Rebecca Solnit: the loneliness of Donald Trump
Rebecca Solnit: On the corrosive privilege of the most mocked man in the world
The man in the white house sits, naked and
obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his
understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know
somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and
like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time
too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions
with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced
himself king of the air, and is in free-fall. Another dung-heap awaits his
landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a
self-made man.
Arendt advocated for the importance of an inner dialogue with oneself, for a critical splitting in which you interrogate yourself—for a real conversation between the fisherman and his wife you could say: “People who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.” Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning.
It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.
Arendt advocated for the importance of an inner dialogue with oneself, for a critical splitting in which you interrogate yourself—for a real conversation between the fisherman and his wife you could say: “People who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.” Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning.
It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.
Once upon a time, a
child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by
bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it,
and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon
the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion
crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his
own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then
moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful,
or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until
they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for
seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat,
steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind,
grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.
He was supposed to be
a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and
women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them,
running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack
of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as
he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the
enforcement was wobblier and he could stay afloat. But his appetite was
endless, and he wanted more, and he gambled to become the most powerful man in
the world, and won, careless of what he wished for.
Thinking of him, I
think of Pushkin’s telling of the old fairytale of The Fisherman
and the Golden Fish. After being caught in the old fisherman’s net, the
golden fish speaks up and offers wishes in return for being thrown back in the
sea. The fisherman asks him for nothing, though later he tells his wife of his
chance encounter with the magical creature. The fisherman’s wife sends him back
to ask for a new washtub for her, and then a second time to ask for a
cottage to replace their hovel, and the wishes are granted, and then as she
grows prouder and greedier, she sends him to ask that she become a wealthy
person in a mansion with servants she abuses, and then she sends her husband
back. The old man comes and grovels before the fish, caught between the shame
of the requests and the appetite of his wife, and she becomes tsarina and has
her boyards and nobles drive the husband from her palace. You could call the
husband consciousness - the awareness of others and of oneself in relation to
others - and the wife craving... Finally she wishes to
be supreme over the seas and over the fish itself, endlessly uttering wishes,
and the old man goes back to the sea to tell the fish—to complain to the
fish—of this latest round of wishes. The fish this time doesn’t even speak,
just flashes its tail, and the old man turns around to see on the shore his wife
with her broken washtub at their old hovel. Overreach is perilous, says this
Russian tale; enough is enough. And too much is nothing…
read more: http://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/
read more: http://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/
