

The core problem here is not that absurdity is a proper enemy somehow to be defeated. Plausibly, any such “victory” represented a lethal oxymoron. Prima facie, by definition, this meant uninterrupted victories for malignant absurdity. While so much that transpired during the fearful Trump years was preposterous, these years were largely founded upon a palpable triumph of unreason. Fitfully, perhaps, with a new president at the helm, but with a more openly agreeable tilt toward knowledge and science, a beleaguered country has begun to restore itself as a “virtuous nation.”And this restoration comes not a moment too soon.

Patently dishonorable and cheerlessly incoherent, this latest “know-nothing” era of American politics seemingly left us with no reasonable cause for optimism.Īnd yet, somehow, a wounded America has managed to lurch forward. On a planet so wittingly disordered, so unequally desolated, so widely resigned to cumulatively catastrophic destruction, the Trump years presented only a variegated ritual of deception and horror. A single corollary philosophical question must surface immediately: “How shall this theatrical imagery be uncovered in specifically American terms?” Now we must inquire holistically, “What is there for present-day Americans to learn purposefully from classical Greek myth?” Still, it’s not the sort of question ever asked in a nation that has been long lost to any life of Reason.Īs aptly sober preface to meaningful inquiry, we must recognize this last query as a prospectively last-chance for Americans to display virtue and dignified candor.

For the future, America need not depend upon any explicit expectations of godlike origin, but it will need to reject the hollow shrieks of another false prophet. Significantly, they represent more than just a bitterly resigned expression of pain and “pathos.” These divinely-mandated actions are heroic. When Sisyphus pushes his giant rock up the mountain, a punishment of endless duration inflicted by the Greek gods, his actions are notin any fashion demeaning. Together, they can differentiate and elucidate, usefully and with refinement. Among other things, metaphor and myth can help this battered nation with certain needed clarifications in murky or opaque circumstances. There do exist various readily-available guidelines for an heroic struggle, multiple literary sources from which a suffering nation could draw insight and remedy. Still, there are rational reasons for hope. Is there any conceivable reason to believe that judgments of Mass can best identify excellence? In this connection, elections are little more than subterfuge. Only if we can first change the individual can we ever reasonably hope to survive as a nation. Always, an authentic societal struggle for truth over lies must begin with the conscious and conscientious individual. The pertinent syllogism is uncomplicated.

By definition, this most easily-corrupted sphere is by its very nature secondary and reflective, one wherein each citizen has already transformed himself/herself into a quantité négligeable. Trump for once unimaginable derelictions, we should be warned that an heroic struggle can never originate from within the political sphere. Judging in part from the recent US Senate failure to convict former president Donald J. It was that he is an inherently dishonest and patently insidious human being.Įven in its most dignified and noble manifestations, politics can never save the American democracy. Trump was not that he tweeted too much or that he was too crude and coarse. From the start, the core problem with Donald J. In these matters, history deserves some pride of place. Accordingly, once it has become clear that the nation is being led by a charlatan and a criminal, it is already too late to wait “patiently” for tiny hints of presidential “improvement.” Above all, Americans ought never again allow their elected representatives to abandon plain truth in favor of presumed self-interest.
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In essence, such redirection presents the United States with its only real option to stay meaningfully “alive.”īut how to soar above the still-multiplying wreckage of a hideous presidency? What sorts of struggles could prove suitably heroic? More than anything else, these struggles would represent principle-based contests against further political derangements.īy now, certain basic lessons should have been learned. As literary genre, the grimly corrosive Trump years are best described not as tragedy (which is ennobling), but as “farce.” Though not readily apparent, redirecting America’s path from farce to heroic struggle would be indispensable.
