375. Three Versions of Elite Blindness: (1) Coastal Blindness

First there's the blindness of coastal elites to the plight of white rubes in the Heartland — Rustbelt and South.  Liberal bloggers, following Michael Moore after the election, lament it so: "My hat off to the man from Flint [Moore].  He understood the frustration and anger of those in the Heartland.  We out here on the coasts totally missed it" (Daily Kos, 11-8-16).

That's  a failure common in all humanity, blindness to the suffering of others, and though the American version is probably no worse than most, it will be cited more eagerly.  Conservative Americans jump at the chance to hang an Insensitive tag on liberal Americans and liberal Americans would rather blame themselves than assign the blindness to human nature.

Assign incapability to human nature and you're doing what dictators do.  "Can't you see what a mess the country is in?  Common people aren't capable of governing.  They don't have the intelligence.  You need an uncommon person.  Like me."

There's the end of democracy, and any role for the liberal elite.  And there rises the prime fear in any political faction, fear of its own death.  Which becomes fear of germs.  Can't use the word "stupid" for Trump voters.  It'll make us sick of the common man.  They must be "frustrated."  Intelligent people "angry" at an injustice done to them.  By us?  Oh yes, if necessary.  Much better than to have the only cause be inability to control the juices that rise in them at a rally.

So coastal blindness, blindness to the inability of Trump voters to think about what they hear at a rally, to listen to the words in the way schools teach them to listen, that blindness in the liberal elite on our coasts is in large measure a deliberate blindness.

This is not to be confused with professional blindness, another ailment found in coastal regions.  If, within journalism, your profession is polls you want your conclusions from them to be manageable by your readers.  American readers can manage what David Paul Kuhn concludes about the exit polls in last Sunday's Times, that though "much of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a jerk...they supported the jerk they thought was more on their side — that is, on the issues that most concerned them."  They could not manage a conclusion that they supported Trump simply because they were jerks, vague about the issues, unsure about their concerns, and unable to control their juices when he created issues and concerns, honorable, honorable concerns.

It's a contest between two pictures of voters, one as rational weighers of issues and interests, the other as emotional responders to gut appeals.  Accept the second picture and you lose your analysis, and probably your readers.  The first wins not because the second is an insult to the common man but because it's a handicap to your career.

Next: the blindness of humanities elites to science.

374. How Shakespeare Anticipated Trump

Once again Frances Cornford's poem (Post 349), the man's ear to the woman's words as to his guitar, plucking and listening before the two "begin to play."  This time the contrast is with Donald Trump talking, there in the trailer with Billy Bush, about the way he plays it.  All grab and gobble.  No ear, no brain, all cock.

I hear adolescents displaying their cocky credentials to each other.  "See what a man of the world I am."  Women have little to do with it, except as accessories to the display. 

It's been heard differently.  Those close to him hear "locker-room talk," a temporary descent.  We might hear it that way too if we could see what it's a descent from. 

A teacher of the guitar or love poetry would be suspicious of  that "temporary."  Some descents can have permanent effects. Hear "locker room" for a while and you don't pick up "sitting room" so well, the language of daily affection, that tune, that prelude.  Your eardrum has been thickened, your ability to listen and tune and really play.  As adults do.  Call this "locker-room talk" and you accommodate deafness and retardation.

Shakespeare, as so often, is ahead of us in identifying the type.  Here's Gloucester in King Lear, speaking of his illegitimate son Edmund to the Earl of Kent, who has just said, of Gloucester's words,  "I cannot conceive you."

Sir, this young fellow's mother could: whereupon

she grew round-wombed, and had, indeed, sir, a son

for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed.

He ends with a breezy confidence:

though this knave came something saucily into the

world before he was sent for, yet was his mother

fair; there was good sport at his making, and the

whoreson must be acknowledged.

And Edmund, the son, is standing right there.  Hearing his father say (if we may translate into Trump talk), "Yeah, he's a bastard but his mother was a dish and we had a lot of fun conceiving him.  I have to recognize the son of a bitch."

Talk about deaf and insensitive! How did he get that way?  We don't know but a good part of it must have been privilege, male privilege and British-gentleman privilege, something he's used to.  Part of his insensitivity is his inability to recognize that Kent has transcended it.  Just another knight with whom you could exchange barrack-room, or club-room, or after-dinner smoking-room, talk.

I smell misogyny, or at least a belittling of femininity, in there too.  Gloucester, like Trump, probably considers sensitivity feminine.  Only pansies play soft guitar.

But this is Shakespeare, friends, and no disrupter of the God-established order of feeling creatures is going to go free.  Gloucester, like any parent, can't help teaching his children.  What he teaches Edmund in that speech is that father-son feeling is dismissible.  "All right, so that's the way it is," thinks Edmund, and there goes son-father feeling.  The way is clear for him to betray the old man, and bring on the terrible scene where Albany, free from any feeling, gouges out his eyes ("Out, vile jelly!").

And there is Shakespeare, making sure, through Edgar speaking to Edmund, that we see the connection that even in our amoral age feels moral, a law.  "The dark and vicious place where thee he got, cost him his eyes."  That whorehouse where you kissed away marital order, love and daily affection, feeling for wife and children, was no playground for moral vacationers.  It was a dark and vicious place, spawning more darkness and viciousness.  Extending to you who brought it on.  The disruption will be repaired and the order restored.

Restored even though the disrupters in this society — Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, their followers and, for a time, Gloucester and Lear — are so many and so powerful that they have made disruption look normal.  A step further and "disrupt" could become the buzzword for them that it now is for us.  But no, this is Shakespeare, and the moral order, though driven underground, will reappear.

Gloucester sees it when he, blinded and humbled, says, "I stumbled when I saw."  When he stumbled into that whorehouse, yes, but worse when he stumbled into the locker room in front of Edmund.  Decency and feeling, father-son feeling, reassert themselves each time Edgar, the legitimate son, moves closer to his father.

That's probably as far as we should push the comparison, the adolescent male elevated to significant disrupter, but the reason we can't go further might be worth some thought.  Trump is a character in real life, not a character in a play.  With Shakespeare's characters you could readily believe that the disrupter's triumph would be temporary.  All God's universe was against him.  The order of the heavens, the hierarchy of creatures on earth, the ranked faculties of man, the whole Chain of Being, testified to it.  He'll have his day in the sun, but just wait.

Also, in Shakespeare the man who disrupts can learn.  Learning goes with the human being's place in God's order, between the angels, who know everything intuitively, and the animals, whose instinct tells them nothing important.  Man can learn because he, the one creature who can do it, and needs to, was given reason.

Also, he can suffer.  Unless he's become impossibly callous he can feel his own and others' pain.  And be taught.  Bareheaded Lear in the storm, feeling for homeless wretches ("Oh I have ta'en too little care of this"), is an example of this learning.

We, without going way past acceptable elitism, cannot assume that Trump is incapable of suffering and learning and changing.  But the evidence is not encouraging.  Listen to him for a while and you conclude that the normal order is not likely to return through this leader's return to it. 

How then?  We have nothing like the Elizabethan's guarantee that the present disruption will be temporary.  For us no eternal heavenly order, no fixed natural order, no Maker of It All, no reassuring picture pasted in the backs of our heads (see E. M.W. Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture, to fill in what I'm talking about), nothing to back up the moral order and assure us of its return as Shakespeare's audience was assured. 

With that guarantee gone all we can hope for is that there is something in human nature to replace it, something innate that produces love-supporting systems like Christianity.   I don't know if we'll find such a thing but I know that we hunger for evidence of it.  I know my own hunger as the news program runs though its string of terrorists and mischief-makers, hackers and scammers and trolls and Wall Street crooks, when natural depravity seems to be the unavoidable, final doctrine.  Oh for some evidence, a shred, some  show of natural empathy, a sign that man is not, down deep, way down deep, a selfish animal but a feeling creature.

The producer of the news program knows that the hunger is there and gives us Looking Up, the final segment.  The food we hunger for, evidence.  A child gives her toys to a refugee child, a stricken invalid makes life easier for the more deeply stricken.  We feast on it.

Well, that feasting certainly makes the case for the hunger; the case for the evidence, the food, is a different matter.  Anecdotes aren't reliable evidence.  The question about our species is still open.

And I'm not going to try to close it here.  I can't see anybody closing it.  But I can see, as a long-time teacher of classics like King Lear, a more widespread understanding of the question, and of the relation of people like Donald Trump to it.  It's (no surprise) through those classics.  Liberal education.

And a more widespread understanding of that education's enemies.  Start with Donald Trump but go on to Pink Floyd, "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control."  Measure that stuff against the classics.  Did Gloucester need some education?  Are people who read and understand King Lear going to keep flocking to Trump rallies?

That looks like an easy question, but it's not closed.  For years the well-read, the civilized, the American elite, the people now lamenting the flock to Trump, flocked to Pink Floyd and a hundred other voices of barbarism.   Gangsta rap and gangsta-colored rap.  They lapped it up.  They loved what Trump loves, the poorly educated.  Look up to those now in tears over his flock-love and you're looking up to people who basked in it.

So where do you look?  I have to say (no surprise) back at the classics.  Start over.  Liberal education.  Western civilization.  Get it straight.  So  you can see where you wandered.

373. The Christmas of the Trump Election

What was it that made me think of Hollis Summers, Ohio University's own poet (and Distinguished Professor), as I put down another despairing state-of-the-nation piece in the New Yorker?  I looked back through my collection.  Ah yes, there it was, in one of his annual Christmas poems, circulated to his friends.  The words "reasonless season."  Here's the poem:

Unsequined, squinched, squenched into winter,

lately belittled by ailing bones,

we have announced, if only to each other,

if only in whispers,

No Christmas Cards This Season,

no notes this reasonless season.

We have seated ourselves in the rear

of all our auditoriums,

thinking no joyous merries,

considering only our blatant miseries.

And, inevitably, we have confronted the backs

of all the heads in front of us.

We have been compelled to concentrate

on the backs of basic, friendly heads.

And, mental telepathy being what it is,

 you have turned to consider our staring.

Here you are, bearing magic admonitions.

Here we are, smiling back at you.

      Be joyous.      Be Christmas.

Laura and Hollis

And this made me think of another of his poems, appropriate to our season.  It's in Seven Occasions, and titled "Very Well."

Very well, very well, very well, very well,

I respect his circumstance,

Remembering his father's arrogance

And his mother's compulsion to tidy hell

And the unfortunate seasons of his upbringing

In an utterly withering place

Wearing his straight winter face

Among the most odious of odious siblings;

And I understand the universal hex

Placed upon men of paradox

Who walk both liberal and orthodox

Among depressions, wars, and sexes;

I accept him totally, with study

And the aid of your mental riches,

But you are both sons of bitches
And I am tired of loving everybody.

372. "Stupid," a Dangerous Word America Needs

I hate where this post is going to end but I am going to start it anyway, with this: the right word for Trump followers who believe these fake news stories (like that Hillary Clinton is behind a child sex-slave ring operating out of a pizza parlor), the right word is "stupid."  Not "deprived" or "left out" or "despairing" or "victimized," which you may use after looking into their position in society.

Those words may apply but I think many of us use them now simply because we're pressed to find words that leave us with approved emotions — sympathy with the suffering, desire to make up for neglect, indignation at oppression.  "Stupid" leaves us with, or reveals, contempt.  Once allowed, maybe, but not now.

The trouble with those customarily approved words is that they don't fit.  Think Trump supporters are "deprived," go to northern Ohio with the New Yorker reporter, hear the Trump line from construction workers, find out they're making 40,000-50,000 a year, and there goes "deprived."  Go to a Trump rally (via TV), see such a wide range of people all worked up by obvious untruths, and there go the rest of the customary words.  Left is the one word that fits them all, "stupid."  

We can justify our use of it by saying we're "calling a spade a spade," and accuse others of euphemizing by adding, "and not a dirty shovel," but in any age we resist words like "stupid." Because they give pain. 

More interesting now, though, is our resistance to them because — my guess —  they transfer our attention from something extrinsic to the creature to something in its nature, and give us a much more difficult problem.  You can clean the dirt off a shovel but a spade is what it is.  You can change "bad schooling" and "poor health" and "economic deprivation" (to use alternative problem-labels) but confronting "innate disinclination" you're helpless.

That's disinclination to study and I believe there is such a thing.  Some students simply would rather talk or tweet or daydream than buckle down at a desk or do their homework.  They don't have much against dropping out in tenth grade to work on cars or have babies.  They can be of any color or gender.  And they think Trump is great not because they have been left out but because they have not learned the things in school that would tell them that Trump is not great, that he is false-great.  That they are falsely worked up.

If there's one thing that Western educators try to do it's to improve students' ability to distinguish the true from the false. To make them less credulous.  That's what made the West powerful and prosperous, loss of the credulity and superstition that held other cultures back.

All right, that's the task the West handed its teachers, to pass on a critical view of belief.  And here's what else it handed them: capitalism, the engine of its prosperity.  In capitalism you go for profit and if there's more profit in selling things than in telling the truth about them you suppress the truth, or put a spin on the false, making it appear true.  Eventually you have what we have now, a culture full of hokum.  Smart people making money off of credulous people.  In every mail, from every telephone, on every screen, hokum.  Fine-spun, coarse-spun, we're up to our eyeballs in it.

And in every living room, suspicion.  When a dollar's at stake you can't trust anybody.  Even the New Yorker and the Economist, farming out their subscription campaigns, feed us hokum.  Everywhere but in schools, it seems, people are doing their best to make us comfortable with it.

And in the middle of all that comfort appears the teacher now, say at the door of a Trump rally. "OK, time to get serious.  Election time.  Get uncomfortable with falsehood.  Remember what you've learned.  Ready, set, discomfort."

Maybe you expected teachers to succeed. "We're paying all these people so much money to implant respect for truth, surely, when the chips are down, that respect will kick in." 

You don't know the odds.  They are about forty to one against the teacher who tries to lift the weight of culture from a student.  You're not going to hear truth whanging the scales.

So?  Do something about your culture, America?  No, too big a job.  But there is a little job we can do.  With language.  Go back to words that give pain.  Pain, we forget, is the earliest and most powerful teaching device.  Nature, to teach us, makes sure we feel pain when we do things that lower our ability to survive.  Mothers teach us through pain that anticipates nature's pain.  "Step off the curb before I get there and you get a smack."  And it works.  So, pedagogues, don't knock pain.

When we're older, mothers substitute disapproval for the smack.  Pain is still the object.  We're supposed to feel it when we take up with glue-sniffers.  Disapproval introduces a much broader pain.  When somebody you respect, somebody who knows you, and knows what you are capable of, and looks forward with hope, when they disapprove you get a smack you feel all through your psyche.

Think of a preacher.  In the standard model, a parent substitute.  His job (in my day always a man) was disapproval, making people uncomfortable.  My colleague Max Pullen (maybe some of you will remember him) showed what a firm idea he had of that job when we went together to a church where he sensed far too much comfort.  "I could hardly listen," he said of the sermon, coming out.  "All love.  Nothing but be comforted, you're loved."

"What do you want to hear?"

"I want to hear, 'Listen, all you damn people, quit doin' what you're doin'.'  Those are sins.  Knock 'em off.'"

I hear the speech he, dead now, would have us make to our former students: "Listen, all you damn graduates, quit swallowing this stuff.  It's hokum.  Spit it out."

If teachers now, not wanting to go as far as Max did, settle for a  "stupid" call, they still have what Max and his preacher had behind them: the respect of their listeners, who know that the teacher and preacher know them, know what they are capable of, and hold high hopes for their future.  A "stupid" from them will really hurt.

Even if they hear it only in their mind's ear.  "What are you, stupid or something?"  At the rally.  "Oh, oh, Max sees me."  They begin to see themselves. "What are we doing down here with these glue-sniffers?"

It might be easier to overcome our reluctance to use "stupid" if we remember how easily and usefully it has been used in our literature, in earlier times.  In England's neo-classic period it was used without hesitation, and precisely for the contempt in it.  Dryden's departing king of dullness describes his chosen heir, Thomas Shadwell, thus:

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years.

Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he

Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Then in the next generation there was Pope with his Dunciad, finding stupidity right and left.  The new king, "a demigod of stupidity, the true son of the goddess Dulness" (Wikipedia),  was the popular entertainer Colley Cibber, who had "a brain of Feathers, and a heart of Lead."

Of course Shadwell and Cibber would be hurt, but if mediocrity presumes to play in this league this is what it gets.  Readers of English literature, sophomores of the future, will thank you, Messrs. Dryden and Pope, for keeping these bushers out of the anthologies.  As future Americans will thank you, plain-speaking teachers, for keeping bushers out of political conventions.  Damn the shame and pain.

I'm too far out of it to know how far we've given up on shame and pain.  My conservative friends tell me that under liberal dominance we've gone nearly all the way, as seen in our quickness to forgive underperformance on grounds of deprivation — of a race, or a class, or a region.  Behind it, no doubt, were the softies who earlier forgave undone homework.

I have doubts about that, but I have no doubts about one thing: that homework is what America now needs most.  In which case it would be good for students and teachers to lower on their walls all other slogans, all that comfort, all that might excuse.  At the top no assertive politics, no ethnic pride, no self-worth.  "It's the homework, stupid."

And here comes the ending I am afraid of.  Maybe you can see it.  No, it's not that I have put a stamp of approval on ugly talk, not that I have enfranchised cruelty and licensed insensitivity, though that's frightening enough.  It's that I have paved the way to fascism.

I laid down the stones with my contempt for stupidity.  Fail to qualify this and you've got contempt for the common man, now commonly "the populist," who can vote whether he's stupid or not.  The most dangerous terms are to me the most fetching, the ones from baseball.  You want a winning team you keep the bush-leaguers off it.  This is serious major-league business.  And government is serious business, serious as a World Series.  Playboys, featherheads, amateurs never rising above the bush leagues, don't deserve to conduct it. 

So there you are, on your way to dictatorship or some other form of autocracy.  If you call the common man stupid you are saying that democracy is built on feathers.  That's stupid so —here you go — let's build on something solid. Like intelligence or learning or skill.  As found say, in this elite group, or this dictator here.

371. Seven Rules for Surviving the Trump Term.

1. Pay attention only to what President Trump does.  If you think about what he says you'll blow your brains out.

2. Pay no attention to what his admirers say about him.  If you do you'll waste a lot of energy controlling your impulse to blow their brains out.  Or making tortured jokes about your attempts to find their brains.

3. Pay no attention to what his critics say about him.  If you've listened to him up to now you already know what he is.  You can skip most of the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, as I have been doing for weeks.   It's redundant.  Redundant knowledge, redundant evaluation, redundant attitude.

4. If you miss witty take-downs (Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins) go to publications (Mad magazine) or anthologies (Alexander Pope) taking down somebody else .  Trump is too easy.

5. Don't get worked up over little things, over symbolism, over potentiality, over the darkly menacing, over anything without perceptibly injurious consequences.  Save your energy so that when Trump commits the big offense, the action (it has to be an action) that will clearly hurt the country you'll be ready with plenty of energy, and won't have wasted it on petty indignations.  The principle here is The Principle of Parsimonious Outrage, and every efficient activist adheres to it.

6. Picture yourself at the top of a slippery slope.  It's long.  Four years.  Your companions, brought to the boiling point by the rising in-house heat (liberals have echo chambers too, you know), maneuver shadily, want to go outside the law, pull some dirty tricks.  Cabals of the enlightened and good.  In the open he's blocked at every turn.  Half for what he is doing, half for what he is.  A crisis, forced.  He's in the wrong.  Such a dog.  Any stick to beat a dog.  Who cares now if the sticks are legal or the beating fair?  A dangerous dog.  So we make an exception.  Just this once.  We'll go back to the laws as soon as the danger has been met.  And American democracy ends.

I'm having you picture an apocalypse, and all us enlightened people hate that, but don't be too sure the picture won't in fact come together.  More unlikely ones have.  So work against the coming together.  Don't even start putting the pieces in.

7. Never applaud ugliness, even in the name of the beautiful, even to head off ugliness.  Ugliness begets ugliness.  Trump ugliness begot the ugliness, the condescension, the offensiveness, of publicly lecturing one of his associates who had innocently attended a beautiful play.  Such insensitivity is never allowed when you're facing one on the good side, or indeed, any human being with feelings.  But these are monsters, so your people claim an exception. 

But you don't claim it.  You stop the movement right there.  You're against adding any pieces to a picture that might turn out to be apocalyptic.

370. The Ghost of Revolutions Past

This man is too much to bear.

"You fight for the rights of the people, you fight and fight, you win, you finally get an election, you think you've given them what they want, and what do the damn people do?  Elect somebody who's against elections.  A Muslim in Algeria (1990, expected) and another one in Egypt (2013, done).

 "Just the way the French people did, twice.  Bloody yourself overthrowing the king, get an election, and the people, the wonderful people, elect a bunch of royalists (1797).  And then, after all your effort on the barricades, they give you a second Napoleon (1848).  In a landslide."

  So what do you do?

"You throw the bastards out.  Can't have a Muslim, now, as president of a democracy.  His religion will keep him from maintaining it.  Are you going to wait until he actually does something undemocratic?  No, a Muslim president is too much for any democratic people to bear.  Throw him out, day one."

And throw your country, your party, your supporting press, your thinkers, into confusion.  Throw out, rather than fail to re-elect or impeach, the most unbearable monster, like Viktor Yanukovich, and you've thrown out democracy.  I know, he was a Russian lickspittle, but he was an elected Russian lickspittle.  You expect that to just settle in the bottom of the tank?

"But Yanukovich was a very bad man.  Right up there with Hafez al Assad, and Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi.  You've got to do something about such people.  'All that's needed for the triumph of evil is that the good do nothing.'"

Yes, do something.  Some dumb thing, half the time.  But do it and you'll have plenty of company.  History is full of democracies brought down by good people throwing out bad people.

"But if the one that's elected is not just bad, is an unbearable monster, how can the people live with him?"

By deciding that democracy is worth the price of living with a monster.  And sticking to the decision for the whole term.  Working to stick.  Downplaying his monstrousness.  Crying out only when they're really hurt.

"I know some people right now who are going to need that advice.  But I'll tell you, the monster they're looking at is going to make it terribly hard.  Month after month, week after week, day after day, for four years they're going to have to live with him.  In their faces."

Oh I know the monster and I feel for them.  What a strain, keeping their minds on their tradition through every hour, every news program, every speech, every tweet, through all that time.  Bearing the unbearable.  Never in their history have they faced anything more trying.  And I have never felt more sympathy as they set out.  God bless them, every one.