Sunday, January 26, 2025

The Wish To Be Cared For


 

Machiavelli during his lifetime was personally acquainted with the cursed Strife inflicted on Florence by gift-guzzling Medici princes, also with the bonfiring of the city’s beloved vanities at the behest of Friar Girolamo Savonarola, a vengeful Dominican monk preaching the word of God as a howl of rage against the world, the flesh, and the devil. The history books tend to portray Machiavelli as a cynical Italian courtier supplying despots with murderous raisons d’état. The spin is travesty. Machiavelli was an idealistic civil servant who was also a poet and playwright seeking to provide early sixteenth-century Florence with a republican form of government. He rated the task as the most worthy of human endeavors when supported by a citizenry animated with the will to act instead of the wish to be cared for. 
… 
Winning is such a great feeling. Isn’t it a great feeling? Winning! A great feeling. Nothing like winning! Gotta win…There is no other alternative. Victory, winning, beautiful words, but that is what it is all about. [Donald Trump at the midshipman graduation, May 2018]
It’s not what it’s all about. W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” the date of the Nazi invasion of Poland, is what it is all about:
The windiest militant trash 
Important Persons shout 
Is not so crude as our wish: 
What mad Nijinsky wrote 
About Diaghilev 
Is true of the normal heart; 
For the error bred in the bone 
Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, 
Not universal love 
But to be loved alone. 
Human beings consumed with the single-minded staring into mirrors lose the capacity to think. An exceptionally virulent strain of intellectual leprosy tends to show up in rich people who imagine that because they are rich, they step into the golf shoes of Andrew Carnegie’s “highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.” In the world according to Trump, money is the true, the good, and the beautiful, the hero with a thousand faces, all of them the face of Trump—gloating or seething, saying and doing whatever it takes to make the American democracy smaller than himself, to nullify it in theory, dispose of it in practice. What Edith Wharton said of America’s late nineteenth-century Gilded Age is true of the early twenty-first-century rerun: “A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.”
--Lewis Lapham 

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