CSotD: Carrying on as if we did
Skip to comments
I don’t know how many times I’ve alluded to this, but if you’re never seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it’s time you did, because the question of “truth and illusion” is currently far more relevant than it was 60 years ago.
The drama is a cross between Theatre of the Absurd plays like Endgame or Rhinoceros and the dialogue-heavy suburban work of Alan Ayckbourn and while it’s exhausting, it brings up a mindset we have to deal with anyway.
Watching George and Martha go through an evening of drunken performative cruelty provides us with the necessary critical distance to see the genuine performative cruelty surrounding us. And while I’m not a fan of awards, its list of honors is impressive and includes some major names in cinema.
Bennett makes the connecting point: Trump’s primetime speech the other night was a trip into the clouds, a collection of misstatements, invented stats and disinformation in which the illusions far outweighed the truth.
It provokes the same reaction as watching George and Martha weave an evening of insults, accusations and false claims: The point is not to sort truth from illusion but to wonder if anyone can tell them apart?
Matson notes the smile and the deliberate gaslighting (another movie you should see, btw), but, as he suggests, people know that prices are going up and that jobs are declining, while claims of an A++++ economy seem more dishonest than encouraging.
People may be catching on, but, to be fair, we should remember that when Jimmy Carter leveled with the people, telling them things weren’t going well and that we all had to pitch in, the response was to elect cheerful, encouraging Ronald Reagan instead.
People hear what they want to hear, and believe what they want to believe.
However, we experienced a series of politicians like Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Bobby Kennedy who knew they lived privileged lives but made an effort to recognize and respond to the needs of average people. Perhaps you had to be there.
Marie Antoinette’s famous-but-fictional “let them eat cake” was based on her alleged assumption that, if people were out of bread, surely they had brioche and other pastries. The point was that she couldn’t imagine what real poverty was like, which is why the saying has caught on and, as Markstein says, is the attitude adapted by our own insensitive royalty.
It seems funny when Trump says people have to show identification to buy groceries, and when he treats the term “groceries” as if it were exotic. But that’s the separation between his experience and yours, and the problem isn’t that he’s never been in a grocery store in his life, or that he doesn’t have to live from paycheck to paycheck.
It’s that he doesn’t recognize his privileges, nor show any real interest in anyone else’s situation. That’s how you can happily toss paper towels at hurricane victims.
That’s how you can go on TV and tell everyone how well they’re doing when they know they’re living paycheck to paycheck and barely that. You have no idea how they live, and no interest in finding out.
The lies and the lack of empathy sting more than the actual deprivation. Slyngstad points out the falsity of Trump’s “Warrior Dividend,” a bit of showing off to make him seem generous.
But there’s no generosity involved: The money he’s handing out was approved in the budget to update the housing allowance for low-ranking military members.
Trump just wanted to sound like the Big Man, though handing it out as a lump sum instead of applying it specifically to housing costs may be more damaging than helpful. How many people will put it away and budget it out at $148 a month to pay the rent?
And where will they get that $148 each month if they don’t?
Davies is right: We’re all trying to get by, but we’re not even speaking the same language.
In Tale of Two Cities, the marquis sees that his carriage has run over and killed a small child, so he tosses a few coins to the parent and can’t understand why his gesture is not received well.
But, for the marquis, it was still the best of times. You don’t need to be a history major to know how that ended.
The question of “What did the President know and when did he know it?” is being answered by vandalism and bizarre fantasy. Morland shows Dear Leader sitting on a gold toilet and writing on the walls of the White House, but the reality is not a whole lot more dignified and certainly not any more honest.
Posting lies and historical nonsense on the White House walls seems a sign of a man losing his grip on reality, but the positive aspect is that a can of paint could restore sanity and history. The bad part is that, in the meantime, there will be people so loyal to authority that they will allow their sense of reality to be poisoned by this delusional partisan nonsense.
That is, after all, how the mythology of the Lost Cause was embedded in our history after the Civil War: Promoting comforting, colorful illusions in place of uncomfortable truths.
Fortunately, like the nonsensical plaques in the White House, Trump’s egocentric need to have his name on the Kennedy Center is a personal fantasy, unless Congress votes in favor of the idea. And you’ll note that there aren’t many references to the “Gulf of America” these days, nor are we reopening Alcatraz.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Okay, not exactly “Of the Day,” but the pair does lay out our options. Trudeau joked about Honey keeping peace with a fading Mao, and I had this clipping on my office wall because I, too, had dealt with irrational despots and her method worked as well as anything I’d stumbled across.
I suspect it also works better than replacing Donald Trump with JD Vance, which seems likely to just make Project 2025 run more efficiently.
Besides, the way the 25th is written, it’s up to the administration to make the call. Seems unlikely.
Keep the faith.
Comments 8
Comments are closed.