Old King Trump

Two-hundred and forty years after the repudiation of the monarchy, the United States has elected a king, Old King Trump. And like the petty fancies of George III, the state must now take the personality of the ruler to heed. The state must bend and twist according to the mood of the king. His ego must be appeased, his attention sought, his whimsy anticipated.

'What will the king do?' they said because they knew the king answered only to himself, or his god.
'What will Trump do?' they say because he cannot answer for anyone. And that is what makes him king. He answers only to himself and not to the office - not to prescription. He is king - therefore.

It is a servile nation that bends to the caprice of one man. A nation demeans itself if it submits itself under personal rule. America, don't submit! Never submit! Resist! George could count on the native credulity, the ordinate structure, ignorance, and the sclerotic preservers of establishment to continue in the fashion to which he was accustomed. They would bow to his feverish brain. Is America really going to bow to the fevered imagination of a man who has always had power centred at his hands? A man who has only known how to talk, never to listen. No! Never give in! Never submit!

Perhaps I exaggerate. Yet...the facts: Who inherits his business empire? His sons - the primogeniture of kings. Who, says the king, is damaging the country?  Foreigners. Who lives in his tower? The king. Who has contempt for the rule of law? The king. Who makes all who come before bow to will? The king. Who may lie without consequence? Then king. Who has mistresses? The king. Who has foreign wives? The king. Who lair is gilded? The king. Who has supreme contempt for the lower orders? Take a guess.

There is not a person on this earth who cares less about the poor than Donal J. Trump. And yet...and yet he was elected as their champion! Frauds force us to see our wicked ironies.

It's a twenty-first century America that has elected a monarch. There have been many kings but the one who Trump most resembles is Louis XIV. Ostentatious, arrogant, absolutist, surrounded by gold, vein, pompous, pampered, promiscuous. A king who encouraged the divisions in his courtiers so their only common ally was himself. A king who worshipped the sun. A king who reigned on division. Will the courtiers (cabinet) not vie for Trump's attention like a retinue? Will not Trump's impulse be to stamp his authority on congress (parliament)? The worry, the fear is that Trump will imitate Louis in one other way. That Trump will be the Louis who said, 'I am the state.'

A king elected is still a king.

'Grab 'em by the pussy', what lady of the court could refuse?  How does Trump gets away with it? Only because he is king. How else? Who else would there be that such a thing wouldn't have disqualified them from high office. It is allowed because the memory of long millennia, serfs to kings, is dormant in the blood. It only needs a king to re-assert, and the impulse to dismiss arises. It is like the hypnic jerk that we get even though we no longer live in trees. The ancient habits aren't so easily removed from the DNA. But what is shocking is that it should happen to America, fountain head of liberty, meeting place of the thorough individual. To elect a king...and the most unpopular one at that.

What is needed therefore is resistance. The congress must not bow to him. He has already undermined, like the little king he is, the judiciary. He has already set foreign potentates on notice. Stout yeomen, the salt of the rugged and ready, they must resist the gaudy king. Precisely the reason
he bares no comparison to presidents past is because he isn't a president but a king. He will not treat anyone as though he is a president, therefore do not expect protocol from him as a president. Do not acquiesce to 'unusual' circumstances. Resist and stand up for the liberties you believe in. Do not acquiesce to party line, but examine your own conscience.

Now that we live in the reign of King Trump I, let's not waste time. This man is just learning his kingliness. It only gets worse. I will make one certainty: If there is a second term there will be a constitutional amendment. Then, for the sake of all that is good and decent, there should not be a second term of Trump, lest there be a third. For what is there for Trump after being king but to be a god.

And never has a president of the United States so departed from the office. Truth must lie somewhere in a bed of ironies. Because Trump is the most unsuited to be president and yet the best suited to be king. And yet he is president and presides like a king. Ah, will these sharp pricks of shame stop? Is America so far through the looking glass that it can't spot a main-street fraud when it see's one? Our is a species that has the potential for progress. So it galls to know we always have to live with stupidity and so progress must be marred with the anchor of our species, our past. But if only we could govern with the superior argument and not the superior motive. If only we could override the limbic with the thinking brain. If only.

A government is only really as strong as its opposition is strong. This is a fine irony Trump can never understand. That in the interests of the country a government secretly relies on its adversaries to improve its own argument: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Trump, being a king, and a once smart person and now degenerate, cannot understand. Instead there is only thesis which to him is the beginning and end: a very fine definition of absolutism.

My cat, bless her, is neither American nor a man and so is supremely unlikely to be president. But I am with brutal certainty sure that it would be better suited. And I am biased, but is it so satyrical? What America has elected is a decadent king who is a product of both distracted brains and selfish quantities. Of fools and frauds. A rallying cry to power; A spur to the tribal; A tavern to those who want the strong man; A ballroom to the dancers of corruption; A soviet rattle to 'the programme'; A hale to Robespierre and his committee; A promenade with dictatorship; A lance at the indefensible; A shot at the weak. Mr. President, what have we done? What have we done. Don the noble caps? No, doff them. We are not noble. Noble since when? Yet, there is that thinking part of our brains that demands progress as if it was a universals force. But we, primitive beings, we can't do it. Our stupid vanities intercede.

What he does is make everything quite simple. Trump is a king to be adored or overthrown. That is no mere satire. Do you think he cannot live on praise? How it degrades the human spirit to have to praise such a beast! Therefore over throw him. That is the only decent thing to do. That would be the first American president ever overthrown. The first American Leviathan. The body politic cannot be one man. That is what is meant by separation of powers. The famous few didn't write the constitution for a king to be the state.

Therefore America, it must be Trump, only for one term. For the preservation of American democracy, and so by example world democracy, Trump must only be president for one term - the dignity of man rests upon the point. And so then humans can hope to reason and logic and progress to govern. Then we can move closer towards progress. We can learn on the backs of each other and so reach higher.

Alas, King Trump is, and at last that should send a boot up the arse of those still strumming their beards, or stroking their hair. There has never been a man so vile to be president.

We were children when we used to sit and watch the purple dusks and think they meant the future. In those hopes, did ever a tyrant hove into view? Did ever it occur to the child-brain, that the exponential future would be turned by tyranny? Do you take pleasure in clouding over the sweet dreams of the young. Now Trump will want blood, he will want blood because he is a primitive. And his distracted nature demands action. Alack, alas, the middle class will eat up his pudding of bullshit. What can decent people do? They can resit, they can fight. King if he must be, must be king only of his own vanity. He must be disavowed. A man such as he, though cannot be disqualified, must not be elevated, elected. Most of the people can be fooled some of the time, some of the people can be fooled all of the time, but all of the people cannot be fooled all of the time.

Do not be fooled.

Recognize you have a king.

And Fight!

Wine...

A book of verse, underneath the bough,

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness -

Ah, wilderness were paradise now! 

— Omar Khayyam

One thing that is devastatingly obvious when reading Wilde is how wrong received wisdom is, and also how right it ought to be. Or how the frivolous is serious while the serious frivolous. The abiding lesson, which is Socratic, is how things should rarely be taken at face value and why it is necessary to always question tradition, the consensus, conclusion, bias, even the nature at one's own fingertips. That the only descent object of things, as Algernon poses, is to argue about them. 

Why then should we accept as stone the notion that the object of life is to extend its length? What if in that length there is no extension of pleasure? Or that love is necessary for the happy life? Or that symbolic gestures as the gravestone have any value? Or that university education produces qualification? Or that observance of form leads to result? Or that slavish obeisance to doctrine has moral benefit? Or that simple living is best? Or that having sovereign contempt for mass opinion is evil? Or indeed anything? 

What is needed therefore in our culture is the pre-eminance of the dialectic. Pre-eminance of argument not agreement. The peace that the conclusion is nothing - the method everything. We attach to high a token to equality of mind, to passive agreement where at such a crucial moment sound rebuttal is needed. I understand the impulse, the need to co-operate, the urge to seek pattern, the native impulse to avoid conflict or to quickly resolve it. Society needs common. And it is a bore who is always contrary. Yet consensus is terminal. It soon gathers dust. It quickly becomes moldy. The object is less important than the way, the end less than the means. What is needed is a ready face for argument, a willingness to entertain paradox, a stomach for unpleasant facts, a mind that can know its limits, a heart for irony and courage in the blood. 

Paradise is knowing it doesn't exist; joy is knowing life has a full stop. We smile broadly realizing utopia can't be, that it is an insidious project. We like to know why there is a wilderness in the centre of our civilization and a citadel in the jungle. That truth lies in the contradiction not outside it. The simple mind cannot appreciate such things. The culture is ruled, therefore, by the simpleton if it is governed by reductions. The simpleton, the idiot then is the enemy, yet what latitude and credit he is given. How in great esteem is the stupid held in our culture! How earnestly his opinion is sought! There is nothing wrong with our race producing stupidity, each to his own. But that it is sought out... I say this to criticise one grave fault. The idiot is either a reductionist or an anarchist. Neither is concerned with the means and only ever with the end. Neither knows the argument and both claim the answer. There is a strange respect for idiocy. And there is a parlous desire only for conclusion.

This brings me to wine, itself a culture. Wine, woman and song being the triptych of the pleasant life, the unambitious life, the life that doesn't strive for riches or reputation has been uttered all beyond cliche and is so charred in the marrow that it's as if we are born with such words on the lips of our newborn crying. Perhaps I wax too lyrical. For this trope is also a primitive one. There's much competition where it concerns wine and women, and plenty of argument over song enough. How animals have fought over sex! It's makes the eyes water with incomprehension. Yet wine is the chief of them all. Women for the species, song for pleasure of heart and mind. But wine interconnects, between the corridors of the mind it bleeds. The sum of our culture seen from afar may be no better than the iridescence of bacteria. Beautiful it may be, it doesn't do much. Wine makes folly of our great achievements, and in so doing makes them better.

But I can't leave wine so easily. Because, it is the favored cup of the wordsmith. You could well as ask where would the poet be without the pen as without the wine. What use, ever, was a sober poet? The point of the lyrical was to take you out of the common. Don't therefore be too hard a judge on the poor writer. To boot, if the society's ambition in its culture is set as the tide, then the poet must drink to soar. Vacillating between low and a little less low, what kind of sobriety is the benighted letter-monger supposed to maintain? It's just as well the grape, grain and hop manufacture inspiration by the drop. And by the drop it bleeds into the world.

This essay has not centre nor point. The writer stares out the window perhaps as the monk did in his labour. Only he hopes for serendipity. While he scribbles, perhaps the cosmos whispers. It whispers that grand irony. That we are wild animals, with primitive brains attempting reason and civilization. And that if we were to create us anew, we would want nothing like the humans we see around us. That there are so many things we would want to improve and not be labored with a brain that is a sliver away from murder and rape. So, while we retain the stamp of our primitive past we must feel pity for ourselves. And should there be need of consolation, seek not god's or doctrine, but scribe's thought. For he knows more the he dares tell.

Style?

What is the best literary style? It is a facile question. The best literary style, if we are to honestly attempt an answer, is that which suits the story. This, as would be expected, is so many crumbs thrown to dust for the literary sycophant. They cry that you prevaricate and are the perfect child of facetiousness. Yet look what they demand. Nothing less than the book written and all ready for them. as well as a detailed analysis and blueprint of its production. You want to know what style to write in? It's easy, first you get a life.

And writing is such a simple labour. What is it but an individual sitting with a pen looking at the sky, through a window or in his head, and trying to understand. And where the train goes, style follows.

It seems to me that the aim of a good deal of criticism is to seek out what is in the most vaguest terms called the truth. To dissect style from story or sense in this goal is of little value. The style must, after a fashion, be the story. They are one in the same. One informs the other. If a writer has a consistent style it is only because they have a consistent story. At some point the writer decides what he likes and what is good in the world and so his writing becomes an affirmation of these prejudices. The good writer is the one who scribbles on despite the resistance. Or in several cases in spite of or to spite the opposition. What is essential in any writer is the wherewithal not to mind such opposition in himself and others. The nettle stings only half as bad if you have a mind to it and even then the barbs never last. The fidelity to ones own convictions is more important than obeisance to fashion or received wisdom. How can there be evolution without pioneers? And so how can there be new forms without challenge? But that is preaching to no small converted gathering. Isn't it de rigueur to be violently different from the tradition or that which was before? There has always been a tendency in art to confound expectation, but nowhere quite to the degree of the modern writer. This, of course, is nothing more than a paroxysm of post-modernism. Instead, the writer must not hold so dear to tradition yet not be so scurvy towards it. The merits of the story must be the lead. The genius of writing lies more in experience than in ability. The felicity of the pen is between so many various forces. There is nothing in word or art that can formulate exactly where that is.

So we have many styles. From the simple to the stimulant. There is Orwell, there is Elliot. There is Murakami and Smith. Style, in my opinion, must be concise and precise. It must be efficient, it must be as simple as possible. It must pack as much for as little as possible. Its impulse must be to economy. Yet at the same time it mustn't be boring. It must stimulate. It must engage. It must set the reader at the centre, whether he lives now or many years into the future. It mustn't acquiesce to his wont, it must question his bias and stir his centers. A good story leaves an impression, and the best long after they have been read. There is no thing certain. How can it be written into stone one thing with the cosmic certainty of its truth, yet how can it at another extreme be said that truth doesn't exist. That all is relative when there is plenty that repeats.

Therefore the writer must follow the thread where it goes. Be it simple or not depends on the story which in turn depends on the writer and his experience. Style is a product of these things and not an element of them. A style maybe worth imitating in as much as it is worth understanding the author.  But not much more. Style is in so many ways the extension of the writer's personality. Therefore questions of the best are silly. The writer should ultimately look to himself for guidance more than others. The writer should celebrate the mind and its instinct and trust it.

And ultimately the best thing to know, is oneself. All else then follows.

Between Real and Ideal

There's a fire that burns in the hearts of so many who see the world around them and are at a loss to understand why it isn't what they imagine it must be. It is a flame of youth. It is also a turn of reason because reason says it could run better, if it weren't for the chaos of human impulse and the mud of earth which has always been so much more powerful than reason. The powerful nexus of primitive interests, infantile and apish, has always defeated reason. Thus, the 'should be' and the 'will be' are so very far apart. We trudge to the ideal like a romantic after the goal that we know we will never fully realise. The only consolation is that the path on the way is tolerable to our needs. Reason explains the phenomena in the cosmos; it is not governed by it. That is why reality always falls below expectation.  The life must always deal with chaos. For this reason utopia is a stupid concept. And the impulse to create perfection in society, misguided. Yet at the sametime, there must be a set of ideals otherwise all is just and all is same and nothing matters. There must be an idea because at every turn our physiology distracts us from intelligent life. Our bodies, of the spear-throwing mold, abide by adrenaline and the reptilian. The neo and cerebral cortices are always asked second. The frontal lobes consulted as afterthought. We are afraid of the dark even when we know nothing is there to harm. We jealously guard our boundaries even when we know there's no threat. We are ever watchful over the dinner table even when we know there's plenty. We are in thrall to the printed money bill even when we are not in poverty. At many passes, our own nature quenches the fire of idealism. The 'should be' and the 'will be' are continentally different because we know what one is, yet we are controlled by the other.

A slight paraphrase of Aristotle says that of drama there are four ways: what was, what is, what will be and what should be. For this reason art can reach what we with great trepidation call perfection, because it's is unencumbered by the common and real. It can be the 'should be' without prejudice or contradiction from the real. It can combine 'what was' with what 'should be' and, if done eloquently enough, can suffer no reprimand from the real. If the artist is only interested in 'what is' and what 'will be' then he is a deep, penetrative soul who seeks truth. If the artist is one who considers 'what was' and what 'should be', then he is an idealist, a romantic, a rhapsode, a dolorous pinner after bountiful meadows beyond an unreachable hill. But criticism has well instructed that no artist is ever truly of one distinction or the other. It is a combination of all and that is what makes Aristotle's picture complete. The artist, with brush tipped in expectation, writer with pen pregnant, sculptor with sensitive hands, musician with high attenuated ear, or act on the stage was never such a dullard as not to know that there was first the idea then the thing.

It all begins in beauty. In our birth.

We are all born free to kiss the sky. Each succeeding day is a diminishment of that promise. The fire burns brightest in those that remain convinced of this early hope. How the imagination soars! How sad is the life of the one who cherishes the greatest degree of freedom, how much they have to reconcile with the real! You want to skip glad through meadows and woods, but what of food what of territory, power and survival. You want to place your mind in the grand stimulant of arithmetic, what of your body and all its needs. In short, the languid stepped, delicate sweetness lives in the charm of the ironic. Between the ideal and real. between the cardinal paradox that we know we we will die yet in the mean time must live and the irony that drips down from that original contradiction. In the bitter-sweetness and sweet-bitterness.

Thinking is for the intelligent. Feeling is for genius. One is done in fine foolishness, the other in ponderous sobriety. One is a child looking at the stars, the other studying the terrain. Idiocy is for everyone else. The addition of these sums bears out one conclusion. That at the least we must have a moral code which to live by. So, if anything else, at least the moral law, as agreed upon by the consensus, challenged by the thinker, criticized by the artist, mocked by genius and disregarded by the anarchic, will be the stitches in the fabric.

Nothing is certain. Should a master intelligence arrive, it cannot last forever and its reach cannot be infinite. There is no God. In lieu of these deficiencies, labeled scandalous by some, let us be moral. Let us be moral irrespective of the real or ideal. And in this lovely scheme we will find truth. That is not just a pretty observation. As a see-saw is hard to balance, truth sits in equilibrium. Between dark death and light life; Or up and down; Left and right; Big and small. It is not, then, a delicate throwaway beneficence of Keats to equate truth with beauty. How can not harmony please? How cannot the unconscious pleasure of feeling the moral, not be equivalent to the thinking of truth?

The moral comes from truth. Truth borne well brings a tear to the eye of the hearer, honor to the bearer. It sets you free, by moving you closer to your natural born position, at liberty. Truth is love. Truth is love for the poorest. Truth is taking the side of the victim. Truth is sympathy of the sufferer. Truth is brotherhood with the wretched. Truth is knowing how small man is in cosmos, how big he is in society and how sweet it is to know the difference. Truth is beauty before beauty is seen. Before truth exists.

So where with old faithful hearts to we take ourselves long weary to? And with what diminished memory can we do there? How sad the petty brain in his seat, slave-like sits! Like a robot he thinks in numbers and travail. Does that answer to the dignity of man? But the faithful heart reaching his destination looks around and lends a hand. He builds up around him the future. He loves fraternity. He wants to bring all the species to the best of it sense. But in many parts, war, thirst, famine, want stand in the way, blockades to the better. Man cannot be a success unless all are successful. That will never be. Only intelligence after man could be all successful.

So we must set moral goals into the future. We must follow their path with no hope of treading their final spot. We must take the worst in our midst in arm, embrace the poor, help others. The ardent will want their fire. Let them flame on. Life always exists between hope and reality. The artist lives therefore something of a privileged life. Because he knows the difference. Then shine on!