As Hoffer observes, The
inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The
decent, average people who do the nation's work in cities and on the
land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best
and the worst.
“The superior
individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce or
industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do
individuals at the other extreme—the failures, misfits, outcasts,
criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had
one, in the ranks of respectable humanity” (1) the latter being
an exhaustive description of our would-be Caesar.
“The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both; hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking—hence the proclivity for united action.” (2)
This describes tRUMP and
all that he represents to the proverbial Tee. The war on the Obama
administration and all that went before—the war upon the world he
inherited. The need to waste and wreck, the vandalism of
institutions. And the chaos that follows.
The early recruits are
among the most disaffected. Hoffer lists several: the poor, misfits,
outcasts, minorities, adolescent youth, the ambitious, those in grip
of vice or obsession, the impotent, the inordinately selfish, the
bored, the sinners. (3) There are reasons that tRUMP makes war on
education claiming to love the uneducated and counts the nations
motorcycle gangs among his greatest supporters.
The Poor:
“Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay. They shudder at the thought of life outside their familiar cesspool. Even the respectable poor, when their poverty is of long standing, remain inert. They are awed by the immutability of the order of thing. It takes a cataclysm—an invasion, a plague or some other communal disaster—to open their eyes to the transitoriness of the 'eternal order.'
“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the 'new poor,' who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire to their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement. It was the new poor in seventeenth century England who ensured the success of the Puritan Revolution. During the movement of enclosure, thousands of landlords drove of their tenants and turned their fields into pastures. 'Strong and active peasant, enamored of the soil that nurtured them, were transformed into wageworkers or sturdy beggars;...city streets were filled with paupers;. It was this mass of the dispossessed who furnished the recruits for Cromwell's army.
“In Germany and Italy the new poor coming from a ruined middle class formed the chief support of the Nazi and Fascist revolutions.”(4)
Abject poverty makes not a
revolutionary. It isn't simply that a pall of permanence descends
upon the victim's head, it isn't simply that all self worth and self
confidence are beaten, by intent and by circumstance, out of the soul
of the downtrodden. It's also because of, in modern parlance, the
dysfunctional behaviors into which one is bred, born and
raised. All this, after a measure, assumes the cloak of normal.
Divorce, domestic violence, terror with and intimidation by the
unfamiliar, all lead to a lack of striving—interpreted by the
larger society as laziness and sloth. They are comfortable in their
cesspools, as Hoffer puts it, not out of devotion or attachment but
out of fear and intimidation. This is why poverty is so intractable
and why the poor are hard to politically motivate.
“The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate. Every meal is a fulfillment; to go to sleep on a full stomach is a triumph; and every windfall a miracle. What need could they have for 'an inspiring super individual goal which would give meaning and dignity to their lives?' they are immune to the appeal of a mass movement.”(4)
No, it is those who
suffering downward mobility, those who have fallen are fear
they are about to fall who are the fodder of mass movements.
The Misfits
Here
Hoffer lists the temporary misfits; young adults seeking niche in
life, people going through serious life changes, divorce, career
change, unemployment, which he describes as...”restless,
dissatisfied and haunted by the fear that their best years will be
wasted before they reach their goal. They are receptive to the
preaching of a proselytizing movement and yet do nt always make
staunch converts. For they are not irrevocably estranged from the
self; they do not see it as irremediably spoiled. It is easy for them
to conceive an autonomous existence that is purposeful and hopeful.
The slightest evidence of progress and success reconciles them with
the world and their selves...
“The
permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some
irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which
their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in
other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they
undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never
pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of
that which we really do not want, and that we run the fastest and
farthest when we run from ourselves.” (6)
These
words could have been lifted verbatim and applied by Donald tRUMP's
niece Mary who has recently published a book about her uncle
entitled, appropriately enough, “Too Much and Never Enough: How
My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man”. It was Mary
who leaked the trove of financial documents to The New York Times
that revealed to the world that in the 1980's tRUMP the
businessman lost more than a billion dollars.
Totally
lacking in talent, with every defect of body and mind, Mary tells
about how his sister did Donald's homework and that he hired a bright
friend to take his college entrance exams. It remains unclear who
took the tests and who did the homework while in college, but it is
clear that he he learned nothing. Growing up in his father's shadow,
Donald sees himself as irredeemably spoiled—that is, worthless.
How else does one respond to being exiled from home and shunted off
to a military school? That no matter what he achieves will never be,
in his mind's eye—seen in his father's reflection--enough. So he
adheres himself to a movement, rising by the basest means to lead it.
Speaking always in superlatives, his outlandish pomposity and
grandiosity belies a shattered sense of self-worth. He is always in
motion, always deflecting He is always running, but never arrives.
He's running to stand still.
This
is the picture of our disgusting Caesar his niece, a clinical
psychologist, confirms to the nation. The inordinately selfish
seeing perhaps unlimited opportunities in the presidency and bored
with the litany of failures that daily visited tRUMP tower, from
forays into the airline industry, to casinos, wine production, steaks
and even a 'university', Disgustus, always drawn to shiny object
settled upon nothing less that the presidency itself. Commandeering
an emerging mass movement was, given his age, Donald J. tRUMP's last
chance to become somebody. And the adoring multitude sees in
him their own yearnings and their own reflection. Man makes god in
his own image, likewise the multitude. Our Caesar Disgustus is
nothing more and nothing less than a mass conceit.
An
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh
Flush
this turd, November 3rd.
______
- Ibid. Page 29
- Ibid. Page 30
- Ibid. Page 30
- Ibid. Page 31
- Ibid. Page 32
- Ibid. Page 50
No comments:
Post a Comment