muslims didn't do, as made clear (if it weren't before) by Malise Ruthven in his review of three recent books on Islam (NYR (4-7-16).  The struggle for reason against dogma has in that faith been a losing one.  Whatever it was that reconciled the two sides in Christian society is very hard to find in Muslim society.  The re-theorizing hides itself and the apathy ... where is it?  What you can count on, eventually, to drain away the followers of every Kansas creationist, and put, alas, every sweet fundamentalist Sunday School out of business, cannot, in Islam, even get started.  People in this religion seem to know only one way to take their God: seriously.  Meaning, for many of us onlookers, barbarously.

One of the authors, Jason Burke, tells Ruthven (in The New Threat: The Past, Present, and Future of Islamic Militancy) that what makes adjustment to modernity so very hard for Sunnis is their "theology of manifest success."  For 1200 years their conquest and domination "assured them of divine favor," an assurance unavailable to Shias, who lost their leader to a rival, or to Jews, who lost their land to an invader, or to Christians, who lost their man-god to a government.  "This Allah, this God that we of the three great religions of the Middle East share, out of the same original book, favors us Sunnis, possessors of Baghdad and all the land for hundreds of miles east and west.  Look on us, you others of would-be might, and despair!"

We in the West should understand appeals to manifest success, since we've made so many of them.  Do you doubt that Christianity has a divine origin?  Look at the church, its early expansion and then its worldwide provenance.  Overcoming impossible obstacles.  Only by postulating God can you explain it.  That's at one end.  At the other is L. Ron Hubbard pointing at the success of Scientology.  In between are the Mormons pointing to an expansion that rivaled that of early Christianity.  Then there are Christian businessmen.  Do you doubt that there's a God that rewards virtue?  Look at that bank account, buddy.  And if your God is as good as mine, why aren't you rich?  (This has a name, "prosperity theology."  Rising in America.)  Then outside of theology there are Donald Trump's appeals, nearly all to his marvelous success, especially at the polls. 

Well, we know where appeals to manifest success take you, to a cliff.  Let the market crash, the attendance tank, the vote-count drop, and you are sprawled out at the bottom.  

And there, according to Hughes via Ruthven, is where the conquest of their territory by Western skeptics, unbelievers, left the Sunnis.  And they just couldn't handle it.

So what are we going to do, offer ourselves as an example again?  "Look, the British lost a bigger empire than yours, a lot bigger, the sun never set on it, and what did they do?  Cashed in what chips they had, sat back, and watched their young people make fun of the whole game.  What do the managers of the best teams in our best sport say after getting crushed in the big game?  'Win some, lose some.'  All right all you Sunnis, get with it, be cool.  Go watch The Princess Bride.  Get yooosed to disappointment."

Fine advice and, in its superiority and condescension, very satisfying to deliver, but breathtaking in its incomprehension.  You can't address believers as if they were players in a game.  This is a faith, the faith is in Allah, and sainthood is nothing like what Winston Churchill and Joe Dimaggio achieved.  No, Western examples of cool won't do.

Nor will Western testosterone. Bomb the hell out of them.  "Think your success proved the power of your God and his favor to you, do you?  Well, how about some failure?  More failure.  Bigger failure."  So we go over to the bottom of their cliff and stomp on them.  It would be as satisfying as burying Trump in a landslide.  Just the thing for people who stand on manifest success. 

But equally uncomprehending.  It's not this religion's ordinary followers doing us harm, it's its saints and martyrs.  Lump them and bomb them, collaterally damage them, and we create more saints and martyrs.  Furthermore, by making them victims we take the word "barbarian" right out of our mouths.  You can't call victims bad names, not in our country.

The problem opens our ears to our own saints, speaking liberal tolerance: "We should live with these people as we would with any other group in our diverse society.  All groups, including ours, have their lunatics.  Deal with the lunatics; don't worry about their religious identity."

Ah yes, we could do that — if all religious identities were the same.  But they're not the same.  Some religions, when their fringe followers go lunatic, have them going one way, others have them going another.  Israeli settlers are the lunatics they are because their religion is what it is, a religion promising a worldly reward, in their case a God-given piece of land.  Followers of other religions live on top of pillars or look at the sun until they go blind, all pursuing sainthood, all counting on a particular promise.  Our worry varies accordingly.  Climb a pillar or stare into the sun and I worry only about you.  Attack unbelievers and I worry about both you and myself.

In that worry I am worrying about religious identity and, though it could start from prejudice, it doesn't have to.  In concern for my safety I, in full academic mode, could have started simply by asking, "In what groups do the paranoiacs, rebellious children, and alienated misfits (found in all large groups) turn to this kind of behavior?"  No prejudgment.  Just rejection of saintly advice and indifference to cries of "Islamophobia."

I labor the point because the Christian has been so pervasively the dominant mode, even among academics.  In that mode we resist causing pain or offense even when our science justifies it.  Take profiling.  The question security forces ask when they lack the resources to identify the possible risks in each individual, and have to discriminate among them, is exactly the question scientists ask above: "In what groups do the extremists turn to the kind of activity we need to prevent?"  If the activity is illegal settlement on the West Bank the answer will be, "Ultra-Orthodox Jews"; if the activity is terrorist self-sacrifice, the answer will be "Muslims."   That makes your profile and gives your agents a marker.

So we skeptics of limited resources give ourselves the best chance of living on the planet with certain credulous people by profiling which, though it pains and offends the innocent among them, and rubs against our Christian upbringing and democratic faith, is justified by practical need and scientific analysis.  The same goes for surveillance.  At least those things are better than bombing.

332. Relishing Poetry, Relishing Lifestyle

Adam Kirsch, in the April Atlantic, glancing at the "free love and radical politics" in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and '20s, reminds us of "how little this kind of Bohemian playacting" had to do with "modernism" (the literary movement dominant in the first half of the twentieth century).  "The greatest poets of that era kept it at arms length." 

"Bohemian playacting."  Adopting the lifestyle of poets.  So appealing to those leading duller lives.  And so much easier than writing poetry.

See a name, what do you think?  "Kerouac."  Do you think lines?  Issues?  Insights?  Conflicts?  Connection to known life?  Maybe for some, yes.  The reviews in Goodreads on Kerouac now are all over the map but few in my sample (30) are of any of those things.  With Ginsberg it's not much different.  The appeal is lifestyle, Beat Generation lifestyle, Bohemian lifestyle plus, way plus.

Now try this name: "Wallace Stevens."  Lifestyle?  Who wants to know after they hear that he was an executive in an insurance company in Connecticut?  No, it's lines, lines, lines, lines that if you think of them while shaving you cut yourself (A. E.  Housman's test of great lines).  For me it's lines like these, especially the third one:

Take from the dresser of deal, 

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

It's those fantails, something fancy, the picture of the woman bending over her needle, a little art in a bare life, a bare culture, trying to "have things nice" — and it failed, oh god how it must have failed, with grown-up children treating her this way, at the wake not even covering her feet, displaying to anybody who looked into the bedroom the ugliness of ignorant labor, the poverty, what she tried to veil, down now to the animal fact, the bare body, looking like, treated like, a dead chicken.  So that they can get back to their ice cream.  Not  a single child to say, "Yes, yes, the fantails, lovely, Mother, I'll carry on with them, Mother, Mother."  The lines leave me saying it, and making connections with what I can see around me, and can now see better.  That woman carefully stringing Christmas lights on her trailer, yes, a mother, a mother, a single mother, trying to have things nice.

But I have to give you the lines preceding my whisker-raising lines.  Here, the whole opening stanza:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

First a word about connections.  We value poems that connect with — that is, that throw light, a new light, a brighter light, a better light on — things known in our lives.  I knew trailer parks and their occupants and then Stevens' embroiderer suddenly threw a beam on them, so bright that other instances — other mothers, other failed attempts to refine life, other triumphant coarseness, other failures in appreciation and gratitude — blazed up in my memory.  Those are connections to my life, and they give meaning to what my seventh-grade teacher taught me was the value of literature: that it expands your imagination and deepens your understanding. 

Then, beyond these connections are connections to things I have read, and taught.  Here it's the cry I hear the speaker of the poem ("The Emperor of Ice Cream") making that sharpens my sight — or, I should say, sensitizes my eardrums.  It's a cry against coarseness.  "Go ahead, do it this way, you uncomprehending animals."  No imagination, no sense of ceremony, no dignity.  In Stevens' cry I hear cries in Tennessee Williams (Blanche facing Stanley, the muscular one in Streetcar), in Salinger (looking at the small gift sent him by sensitive Esmé while listening to the crude speech of his fellow soldiers), in Chekhov (Nadya listening to her future husband's banalities), in Eliot (the whole Waste Land).  Stevens' cry strengthens a cry I want to make against hip-hop.  Other readers will hear other cries, all against coarseness. 

You don't have to be an English teacher; the connections are there, readied by Stevens for you, according to the liberality of your education, to activate. The ones made here are to things known in my life, and known or knowable, in the lives of those I talk to and in the publications I read.  We relish them, in the sad way of human discovery.

And what is there for the relishers of On the Road and Howl to relish"? There's the lifestyle I described, then oracular pronouncements that rule out other lifestyles.  Very few connections to anything beyond that lifestyle, hardly any for the liberally educated — in the way of my seventh-grade teacher and her followers — to activate.  Those connections take work.

Oh how Stevens must have worked over his poem.  Or worked until the flash came.  Look at the way he builds up to those fantails, in the image that catches our hearts. He's already set us up with a roll toward something  ("TAKE, from the dresser of deal"), and then, after holding us in suspense with an unemphatic aside ("Lacking the three glass knobs"), given us, in what always forces attention, adjacent heavy accents (a spondee), the something that's going to be huge ("that sheet"), the hugeness prepared for by a longer roll of weakly accented syllables ("on which she embroidered") before the big one, "FANTAILS."  Oh lordy, FANTAILS.  Of all things.  In a bedroom of cheap pine furniture where the knobs keep falling off.

And then the pause forced on us by our inability to slide from "-ails" to "once."  Try it, there at your electronic device.  Then a pause.  We see her bent over, supplying a little artistry.  You can't read that sentence, you can't pronounce it, without seeing their importance.  Careful Stevens makes sure of it.  So, slight pause.  Then "once."  Long ago.  When she had hopes.  Now the boys with perfunctory flowers, and the girls, become "wenches," in "the dresses they were used to wear," not anything special, don't even take time to cover her feet.  Too late now for effort.

Up to here the imperative is addressed to the children and friends:  "Go ahead, you animals, you Sweeney, you Kowalski, hold your wake this way."  But the last two lines in each stanza are addressed to us readers, wanting (it's human nature) to draw a conclusion, a lesson, from this scene, and it assumes a particular desire: to find something redeeming in animal life.  The lines are a rebuke to that desire. 

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

"You think something higher rules human beings? No, we're ruled by pleasures, and not even importance-bestowing pleasures, nothing that gives us dignity and stature.  Low-level pleasures, like for ice-cream.  Rule by anything higher is an illusion, a seeming, that will be corrected at the end, in scenes like this."

That's bold philosophy, man, that knocks people flat.  If they haven't already been flattened by those horny feet, that dead chicken, ugh so extreme.  How did it ever come out of this insurance man, the fellow we see in a suit and tie and vest on Wikipedia, wearing the rimless glasses of the upper administration.  Flaubert, from his pedestal where the French avant-garde put him, gives us the answer in his advice to writers: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

The work is the practice of writing, a craft.  Do it well and you can become a literary celebrity.  Quite different from what you have to do to become a lifestyle celebrity — a difference that makes it very tempting to say that the Beats are all just lifestyle celebrities, their work a collection of signals and badge-flashes, their popularity a result of eagerness to pick up the signals and, with such ease, belong to the fraternity.  We can't say that because there obviously is craft in poems like Howl and there is genuine literary appeal.  It's just so hard to separate that appeal from the appeal of signals and badge-flashing.  Too hard and too time-consuming, I think, to fit into the good life.