Diary: Fragmentary Life

I passed a man and his young son on the street. I turned to look and caught a glimpse of the boy looking up at his father, having asked him something, with a look that was all trust and expectation. Nothing profound, nothing special; the scene was commonplace. But so much was told on his face, of how much he depended on this man, how much he respected him, loved him; how much a mystery this towering figure–just some guy on the street!–is to him. You can spot a loving father a mile away. I see them all the time. They haven’t a chance. Some of them know it. They can’t help but be committed, tireless, against all evidence. Some even understand–how can one not, in this day and age?–how ultimately futile their efforts at nurture are. Not that it would matter; you could prove beyond a doubt that every effort of theirs is pointless, that all is for naught, and they’d go on, holding hands, pulling up trousers, patiently answering questions.

You get these glimpses of other people sometimes that are too close for comfort. It’s as if you’ve stumbled into their homes. But they don’t know; I try not to look too closely at other people. I can go all day in public without making eye contact. I try to remedy it by looking directly at them sometimes. I can be very charming sometimes; I surprise myself. If it’s this easy, why don’t I just do it?

I’m interested in people; I’m always looking for something in them that will surprise me. But I’m mortified by the prospect of intruding on them, so I mind my own business. Still, you can’t help it sometimes; people intrude on you, wandering into your line of sight. You can’t spend your day looking at the ground–it’s been a bad habit of mine since childhood, to walk with eyes to the ground. But I instinctively don’t look people in the eye. In the city I’m often looking up–over the heads of people. You can do that in the city. I’ve always had a problem with other people, with relating to them. But I love the idea of people. I only now realize these things are related. It’s so much easier to appreciate people in the abstract than to love them in person. I like to walk the city streets to be among the crowd, but I rarely engage anyone. But then, who does?

But here was this little guy, an awkward kid, scrawny, sensitive, heartrendingly earnest; it was all there on his face. With no idea what’s really in store for him. But no; he has to have some idea what’s in store. He can sense what’s coming, and that sense is getting clearer along with the progress of aging, crystallizing into realization. Childhood is all premonition and foreboding and, maybe, hope. No one ever remembers the precise moment he learned what death is–do they? I don’t. It’s as if the understanding was always there, gradually taking form with the same inexorable, unceasing certainty of the physical growth and decline of which it is a part. The precise moment you understood death, that you came to know it, can’t be pinpointed because it doesn’t exist.

Everything outside the small world of a child is mysterious and grotesque, enticing and terrifying at the same time. You graduate into the once mysterious world of the adult beyond, and realize how vast childhood was after all. For all its greater dimensions, possibilities and dangers, adulthood is small, constrained and contained, its boundaries too early known, too early they become depressingly familiar. Speaking for myself, solace from this can only be found by turning within, and there I rattle around inside my psyche, tinkering like a hobbyist, fashioning rationales, molding denials, tricking out fantastic scenarios. I kid myself that I’m not like everyone else; I kid myself that I’m just like everyone else, as the moment requires.

I confess: I’ve imagined alternate lives, the life I could have led, should have led. It’s always better than this one. But then, just as the madman is always a reincarnated Napoleon, not a reincarnated Nobody, these other lives are better, more fruitful, more pleasing–I’m better. I can imagine these alternate Dennises do exist, right now, in neverending variation, an endless hall of mirrors out there, redeeming this dull life, this squandered potential, these venal sins. That moment, that deja vu moment we all have, when your life suddenly feels unfamiliar and alien and you find yourself tripped up and you think, like the song says, well, how did I get here?–maybe that’s the glitch-in-the-Matrix moment when you come too near on some dimensional plane to one of your alternate selves. Your frequency is momentarily lost to the interference.

I should imagine how much worse life could have been, as a sort of therapy. I mean, in my imagination I’m out here in the foggy ether of all possible realities, and the bottom is no more visible than the ceiling. But what would be the point? What I need is what we all need, what we can never have: to escape myself. Intoxication, meditation, medication, various obsessions: all these are means of momentary, simulated escape. I don’t disapprove, even if I don’t indulge myself in any of these, at least not any more.

When you’re a kid you think, hopefully, that you’re going to know things. This, I thought, was the true measure of a man. A man knew things. Cruder souls sought to acquire things. “He who dies with the most toys…” At least I thought knowing was my aspiration. He who dies with the most knowledge. But I’m lazy; I’m always content to know just enough. I stop short; “okay I get it” I tell myself with a shrug, and interest evaporates. The moment I pick up a thing is the moment just before I lose all interest in it. But knowing is not everything. Knowledge can only reduce the world–down to formula, predictability, measure ever more precise. Mystery is boundless. But you can’t fake mystery. People try. People are driving themselves mad right now, everywhere, trying to conjure up mystery and resuscitate wonder lost to maturity. Should I have sought “enlightenment”? I don’t know what that means. I should have been a man of action, I tell myself. Ha! I wish. I envy these men, respect them, but I do not understand them. I am another species entire–but what species am I then, I keep asking myself. I honestly don’t know.

So I couldn’t help but be moved by the sight of the boy. And I don’t think it has anything really to do with my own lack of a relationship to my own father–that was the last thing on my mind. It had everything to do with my relationship to my daughter, now grown; to that relationship lost, that position, as someone else’s towering figure, lost. Lost not in a flash but in a bittersweet, gradual dissolve; every parent is fated to diminish in his child’s eyes. I envy no one more than the young parents of young children. That I couldn’t see the beauty of it when I was young, that parenthood had to happen to me by accident, is less a shame than a mystery.

Because you have to keep repeating yourself, apparently

Originally posted in January, after that month’s Muslim atrocity on the streets of France:

 The “No True Scotsman fallacy” goes like this:

Smith: All Scotsmen are loyal and brave. 

Jones: But McDougal over there is a Scotsman, and he was arrested by his commanding officer for running from the enemy. 

Smith: Well, if that’s right, it just shows that McDougal wasn’t a TRUE Scotsman.

This is idiocy

Just as convention about racism and sexism is supported ultimately by a variation on the fallacious appeal to consequences–if racial or sexual variation in behavior and aptitudes were real it would be bad (or lead to bad things), therefore it (or race itself) does not exist–so too is the “not all Muslims” reflex something that any thinking person, regardless of opinion, should reject.

As one famous Muslim said:

Social justice warriors: all the intellectual depth of a Muhammad Ali, without the humor.

The Brown Inquisition

And why stop at the point fixed by the honorable Member for Oldham rather than at the point which would have been fixed by a Spanish inquisitor of the sixteenth century? When once you enter on a course of persecution, I defy you to find any reason for making a halt till you have reached the extreme point. 
–Lord Macaulay, 1833

Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
–Rise, John Lydon, Public Image Ltd

Ecstatic black power advocates have taken down a university president for, among other vague sins, failure to “acknowledge” his “white privilege”. The marginally black retired professor (as Joe Frazier once said deprecatingly of “black power” advocate Muhammad Ali’s choice in wives, “light, bright and almost white”; though maybe not so bright–see below) replacing him is himself a career diversicrat who just so happens to have been involved in the campaign to oust his predecessor, and–despite a career as a civil rights trial lawyer and law professor–appears to hold a child’s view of how assertions should be tested:

“How can anyone deny there’s a race relations issue on this campus? Are they not listening to the people who are saying there is? Are they calling all these people liars? That’s as bad as calling all of them racist. This is a problem because a huge part of our community agrees that it’s a problem.”

The video from which this is taken (labelled “Response to skeptics” and made before the professor’s appointment) is a fine example of the curious combination of delusion and condescension which is the current stuff of black advocacy:

 

First, activist leader Jonathan Butler confidently contends your doubting the assertion proves the assertion (If you don’t think there’s a problem you’re part of the problem).

Then the argumentum ad populum; the professor comes on to assert that if only enough people say there’s a problem, there’s a problem. Indeed, doubt is itself wrong; “as bad as calling all [skeptics] racists”. The professor seems to have lost the thread: that all whites (not just doubters) are racists is given; indeed, it’s the ultimate cause of the problem, as asserted by the “huge” moral faction he cites. Black students are under siege in a sea of white racism.
Even those white collaborators within the movement are tainted with “white privilege” that both makes them complicit and limits their ability to see the reality of white oppression. The irony gets lost in all the irony. It gets hard to keep up, so we should be gentle in our assessment of the sixty-eight year old professor’s ability to maintain pace. But he should be a real fire plug in his new role as administrator.

But the professor does have something on which to hang his argument: if enough reasonable (let’s be generous now) individuals testify to a problem, it’s overwhelming anecdotal evidence thereof. Yet when we get into these individual allegations they all tend to be trivial or strain credulity. Even the core allegations of boorish rednecks and scat-swastikas would be, in a saner world, laughable.
Then there’s the further problem of misplaced responsibility, which, as far as I can tell, hasn’t even gotten an airing. In all the hysteria, no one dares question just why a university head is responsible for rowdy townies.
Needless to say, that the infamous swastika might be yet another hoax likewise is an idea that no one with anything to risk can raise without the reasonable fear he too would be stripped of livelihood and reputation. Furthermore for what should seem obvious, that even if these things happened they hardly constitute a reign of terror. But this is par for the course now in America. Political convention regarding race is a shrieking fanaticism: it makes no distinction between the trivial and profound. Just as every problem arising from race relations is attributable to white racism; an infinite regress of racist turtles, all the way down.

But more to the point, and as is always in these cases, the hysteria ignores the running joke and gruesome reality of the American commons, evident to anyone not cloistered or imbecilic: the routine black intimidation of smaller, meeker whites that is a social constant.

Speaking of meek whites, coming on to complete the fallacious trifecta we get the ever-present white quisling, fittingly offering as proof the fallacy of emotion. Fitting because white fascination with black emotionalism is a core component of our dysfunctional relationship to them. If you could only see how glorious these black kids were in their anger, you would be shamed into conviction, says the Nice White Woman, not yet sacrificed to the Maoism of which she desperately partakes.

“I challenge them to really listen to the students. Listen to their cries. Listen to their voices, that are trembling with fear, that are trembling with anger, that are trembling with disgust, that are trembling with questions, if they should even be here at Mizzou.”

Tremulous indeed. But she stumbles on to something, despite her best efforts, with that last line. You have to wonder how much black emotion is just resentment of perceived inadequacy. If you’re black and attending a university for which you are not prepared, which may very well be the majority of black students, you have a choice: be a mediocre, failing student, or a romantic, winning victim. Extrapolate that beyond the university and black hostility to white culture, chauvinism and extreme territorialism about black culture and its “appropriation”, make perfect sense

Black culture is powerful–which is not the same as saying it’s good for us. Before civil rights blacks were compelled to emulate white norms but were not expected to excel whites in achievement. To essentially be second-rate white people.
Now, due to the seductive power of black culture and the perception of black superiority in those things a decadent society values, or at least obsesses over–sexuality, physicality, brutality even–blacks have managed to flip the American script. Faced with the same obvious racial differences but with the old restrictions removed, black culture is winning. Instead of a country with a minority black population emulating whites we’ve become a country with a majority white population emulating blacks. Uncle Tom is out; Uncle Tim is in.

But what this all amounts to is the ongoing persecution of whites for being white, masquerading as a struggle against white persecution of blacks, for being black. No intention, much less conspiracy necessary: just a tragic confluence of things that are always operative: human emotion, ambition, politics, stupidity, cowardice and, always, vanity. How will it end?

The Brilliant, Stunning, Perfect, Glorious and So Cute Mashably Buzzfed Style You’ve Got to See!

Respectable media has coalesced around a liberal-progressive consensus that brooks no challenge from the right on “social issues”. Social media is dominated by youth and conflict. Maybe this is all we need to explain the trend toward the language of wholly unwarranted hyperbole at lefty sites emphasizing the “viral”–so perfectly, stunningly, adorably satirized in this must-see tweet:

 Oct 22
“This 12 year old transgender prostitute gave the PERFECT response to his gift-giving 55 year old lover. So cute!” – Buzzfeed in 5 years.

One familiar trope is the celebration of the PERFECT! retort turned on a “troll”, such as George Takei’s “epic” comeback here:

With no respectable political opposition to the Left’s agenda on social and racial issues the media seems to have lost all sense of proportion. The most trivial Twitter exchange is heroic comedy to Buzzfeed’s cub reporters. Their daily posts come like war dispatches from North Korea’s official press; every skirmish is total victory over an inept and cowardly enemy. Of course, it’s all dependent upon who is smacking down whom, therefore, according to Mashable, “There is Nothing More Glorious than Watching Roxane Gay Shut Down an Internet Troll” who had the nerve to criticize her pot roast that was under consideration for a blog post (no joke):

  1. <div class="tweet js-stream-tweet js-actionable-tweet js-profile-popup-actionable ancestor permalink-ancestor-tweet js-disable-expando-descendants js-disable-inline-tweetbox " data-component-context="conversation" data-disclosure-type="" data-expanded-footer="
    9:02 PM – 3 Nov 2015 · Details

    ” data-follows-you=”false” data-has-parent-tweet=”true” data-item-id=”661770571919859712″ data-mentions=”juliamoskin rgay” data-name=”Joe Dobias” data-permalink-path=”/JOEDOEchef/status/661770571919859712″ data-screen-name=”JOEDOEchef” data-tweet-id=”661770571919859712″ data-user-id=”128979755″ data-you-block=”false” data-you-follow=”false” style=”border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 232, 237); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; cursor: pointer; min-height: 54px; padding: 9px 37px; position: relative;”>

     Nov 3
    6min to prep and hours to cook. Not hours to make. Pretty though. Not sure where mushrooms go in pot roast but ok!
    1 retweet3 likes
    Reply

    Retweet

     

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    More

You mansplained my dinner. That’s impressive.

Along with the tales of epic smackdowns, there is the sentimental “must see” piece that some would give good money to un-see, such as the mother surprising her fourteen-year old son with his first dose of hormones. But that piece didn’t feature the hyperbolic style (“Watch this Trans Teenager’s Emotional Reaction to Getting Her First Dose of Hormones”) so it doesn’t really count here.

But it isn’t just social media bundling reportage that bemuses with its breathlessness. Buzzfeed’s video production shop gave us a downright bizarre feature declaring “People of Color Re-Created Iconic Movie Posters and the Results are Stunning”.

Stunning examples of how much better-looking movie stars are than drama students, alas. We’ve seen the multicultural future, and it’s kind of homely:

 

I suspect the self-absorption, at least, of the young woman on the left is “stunning”.

Regression to the Mean Girls.

Bill Keith, 1939 – 2015

Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Bluegrass Breakdown

Leadership!

At this rate ¿Jeb? will soon become the greatest leader of all time:

Jeb Bush says he’s not reducing his presidential campaign, he is simply refocusing it with an eye toward the early caucus and primary states.
“We’ve made an adjustment in our campaign,” Bush said Saturday before conducting a town hall in the pivotal state of South Carolina. “That’s what leaders do.”

Or he could’ve gone with this angle:

Interviewer: “The last time [Spinal] Tap toured America, they where, uh, booked into 10,000 seat arenas, and 15,000 seat venues, and it seems that now, on their current tour they’re being booked into 1,200 seat arenas, 1,500 seat arenas, and uh I was just wondering, does this mean uh…the popularity of the group is waning?”

Manager: “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no…no, no, not at all. I, I, I just think that the.. uh.. their appeal is becoming more selective.”

This is an act of love, pendejos!

Maybe ¿Jeb? could get himself a cricket bat. I know I wish George HW Bush, patriarch of this disastrous clan, had used the stick a little more often and enthusiastically. Couldn’t have hurt.

Quote of the Day

Born-Again Sexuality

“Dreams of self-destruction, and probably many cases of suicide, are desires or attempts on the part of narcissistic individuals to give themselves a new birth by attacking themselves and thus bringing about self-fertilization.”
–Theodore Faithfull, The Mystery of the Androgyne: Three Papers on the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis, 1938

We’re not allowed to speculate any more on the motivation behind what used to be called “gender bending”: transvestism, transsexualism, etc. Indeed, that now quaint phrase seems destined to fall to the Maoist language police, suggesting as it does sexual identity is malleable and subject to human will and desire. Because while it might sound like that is precisely what the trans movement is about, it isn’t. That is, it is completely about that and completely against that.

While the theory is that sexual identity is a social construct free of biology that exists on a continuum–infinitely divisible, apparently–including as one such point the “gender fluid” individual whose sexual identity may change over time (but not, damn you, at whim), it also decrees that any suggestion this identity is not a congenital fact of birth (“born this way” in the slogan) is both immoral and unscientific. Thus the foundation of political homosexuality would be undermined. Because the movement is protected from criticism, this contradiction goes unexamined. Sexual identity exists like a particle in quantum physics, here, there, everywhere until pinned to a location by observation (or, in their case, declaration). Perhaps they shouldn’t speak of a continuum, but of a
probability distribution.

But it’s increasingly obvious to me the blossoming of alternative sexual identities is driven by two things: individual psychology and social influence. Like many or most of us in this atomized age, gender benders are engaged in a desperate, narcissistic quest to satisfy two conflicting desires: to establish their unique individuality, and to find their place in a community of their own. Sexual dysphorics who act on their dysphoria seek to effect their own destruction and rebirth. Whatever there is that’s “heroic” about it at this point has less to do with social stigma and more to do with defiance of Mother Nature.

I was struck by this thought when perusing a photo collage of feminists and coming upon the picture of a butch lesbian. Her look was actually an impressive, in its way, mimicry of masculinity: pompadour haircut, practiced smile, perfect flannel shirt. I couldn’t help thinking this woman might have been aware of a choice available to her: be an unremarkable looking woman, or an impressive caricature of a lumberjack.

Narrative Inversion, or, Lying Through the Media’s Teeth

We’re told the migrant wave into Europe is a mass flight from a dangerous war zone. Of course, wrong-thinkers keep pointing out the migration appears to be overwhelmingly male. Young, healthy males at that. National Review is here to reassure us, using the selective sentimental anecdote method, that this isn’t a great “invasion” of Europe by “military age men” (neither, presumably, a giant poon-hunt by horny Arabs, the Great Sexile) but merely an advance guard of hardy colonists with women and children waiting at home until they establish themselves in public housing on the European citizen’s dime. Then they’ll avail themselves of Europe’s family reunification policies to bring them along once it’s safe:

“They tell us, ‘We do this dangerous trip on our own, we get asylum, and there is a law in the European Union that the family can come,’” says Christof Zellenberg, the chairman of the Europa Institute, who has been heavily involved in volunteer efforts in Vienna. You see few newcomers over 50, he adds, because “this is a grueling trip, and you need to be young and strong.” 

Many patriarchs are well aware of the risks of bringing their families with them. Zellenberg says the migrants he’s worked with have told him stories of violent criminal smugglers who rape women and threaten men with guns during the journey. 

How many degrees of remove (if any) are those “violent criminal smugglers” from those working with NGOs to facilitate the migration and who are described warmly in other reports?

 Powerline dubs these men “anchor daddies”. The National Review article seems to think this is supposed to reassure us that, even though there’s still no effective screening to weed out terrorists (much less the latent terrorists who’ll be radicalized in European mosques after learning it’s not all pussy and cars in Berlin after all), it’s okay because it’s just that Europe hasn’t actually considered the real numbers of soon to be welfare-dependent Muslim families crowding into Europe:

But a future influx of families could another problem, as Zellenberg notes. Europe is already struggling to deal with the financial burden caused by today’s newcomers, who are pouring across European borders at levels not seen since World War II. If the majority of these men plan to bring families later, the current numbers are totally off. Multiply it by four or more, he says.

Oh, okay. Now back to photos of cute waifs.

So not only are the migrants not fleeing war zones for safety, they’re leaving the women and children behind in relative safety until they can comfortably travel (just waiting to hear about how Europe will be cowed into paying for their transport) into the great fatlands of the North.
A good narrative effort is adaptable and rolls with the punches. A lie refuted isn’t acknowledged but countered with another lie. Refute that and here’s another. Of course it all works because the referee is in on the fix too, but you still have to admire the skill.

Trump Agonistes

The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.
(…)
 The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
  —Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
–John F. Kennedy

And I will stir up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece…
Zechariah, 9:13

American politics have been upended by the Trump candidacy’s success in the face of sustained, coordinated opposition from the powerful. Has there ever been such a wide chasm between popular support and elite opposition? Trump’s unlikely popularity comes not merely as a shock but as a revelation, but what precisely has been revealed is debatable. Something is happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.

His detractors, despite their glib dismissal of his popularity as mere white male anger (the only anger they don’t valorize out of hand), don’t really want to know. So they’ll keep on with a strategy that, after all, should be working. And it may be that despite his remarkable run Trump is still just one gaffe away from the abyss. Or one cringing apology from it. That he hasn’t succumbed so far itself constitutes a secondary, collateral quandary for those who hold the commanding heights of the media. He threatens to expose the gaffe-apology cycle in American politics as the kabuki theater it is. Most of the time it isn’t the offense but the apology that kills or stalls an individual career. Just as its purpose is not to salve real or manufactured outrage–outrage is a valuable commodity in American politics–but rather to de-legitimize the line of inquiry or dissent threatened by any given sin of exposition.

Trump threatens to expose the reality that any given gaffe-scandal normally has little to it but the sturm und drang of media histrionics which might, or might not (for it need not, really) set off some level of popular anger. By this process the individual citizen is led to believe–now through the amplifier of social media (the force-multiplier of manufactured opinion)–there’s a groundswell of popular outrage and expert disagreement with a given assertion. Call it, contra Chomsky, manufactured dissent. As often as not the gaffe is simply a truth routinely suppressed. The gaffe cycle creates the illusion of consensus denying that truth and subverts the individual’s own perception of it, however obvious, causing him to doubt his very own eyes and experience.

Of course this can only go so far, and only go on so long before the deliberate nature of the suppression of the truth becomes as obvious as the truth it suppresses. If Trump achieves nothing else, his demonstration that one can not only survive opposition to the process but thrive by opposing it will constitute a significant contribution to the greater good. But he has to survive, or at least not die by gaffe. All the more reason for the elite to focus on this method of attack–to demonstrate it, still, is How Things Work and some things must not be said.

But his opponents will keep at it for another reason. Serious engagement with his immigration argument–the font of his popularity–threatens to legitimize a debate which the political, media and business elites have worked years to de-legitimize. Astounding as it is, immigration restriction hasn’t a single true proponent among mainstream national politicians or media outlets, despite the overwhelming popular support for it. That Trump exposes this remarkable anomaly is yet another reason to focus on the messenger. It really is “all about” the immigration, in more ways than one.

So it’s absurd to think that without the immigration issue, and the implicitly pro-white agenda of which it’s the centerpiece, he’d be getting anywhere. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump’s comically boastful roadshow succeeding with the same milquetoast policy prescriptions of a Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Far easier to imagine any one of his Republican opponents succeeding with his immigration policy than to imagine him succeeding with theirs. That’s leaving aside the lack of trust the public retains in mainstream politicians and the fact their donors would never countenance them taking such positions.

Still it’s clear Trump doesn’t succeed despite his image. Neither is it a matter of indifference. His style–deliberately offensive defiance–is ideally suited to his message, and that message is ideally timed, if not overdue. Trump’s open insulting of the individuals and opinions of the elite is seen, by a long-disrespected middle America and its sympathizers, as returning insult for insult. And it’s seen as a longtime in coming. We’ve long endured a cultural assault that has proceeded by insensible gradations and the concessions of a naive opposition to where we are now: open contempt for the white, heterosexual historical core of the nation is convention. That is what we mean when we write Narrative with a capital N. Donald Trump is the counter-Narrative.

His message is also seen as restorative honesty after seven years of strained hypocrisy under Barack Obama. From the moment he burst onto the national stage–with a platitudinous, insubstantial speech at the 2004 Democratic convention that was met with the overblown praise for any indication of black ability that is essential to conspicuous white guilt–Obama’s career has succeeded less by the man’s practical successes than by his acolytes’ determination that he be successful and their need to be seen celebrating that success. Obama’s success demonstrates the extent to which we’ve perverted the “Hebraic” strain in Western culture as defined above. That strain, that now would more often be called Christian or Judeo-Christian, compels moral correctness not just in deed but in thought. That compulsion which has been subverted into political correctness and, with horrifying irony, turned upon the heirs of Christendom and Western culture.

Trump, boasting endlessly of his accomplishments and wealth–wealth, to him, being the ultimate measure of accomplishment–represents a return to the Hellenistic view. He, in his vulgar fashion, celebrates the Greek value of arete, of ability and achievement as the ultimate virtues, over that Hebraic compulsion toward inner purification. Which is not to say unrestrained Hellenism would be better; the West has achieved greatness through, however you like, the synthesis or struggle between these two strains. Trump’s impolite frankness is a vulgar Hellenism, valuing knowing, opposing a perverted Hebraism, valuing feeling. 

Even in his obsessive branding, putting the Trump name on everything he builds, he exhibits a core element of the Greek value of arete, where the highest goal is to make one’s name immortal–as opposed to the Hebrew goal of making the soul immortal, in part by eschewing just this sort of  Hellenistic “vanity”. It’s easy to see how the two have combined to create the Western mind, and how one–not always the same one–tempers the other. If you want to ascribe Trump’s success to angst, I suggest you consider a real and justified angst that the Hebraic impulse has been perverted, co-opted and turned first against the common people and then against the West–against itself, in a sense.

It isn’t as if the elite has ever abandoned the Hellenistic value of arete; on the contrary, they jealously keep it for themselves and demand of the common man a perpetual Hebraic contrition. The common man is hectored into a permanent state of moral self-doubt for, among other things, his “racism” and “xenophobia”. It just so happens keeping him in this state–particularly regarding immigration and multiculturalism–serves the purposes of a global politico-economic elite. As the Church Lady from Dana Carvey’s old SNL routine would say, “how con-veeen-ient.”

So, while the individual elites strive to make their names immortal, they offer to the common man the immortality of the soul, even as they scoff at the very idea, bound up in religion as it is, of a soul and its judgment in the hereafter. It’s a blustering con, and it’s perhaps fitting that it’s revealed, intentionally or not, not just by a member of the elite that uses it, but by this bluffing and blustering member of that elite.