OUR VULGAR TRIBUNE
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
President Donald J. Trump is a phenomenon our professional intelligentsia find difficult to publicly characterize, perhaps out of fear and respect for the office the republican president enjoys as tribune of the plebian people. He is a vulgar man who bears that awesome negative called VETO. Fortunately, our founding fathers provided an antidote.
An intellectual who serves the power elite might refer to Mr. Trump as a “populist,” that polite term having a suitably negative connotation. Given the intellectual’s historical origin in the vulgar crowd, he might privately utter “scumbag,” but not within earshot of the commander whose Roman ancestors arose from the lowest ranks.
Accursed was he who interfered with the sacred power of a tribune. We recall that a tribune could veto the acts of the senate and ordinances of the common people. Any attempt to restrain him was a serious crime. Everyone had better rise to their feet in his presence.
Tribunes increased their power from the simple negative of the veto to such an extent under pretext of defending the rights of the people that they did whatever they pleased.
As Mr. Trump said during his candidacy, he could get away with shooting someone on the street. Tribunes, like him, hindered the collection of tribute, determined the creation of magistrates, and pulled victorious generals from their triumphant chariots. And that was not all pending curtailment.
Such becomes the power of the crowd recognized as citizens whose members are needed for militant adventures. That power, when vested in its precedent or president, is worshipped as virtually absolute, as an almighty god. The self-deluded people forget that he is just another vulgar man. The fawning crowd may then be led against its best interest and even decimated or utterly ruined given bread and circus doled out by their consummate flimflam man. Women will forgive his sins, and publicly adore him. Where would our human race be today, anyway, without groping and promiscuity if not rape? No adam is innocent, nor is wo-man, for she procured the fatal fruit.
With all respect due to his oval office it can be uttered that Mr. Trump is indeed a popular man although not a majority man. In him we see the evolution of prehistoric cave man to modern mass man to postmodern republican man.
“The mass-man regards himself as perfect,” pronounced Ortega y Gasset in Revolt of the Masses.
I believe we have France to credit for the revolutionary mass man. The soi-disant revolution in America was a mere changing of the guard, but a new order was established in Paris with the aid of treacherous intellects.
"Revolution is not the uprising against the pre-existing order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one," noted Ortega. Despite the reaction to the Terror, a revolutionary century followed.
Ortega observed that every day added a new luxury to the middle class standard of life. Every day their position was more secure and more independent of another's will. Likewise the standard of living improved for workers. Life began to appear exempt from restrictions; there were fewer social barriers in the West, no longer any castes; presumably everyone had equal rights under law.
The principles at play to this day are industrialization, democracy, and applied science i.e. technology. Everything including technological advancement comes easy to the common man as if it were natural, so he does not suppose it is the work of talented and virtuous men. In effect, he is a spoiled brat.
"To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations. The young child exposed to this regime: has no experience of its own limit. By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that be is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself. This feeling of another's superiority would only be instilled into him by someone who, being stronger than he is, should force him to give up some desire, to restrict himself, to restrain himself."
Is our Donald J. Trump, an epitomic spoiled brat who appeals to massively spoiled brats?
Mr. Trump has been characterized as an idiot and a moron, terms that are offensive to clinical idiots and morons.
Perhaps ‘moron’ is more apt than ‘idiot" in the etymological sense of ‘moron’: from moros, an entertaining fool of yore; in modern psychology, a slow or retarded person having a mental age between 8 and 12, incompetent, perhaps, but not necessarily so, to be a president of the most powerful nation in the world.
I myself do not believe he is a fool, except in the etymological sense of being, like me, a “windbag,” nor do I think he is a stupid or asinine. I have referred to him in French as a faux imbécile.
No, ma’am, he is not without intellect. Ortega’s mass man has a hermetically sealed-in intellect. The mass man, you see, as a member of the negativistic “rebel mass,” is an intellectual hermit.
“He believes he has a right to an opinion on any matter without previous effort to work one out for himself. He finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. As he feels the lack of nothing outside of himself, he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture. Such is the mechanism of self-obliteration."
Progress, supposedly to the End of History, where everyone is free from impediments, is arduous, so humankind has suffered terribly along the way. Still, Ortega was correct: life has become relatively easy for the common man. And now we denizens of the virtual world have become dangerously untethered from reality, from facts, hence make opinions our facts. That is, our world is virtual, not quite real; we believe things are as we imagine them to be. So far so good, until all hell breaks loose to teach us another hard lesson.
I vary from Ortega in my opinion that the “soul” of a mass man is hermetically sealed in, as if it were a monad absent any windows to peer out of, or in a cave without an entrance or windows. I myself doubt the existence of independent souls, and think instead that the typical mass man has been ideologically brainwashed. Thanks again, in part, to the influence of the French philosophers, in particular the ideologues who touted a science of ideas or Ideology that was substituted for Theology by Thomas Jefferson in his beloved Virginia University, a pseudo-science criticized by his friend, John Adams, as “idiotology.”
Ortega also opines that a vain man at least may be influenced by the opinions of others because his vanity compels him to change his opinions. One might think President Trump changes his opinions daily or even several times a day depending on whom he consults with.
But that is an illusion, in my opinion, for he appears to be subject to an underlying stubbornness or stultification, so that the old dog in him may learn no new tricks. Yet that is not to say that he is not subject to whims, and does not forget what he is up to when running about the world.
Some hope is still placed that President Trump is in dire need of what are call narcissistic supplies for his monumental ego, so that he may become a typical political hypocrite in order to obtain the applause he craves, maybe even become a bleeding heart liberal by the end of his term. He may himself be what he pretends to despise in order to be adored by WASPs: an (expletive deleted) liberal. Then he may service the patrician remnant, most of whom are Democrats.
In any event, Mr. Trump sorely needs mass man because he is a vulgar man himself. His fortune does not render him noble or high class. In fact, only recently has money-grubbing become respectable. Money was filthy lucre, what noble or known men used to metaphorically wipe their rears with. Caesars would borrow it just to throw it to the people like so much trash.
Yes, Mr. Trump is as vulgar as any man in the crowd on the street. Call him a fool or a nitwit if you please, or call him a spoiled brat with a mental age of about twelve years. He is not making fools of anyone. He belongs to us. If anything, he is our representative fool.
Will the vulgar man on the street become wiser than its representative fool, The Donald? He may be if only he, like Socrates, realizes how unwise he is.
xYx
Miami Beach 2018
Your article had me glued to the page all the way through. You certainly have a way with wit that transcends ordinary writers like me.
Ron