The Invisible Counterpoint

Andrew O’Hehir’s Salon article: Appetite for destruction: White America’s death wish is the source of Trump’s hidden support I s an “October surprise” that could put Donald Trump in the White House already baked into the American electorate? That’s the frightening question one could derive from this week’s column by Thomas B. Edsall, one of the most useful (and least ideologically hypnotized) contributors to the New York Times. We can’t be sure how many people really support Trump, Edsall reports, since there’s considerable evidence that they aren’t telling pollsters the truth. Voting for Trump, it appears, is something white people do in the shadows. It’s a forbidden desire that is both liberating and self-destructive, not unlike the married heterosexual who has a same-sex lover on the down-low, or the executive who powers through the day on crystal meth and OxyContin. On some level you know the whole thing can’t end well, but boy does it feel good right now.

May 2 We're going to see a lot of this sort of critique in the near future. One thing I would like to point out is that there is a great deal of energy put into attacking those who sneer at the working class -- every progressive you know, is suddenly set up as the most callous person ever. Another thing is that Plato's sense of late-stage democracy is not really established as an illusion here. He -- Andrew Sullivan, that is -- basically agrees that something awful is necessarily unleashed as freedoms suddenly abound. For Plato it is societal inversion, as everyone forgets their "proper" role, deference is lost, and everybody does what they want; for Andrew it is more than people lose roles that actually matter, that aren't intrinsically humiliating, as well as that narcissism and emotion gets unleashed -- the passions -- and order and good reason is lost.

If "Captain America: Civil War" somehow was occurring in our actual world, it's a no-brainer as to which side — Cap's, who wants to keep the Avengers independent; or Iron Man's, who believes the team should essentially part of the security force of the United Nations — is right, the more progressive: the genuine evolution as to where the Avengers must go. Cap's would represent a sort of childish nationalism, where one country stands apart from the world because it can't see global cooperation as something other than entanglements and forced passivity, a curtailing of freedom: America as it was in the world until about Obama. Iron Man's would represent an adult appreciation that respecting the global community is the best way to not be a sort of global antagonist: the kind of force Vision talks about in the world that baits nations into warfare and terrorism that could have been drawn peaceful. But in this film world, overall, Iron Man's s...

I gather at some point in "Harry Potter" I'll get some explanation as to why the hierarchy at Hogwarts is so intentionally obtuse as to how horrible the family situation is that they keep on insisting Harry go back to.