[Orwn Acra]

Julie, no one here is saying what you posit in your first paragraph.

[Stephen Hampton]

My own meditations
Reading Marcus Aurelius
Contemplating Cosmic Truths
Within all of us.

In our Circus Maximus
Blue blood ran Red
The Great Race ended
Democracy bled.

The Mob enraged
With furious release
Cursed the Republic
Damned poets of peace.

In a hundred years
None of us will remain
Of stoic White
Or godly Green.

No dust of any color
Will sing one refrain
Of our Circus Maximus
In Twenty Sixteen.

Stephen

[Mark McDonnell]

At the risk of being accused of trivializing it with mere pop music, I'm going to unofficially merge this thread with the 'RIP Leonard Cohen' one. This song seems particularly apposite to the discussion. I've been singing it all week...

https://youtu.be/ncdY2nGKzBs

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

I think this Leonard Cohen song more on point. This is a cover by a great band.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRHJiqfwnac

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Stephen Hampton

My own meditations
Reading Marcus Aurelius
Contemplating Cosmic Truths
Within all of us.

In our Circus Maximus
Blue blood ran Red
The Great Race ended
Democracy bled.

The Mob enraged
With furious release
Cursed the Republic
Damned poets of peace.

In a hundred years
None of us will remain
Of stoic White
Or godly Green.

No dust of any color
Will sing one refrain
Of our Circus Maximus
In Twenty Sixteen.

Stephen

The actions of the present (especially when it comes to the deforestation, mass extinctions, and changes of the chemistry of the sea from the now fully operational Anthropocene epoch) will be spoken of for centuries, or at least the ripples of our selfish stupidity ringing out from here will be. This Circus is gonna leave mark much more noticeable than two vast and trunkless legs in the sand.

[Alder Ellis]

Andrew M., the Eisenstein essay you linked to, before you deleted the post, in the General Talk thread, was eloquent on the need to avoid demonization. I copied this bit from it: “It is time to stop feeding hate. Next time you post on line, check your words to see if they smuggle in some form of hate: dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision.., some invitation to us versus them.”

Trump is the arch-demonizer, often flagrantly accusing his enemies of his own sins, thereby exposing the psychological dynamic of demonization: i.e., a projection of one’s own unconscious faults onto others. Trump is so unconscious of his own processes that his whole personality is effectively structured around demonization. It is all too easy to demonize Trump in turn, but the dynamic is the same. It just reinforces the destructive pattern. The trick is, to discover a truly constructive alternative.

Eight years ago, Obama’s election evoked a wave of hopefulness, much as the fall of the Berlin Wall had done years before. Things are going in the right direction! Everything is going to be OK after all! What a relief! But it was just a swing, in one direction, of the pendulum. Now it swings the other way. Rejoicing in one direction, lamenting the other, is a sucker’s game. The pendulum itself is the problem. If you identify with its motions, you are part of the problem. The trick is, to discover an emotion, a motivation, which is not identified, is independent. I think Wilbur, in his way, is trying to do this, not only in the quoted poem but in all his work. It’s one of the tasks of poetry, as opposed to rhetoric.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Alder (or Julie or Mike), can you give an example of protest or criticism that doesn’t involve some form of “us versus them” perspective? To critique or protest is to argue your point, and if your point involves something as important as environmental survival or the political/social equilbrium of the world, it's going to be passionate. Forceful criticism or even denunciation isn't the same as “dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision.” But it does mean opposition or challenge.

[Mark McDonnell]

Andrew – Yes, The Partisan is a beautiful song. My choice of LC song felt relevant not so much to the recent events themselves, but to the discussion about how one should best react to these events: the topic of this thread in other words. The lyric ‘There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t’ could summarise the discussion in a nutshell.

My feeling, from across the pond and for what it’s worth, is that Trump is an obnoxious bully driven by pathological narcissism and utterly unfit to be president. He’s uninformed, irrational, misogynistic and a proven liar. I don’t think he’s a fascist; that would credit his unpleasantness with too much ideological purity. I think he’s an insecure, power hungry opportunist who wants to show he can be ‘the best’ at whatever he turns his hand to, including politics, and he decided the way to do this was to appeal to the ugliest, basest form of scapegoating and populism. And goodness, it worked. Somewhere in his dark heart a part of him is probably as surprised as anyone.

But. He was democratically elected. Unlike the protests against the Vietnam war which form the context of Wilbur’s poem, it was the people who made this decision, not the government. Of course those who didn’t vote for him are angry; the fact this dangerous fool is going to be your president is a fact that would be funny if it weren’t terrifying. It makes the writing of dystopian satire redundant. But rather than labelling those who did vote for him as racist bigots (I know people here aren’t doing that but many on the left are prone to that knee-jerk response) Democrats/the left/liberals in general should be asking not ‘why he won’, but why they lost. After all, many Obama voters must, statistically, have turned to Trump, so charges of simple racism won’t wash.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/politi...ire/index.html

I don’t blame people for protesting, for ‘us v them’ anger and waving ‘not my president’ banners. But when that subsides, then what? Basically, the left needs to get its act together. And as The Democratic Party is the only viable, government-ready representative of the left in the US then they have to give people something passionate and inspiring to believe in, and deliver it in a way that emphasises (forgive me) ‘hope not hate’. But that means everyone: including people without college degrees, old white guys with slightly old fashioned attitudes to race and gender, people who are scared of Islamic fundamentalism and want a leader who isn’t shy about even using that phrase, people in communities whose industries have been decimated. Imperfect people, in other words, who just voted for Donald Trump. The Democrats chose Clinton over Sanders, it clearly thought the status quo was going to walk this one. It was wrong, wasn’t it?

So – Yes, protest, have an angry moment, exercise your right to dissent. Then calm down, regroup, and start knocking on doors. What’s the alternative?

[Roger Slater]

Yes, I agree that many Trump voters were not racists or misogynists, but it's also true that they were nonetheless perfectly willing to overlook the fact that their candidate was.

[Mark McDonnell]

Yes they were. But, beyond being a disturbing indictment of the human species, how is that a productive line of argument? If anything it strengthens the idea that the left needs to be providing something more than it clearly is at the moment.