Much as I dislike writing about politics, I have recently noticed some strange resemblances between the current occupant of the White House and the Roman Emperor Nero:
Actors. Nero appeared before the Roman public as a poet, musician, and charioteer; while our president was famed as the actor in a reality TV show called “The Apprentice.”
Wrecking. Nero purportedly burned down a large part of Rome so he could build a gigantic palace for himself called the domus aureus, “The Golden House.” Our president is destroying the institutions of government that he feels do not benefit billionaires like himself.
Praetorian Guard. Nero was murdered by his own Praetorian Guard. Our president, on the other hand, is developing his own Praetorian Guard called ICE. To date, they have not murdered him.
Low-Class Supporters. The provision of “bread and circuses” to the Roman masses made Nero popular among lower class denizens of Rome. Whereas the persecution of various minorities is popular among the red-hatted MAGA supporters of our president.
So far, our current president has not directly ordered any of his family murdered, but if I were Melania, Donald Junior, or Eric, I would not sleep well of nights.
When I used to write ads for the software company whose director of corporate communications I was, I was always running afoul of management, who always insisted that I put a positive spin on every point I made. Anything that could possibly be seen to be negative was to be avoided at all costs.
Being a bit negative is a part of my Hungarian heritage. When your country is on one of the two main invasion paths into Europe (the other being Poland), you can’t help a certain amount of negativity. It’s part of our nature.
I feel there is something wrong about always being positive. It tends to encourage the persons on the other end to be passive and accepting. Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, writing in The Captive Mind, a book about why people accepted the promises and lies about Communism, quotes an earlier Polish novel from the 1920s:
In this story, Central Europeans facing the prospect of being overrun by unidentified Asiatic hordes pop a little pill [the pill of Murti-Bing] which relieves them of fear and anxiety; buoyed by its effects, they not only accept their new rulers but are positively happy to receive them.
In an article entitled “Murti-Bing Conservatism” written for The American Conservative, Rod Dreher develops this idea:
For Miłosz, Polish intellectuals who capitulated to communism and Soviet rule had taken the pill of Murti-Bing. It was what made their condition bearable. They could not stand to see reality, for if they recognized what was really happening in their country, the pain and shock would make life too much to take.
This is why people who have no financial or status tied up in protecting abuse of corruption within an institution can nevertheless be expected to rally around that institution and its leaders. Those who tell the truth threaten their Murti-Bing pill supply, and therefore their sense of order and well-being. To them, better that a few victims must be made to suffer rather than the entire community be forced to wean itself from Murti-Bing.
In the United States, we are facing a similar situation today—all the way from the opposite end of the political spectrum. It is not Communism that is the cause, but Trumpism. Millions of voters who are either ignorant or disingenuous choose to believe that water runs uphill and that the current President is spouting truth when in actuality he is lying like a rug.
I recommend that anyone interested in what happens to this country read Milosz’s The Captive Mind. It is by far the best book about Communism I have ever read.
Oh, and the Tower of Babel? That’s what happens when our sense of reality has become so fragmented that our society begins to fracture.
From Ancient Greece Comes the Story About Who We Are
This is a reprint from a blog that I posted eight years ago. I would not change a word. Except: Note that I was not at the Santa Monica Library today.
In case you are not familiar with this ancient tale by Aesop, here is a retelling from a website called Fables of Aesop:
The Frogs were tired of governing themselves. They had so much freedom that it had spoiled them, and they did nothing but sit around croaking in a bored manner and wishing for a government that could entertain them with the pomp and display of royalty, and rule them in a way to make them know they were being ruled. No milk and water government for them, they declared. So they sent a petition to Jupiter asking for a king.
Jupiter saw what simple and foolish creatures they were, but to keep them quiet and make them think they had a king he threw down a huge log, which fell into the water with a great splash. The Frogs hid themselves among the reeds and grasses, thinking the new king to be some fearful giant. But they soon discovered how tame and peaceable King Log was. In a short time the younger Frogs were using him for a diving platform, while the older Frogs made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly to Jupiter about the government.
To teach the Frogs a lesson the ruler of the gods now sent a Crane to be king of Frogland. The Crane proved to be a very different sort of king from old King Log. He gobbled up the poor Frogs right and left and they soon saw what fools they had been. In mournful croaks they begged Jupiter to take away the cruel tyrant before they should all be destroyed.
“How now!” cried Jupiter “Are you not yet content? You have what you asked for and so you have only yourselves to blame for your misfortunes.”
In the archaic L’Estrange version, the moral is: “The mobile are uneasie without a ruler: they are as restless with one; and the oft’ner they shift, the worse they are; so that government or no government; a king of God’s making, or of the peoples, or none at all; the multitude are never to be satisfied.”
As I sat down reading in the Santa Monica Main Library this morning, I noticed that the people seated around me look as if they had lost their battle with life. One black man alternately wept and swore; and a bearded youth in a hoodie kept calling his family to beg money for his anxiety medications. The coffee shops are full of people with notebook computers, undoubtedly using social media to communicate with people they don’t know or really care about. The natives appear to be restless.
This restlessness is probably what elected our current President, who is very much like Aesop’s King Stork. He seems to be comfortable only with billionaires and despots. And what can we expect from him? The answer, in one word is covfefe, and lots of it—brown, gooey, and pungent.
This will be my last election-related post for a while. Not because I am satisfied with the Trump dictatorship, but because my own personal happiness depends on a positive response to bad government. Most countries go through bad spells, and it was inevitable that, over a long lifetime like my own, I would encounter it at some point.
I am reminded of a quote from Russian Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky: “If one is fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore….”
Well, I am some 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the Pacific Ocean. I do live in the provinces, so to speak, compared to New York City or Washington, DC. And I am becoming increasingly aloof, especially when someone tries to engage me in a political discussion.
Times like these call for a more creative inner life. I will spend more time reading, meditating, and watching classic old movies. And much less time watching late night comics or news on TV. Also, most important, I will spend more time with my friends.
As we head toward the culmination of another anxious election season, I suddenly had an inkling of what could happen. Donald Trump has always relied on rallies where he speaks with a bigly group of mostly young supporters with posters and MAGA hats at his back.
These rallies vaguely resemble the rallies that Trump’s hero, Adolph Hitler, staged in the 1930s. Of course, they couldn’t hold a candle to the giant 1935 rally in Nuremberg which was filmed by Leni Riefenstahl and released under the title Triumph of the Will. Now that was a real rally, with over 700,000 supporters in attendance.
Hitler Rally in Nuremberg 1935
The thought came to me that the whole Trump moment in American history will end badly. The electorate is largely made up of two groups:
People who hate Trump with a passion
People who idolize Trump with a passion (but who will come to hate him when they wake up and find out they have been used)
What I think will happen at some future date is that those faces at MAGA rallies will become a mark of shame, and that people will scan photographs of the rallies with magnifying glasses to find neighbors they could blame for their predicament, which will probably get worse over time. (Even if it doesn’t, the voters will think that.)
I look at cars that bear political bumper stickers and think, “What happens if they park their car in a neighborhood which is strongly ‘anti-’ their candidate?” That’s one of the reasons my car is devoid of bumper stickers and decals.
Height Is the Only Advantage for This Mental Midget
Today I watched the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and her opponent. There couldn’t possibly be two candidates who were more different from each other.
Trump’s only advantage is that he is almost a foot taller than Harris, and America is a country which tends to over-reward candidates who are tall. I myself am of medium height (5 feet 8 inches, or 1.75 meters), though because of a pituitary tumor I had from an early age, I was the shortest male in class throughout my elementary school years. It was only after the tumor was removed at age 21 that I grew to my present height.
There have been statistics to the effect that greater than average height is a clear advantage in politics, business, and wooing. My own thinking is that the height advantage, while real, is no guarantee of success.
At today’s presidential debate, it was Kamala Harris who stood tall. She was quick to react, made frequent eye contact, and even began by going to Trump’s podium and shaking his hand, which no doubt surprised the ex-president to no end. Trump, on the other hand, looked like the grumpy old man that he is, wanting to chase all the darned kids off his lawn, and speaking with a cold, constipated rage that made me think we probably wouldn’t live out his term if elected.
To begin with, I am not a great lover of the news media. In fact, I believe that if somebody wants to have a good night’s sleep, they should not watch or listen to the news after dinner. And certainly not the eleven o’clock news just before bedtime. It’s just not healthy, because those news outlets are peddling fear or outrage as their primary product.
One example is what I call the “Somebody Sez” news story. Just to give you an example, here are a number of headlines I just gleaned from the Cable News Network (CNN) website tonight:
Biden could face obstacle getting on Ohio’s ballot, secretary of state’s office says
Retired judge says statute cited in Trump’s motion raises concerns about NY judge
Republican lawmaker says Russian propaganda has ‘infected a good chunk’ of GOP base
Retired US general predicts Israel’s withdrawal won’t prevent an invasion
Republican strategist says Trump has made a critical mistake in the campaign
CNN apparently relies on an army of “experts” who “say” certain things or “predict” certain outcomes. It is possible that none of these things come true, but they can certainly succeed in riling up the consumers of the news.
Let’s take a more biased news medium, the Salon.Com website. Its readership obviously does not wish Trump well. (Neither do I, for that matter.) But its page today bristles with chatty “experts”:
“Punk”: Don Winslow on Donald Trump
“This is a big deal”: Experts say Judge Cannon’s order signals “bad news” for fate of Trump case
“Things just got very real”: Legal experts say Jack Smith appeal threat “puts Cannon on notice”
“Trump is running scared”: Legal experts slam “harebrained” scheme to get NY judge to recuse
Profs: Trump ruling unlocks key evidence
Experts “very worried” at Cannon’s order
People, it’s not news until it actually happens.
It is possible for editors to avoid this type of rampant supposition. For example, I could find no examples of blabbing experts in the NBC or CBS news sites. Apparently, they are more interested in reporting the news rather than creating it.
I was watching the National Geographic Channel last night when suddenly I sat bolt upright. On her show entitled “Trafficked,” Mariana van Zeller investigates a man who flew to Mozambique to claim an inheritance, only to find himself in jail for attempting to travel with heroin in his luggage—heroin disguised as candy that was given to him by a man from South Africa to give to someone in Nigeria.
Nigeria? Oh oh! Can anything legitimate have anything to do with Nigeria? Apparently, there is a term in Nigerian Pidgin describing the types who are so imprudent as to turn up in Africa for their “inheritance”: that term is maga, which means “easily fooled idiot.” On the show, Van Zeller interviews a masked Nigerian baddy (no doubt a Prince) who points out that the man imprisoned in Mozambique is nothing more than a maga for actually showing up to claim his non-existent inheritance.
Ha ha, it is to laugh!
So when all those flyover country chuckleheads show up at Trump rallies wearing their MAGA hats, is it merely a case of self-identification? “I’m an easily fooled idiot. Lie to me!”
Aaron Rogers: Quarterback, Trumper, Anti-Vaxxer, and All-Around Dickhead
I had a choice of two ways to go for today’s blog. Instead I took a third way. The first way was to continue writing about poet and printmaker William Blake, one of my all-time favorites. Then I was thinking about Aaron Rogers implying of ESPN that late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was a pederast in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle of sexual deviants.
The third way turned out to analyze why I am triggered by the bad behavior of Trump and his followers. To the very core of my being, I despise what Trump and the Trumpites are doing to this country. But my political opinions are of no great interest to anyone. So many Americans, so many raw wounds that won’t heal, that keep on being re-infected!
It strikes me that my blogs about things that interest me make for better reading than blogs about my political opinions, especially when they involve the culture wars of the 21st century.
So tomorrow I return to writing about William Blake, a great artist and poet. Tomorrow, I’ll post some of his poetry. If you’d rather read about Aaron Rogers, trust me: It’s just too depressing for words. Even when I write them.
Tarnmoor 
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