Trump
I can't remember now what I expected, but I am surprised how the bull shit is snowballing even week to week. You'd think they would want to pace themselves.
That said, I do think I've made some sense out of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" assertion. Really I don't know what she meant, but I think it may be true that there are sociologically valid facts that are not "true" but that a substantial percentage of people believe anyway. Rather like religion. Actually a lot like religion.
If large numbers of people are determined to believe a given conspiracy theory or that their favorite invisible sky-faeries have a particular characteristic, then these statements are "true" for them even when they are not true in any objective sense. The question then becomes, Why do they believe these particular statements? And to answer this "why" question you don't need journalists but psychologists and sociologists. And, as with Franco's Spain, scientists and journalists are only seen as being beneficial to society when they support the distorted view.
Avoiding needless synthesis
Today I was helping an online friend reduce the word count in a piece of fiction she's working on. This got me thinking about the "don't mention things that are not crucial to your story" rule and how William Faulkner breaks this rule -- and how glad we are that he does. Just thinking about Faulkner took me back to Methodism and it occurred to me that Methodism played a similar role in America in the 19th century to the role Puritanism played in England in the 17th century. (And Calvinism in Europe in the 16th century?)
So I'm seeing a natural (human?) cycle here but I'm not seeing synthesis in the Hegelian sense. If the secular trend in European history is the thesis, and the frantically religious response to that is the antithesis, where is the synthesis? As with the political fluctuation in the final century of the Roman Republic, I see a social machine getting more and more out of balance and on the verge of flying apart, not a culture on the verge of achieving some compromise viewpoint.
The Classics
Recently YouTube has decided I'm interested in seeing clips from the movie Gladiator -- and my then clicking on them hasn't discouraged this. But seeing these clips has got me thinking about Rome, and then Greece.
When you read Thucydides and Xenophon, or Livy and Polybius, you inevitably come to identify with the Athenians and Romans. The Athenians are just so modern. And after learning the art of war and the art of politics by reading the history of generation after generation after generation of Romans, you feel like you are a Roman. So it's easy to overlook the reality that by their glory times both states were pretty despicable. Perhaps they are despicable in ways that are easier for us to comprehend than was the case with many of their contemporaries, but that doesn't change the fact that they were a nasty lot that you wouldn't want anything to do with if you weren't a member of their gang.
It's hard to not wish there was some way Alcibiades could have been brought back into the Athenian state to lead their defense against the Persians, but then again, it's hard to argue that they didn't get exactly what they deserved.
It's hard to not wish there were better defenders of the Republic at the end than the insufferable Cicero and the vapid Cato. But even if we accept Cicero's account that he wasn't the usual rapacious provincial proconsul, he was supporting a system that was rapacious to the core. Again, it's hard to argue that the Republic deserved to continue in the form it had taken at that time.
And all this is equally true with America. Even if you give us a pass for our first hundred years on account of the times, even if you forgive the unparalleled terror tactics of WW2, as poetic justice for what the Germans and Japanese started, I don't see how you can justify the sins of the post war years. And even if you do decide the Cold War is an adequate excuse for what we did to the Congo and Chile and Somalia and all the rest, that still leaves everything since 9/11.
So, when it comes down to it, Trump is just an instance of reaping what you sow and of just desserts. I still hope American Democracy will prove strong enough to shake off this disaster, but if not, it's not like we didn't have this coming.
Pork People
I'm back at Coffee to the People after having breakfast at the Pork Store. I'm sitting at a different table and this one, I'm delighted to find, has a concert poster for "Not In Our Name" an anti-war benefit in Berkeley from 2003 headlined by Ani Difranco, who I love. Cool.
Absalom
p321 Shreve imagining Bon, "...It should have been me that failed; me, I, not he who stemmed from that blood which we both bear before it could have become corrupt and tainted by whatever it was in mother's that he could not brook...."
p323 Still Shreve talking to Quentin, "...and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girls' nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something young in the cedars like he never saw before..."
I haven't a clue what Shreve/Faulkner means by this, or what Ivan/Dostoyevsky means by "sticky little leaves", but it would seem there's some male descriptive tradition here that I've never known about -- though I wonder if it can be traced back to either Goethe or Byron. In this day, however, "sticky buds" sounds like potent cannabis.
"besides knowing that that sherbet [Judith] is there for you to take... and him [Bon] not used to that since all the other cups [women] that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn't contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine..."
I must confess here that it's never occurred to me to compare women to beverages. Now I'm also wondering what beverage I would be. This is why reading is so valuable :-|
Next Shreve speculates about how incest might differ from other "fleshly encounter[s]." The idle curiosity of sister-less boys.
Troy 2
Still reading that other book. Finished the part where he covers what is now known about the Hittites and Mycenaeans (some) and about the Trojans and "Sea Peoples" (next to nothing). For someone who has spent far too much time reading and thinking about obscure areas of history (and philosophy) I have very little interest in subjects we are unlikely to ever know much about. The best case scenario would be our discovering some historical text -- carved into clay, probably -- by a precursor of Herodotus. How would we ever be able to judge the veracity of his (or her) account? Maybe "alternative facts" go back a thousand or more years BCE -- in fact I'm sure that they do. (I really like Kellyanne's "alternative facts" coinage. This is a term the study of comparative religion has always needed.)
What's more important? What actually happened over 3000 years ago or what the Attic tragedians, and Homer and the others, were able to make of it. Just as what actually happened to the characters in Absalom, Absalom! (nothing, in fact) is less interesting than what Quentin and Shreve see in this Rorschach-like story.
You can even say that what Trump does will be less interesting (though it does look like it's going to be compelling TV) than what the rest of us do with this situation. Will this turn into America's "Finest Hour" or, as an article I read suggested, is this just a Hegelian thesis, antithesis situation waiting for a synthesis.
My tendency to see American history as an echo of the Roman Republic is consistent with this Hegelian view, I think. Though I'd never thought of Roman History in that way. I've always viewed the swings between the popular and senatorial Roman factions as like a machine falling out of balance and finally toppling over. But I guess you can see the Empire as a kind of synthesis. And of course the core of this synthesis was that, while the Roman people continued to hold elections and the offices of the Republic remained, the real power was removed from their hands. If anyone before had doubts about why one would want to do that, they should be gone now.
Though I still think there is a chance for a synthesis that preserves the Republic. But that could change if The Opposition can't get it's shit together in the next several years. If instead we go all Italian, I'll have to reconsider the desirability of the Imperium.
Finally
Our rains are finally letting up. On the one hand I don't mind: We've got a good supply of water and snow, and I would like to start getting back to the gym regularly. On the other hand, now people are going outside to smoke again. Now we'll get to see if the air cleaner I bought for myself at Christmas actually works.
