What's Left? Self-Respect and the Culture of Self Interest

Words like "disparity" or "incongruity" don't do the matter justice. I mean something more like "chasm," in this case the chasm between the legal and the ethical. Our president and his criminal mob are not being prosecuted because their acts or their position within the legal system suggests that their behavior has not risen to the level of illegality. We rely on the moral judgment of those trained to survey the evidence to reach this conclusion. That no one it seems---not even the president's dupes and toadies---believe him to have the slightest shard of morality is far less in dispute.

How ironic too that we use the word "justice" to describe matters at hand. Whether or not the president is a criminal is reduced to a political matter in a system putatively designed to elevate the rule of law to ethics itself while, at the same time, his craven immorality is regarded as anodyne, just another feature of his character-free character. His supporters cheer because this difference is plainly without distinction.

We have had presidents of low moral stature before, some true crimnals, but perhaps none who has violated the terms of self-respect so plainly on our public stage. It is as if reality is nothing more and nothing other than realityTV. That there is no reality in realityTV is not only the fault of an entertainment industry, is it?

Give the people what they want is the first rule of capitalism and of democracy. There lies some of the rub, no? What does the sale of the people's opioid have to do with morality now that it has no contours whatsoever than, than what? A tax cut? "Are you better off today?" What are the boundaries of collective acceptance when cruelty and vindictiveness are the certain aims of those who respect nothing but their own timorous claims to superiority?

Self-respect seems so, so quaint and old-fashioned. Joan Didion once wrote, "Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts."

It strikes me here that Didion is also looking for the contrast, that is for what merely postures. The posers of self-respect use bravado and brazen indulgence as a means of inspiring the rabble to do as they do, to do whatever they want no matter the matter. If it's not prosecutable, it's permitted. Is that what allows the Trump voter to hail their chief and mock Jimmy Carter? That being moral is only for chumps? What about being "better off"? Is that all we will become?

Such a hardening of hearts doesn't seem possible until we see as much the contrast with those asserting their own ethical standards. Then the litmus tests of moral purity conveniently exile all political rivals who cannot match the mob's determinations of personal offense. Once again there is no legal violation as much as there is another set of criteria for human interactions. How tender must our feelings be before tender feelings are the reason for everything we deign acceptable or liable to reproof? Because we are made "uncomfortable" does that mean that another's behavior is immoral or merely unacceptable? What will that accomplish?

When we reduce the world to personal space we can no longer tolerate the notion that the world really is indifferent to our preferences. How does anyone learn anything _without_ distress? Can self-respect demand that we must learn how to alchemize distress into grace? The sort that endures ordinary indignities and tolerates inescapable human foibles? I am not sanguine for our prospects but neither am I willing to give up just yet.

It is the "sense of decency" that we now hold in question. Prosecutors and pundits debate legality while filing for moral bankruptcy. This means nothing more than we anesthetize ourselves, provoking calls to "move on." We are dulled to the iniquity because we must not allow our own self-worth to be so dimmed that we cannot function in everyday lives. What we are left with is nothing better even if what we demand must be better.

I think Joan Didion is again worth citing because what is at stake is not the president's vacancy of moral values but how we question our own. Let's cite Didion at some length. We will have to withstand the arrows aimed at be-twittered attention spans. She writes, "To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give."

We live in a legal world in which what's legal has been successfully and finally severed from what is moral. When we turn to the moral we find ourselves without the means to interrogate a plurality of values, differing standards, and the need for even greater tolerance. Instead we demand a TV audience to voice personal grievances, albeit the kind that do indeed warrant attention for being personal violations. With the next example of personal grievance comes the call for purity tests for what could possibly be ethical in a world in which "standards" cause a rejection of pluralism itself. We need not be relegated to immorality just because we cannot all agree on what is contemptible. An ethical life does not posture, it stands.

We need to figure out what next to do when a significant portion of our fellow citizens care not in the least for what is ethical _if it suits them_. We must learn to live more deftly in a world of double, triple and more standards. That is, we must find ways to fathom multiple codes, even those that have succumbed to "no sense of decency." What we do next will depend not on fairness or the rule of law but on what each of us makes of a world that is neither legal nor moral but by the choices we make to endure. Whether or not we flourish remains to be seen.

Professor Dean Miller, Contrarian

I think I learned more about being a capable contrarian from Dean Miller than just about anyone. Examples abound, of course, but few live up to it. Dean loved John Masters' novels and Nevil Shute. He was also a nevil in that Urban Dictionary kinda' way. Guys like this are just an anachronism nowadays. And Dean was no bad guy, not sexist or misogynist and certainly nothing like what we expect today but, you know, in a good way.  I liked him aplenty.  He hated evil and that's good enough for me.  So here are a few more words about Dean all wrapped up in other ideas.  No one quite writes like John Masters anymore, do they?

When I arrived at the UR some 33 years ago, Religion & Classics was a new department made of old bits. We are still the only Religion Department in the country that shares its professional space with the Classicists. I am strangely proud of that since as a Sanskritist and a student of Tamil, I regard myself a classicist. My inept forays into Greek (and less so Latin) make me a very faux classicist by any professional standard. I'm not sure anymore what my profession is short of just plain college professor. Hitchens could have left his job to me in his will but it didn't work out that way. I fukcing hate "guru" and despite my best efforts get called that---more like accused---more often than I can tell you. It's a hazard of studying India? Or loving India? Or learning something? WTF knows. Anyways, none of this is about that story. This story is about a guy I met when I first got here. His name was Dean Miller.

That's a confusing name for a professional academic because you are either mistaken for a dean or you'd be Dean Dean Miller, and both of those things are truly lamentable. I can think of no job inside the university that I would like less than dean of anything. Really? Meetings? Policies? You don't get to read books all day anymore? I get that you don't grade papers and don't have to indulge the little villains, but _dean_? Man, that would suck. Well, this Dean did not suck and he was never a dean because one of the things I liked best about him was that he felt that way about being a dean. He liked to teach but apparently wasn't very popular. He loved the intellectual life and took his profession more seriously than I do. I learned not to love being an academic at least in part by watching Dean struggle with the disparity. Having an intellectual life is a prerequisite but not synonymous with being an academic. Academics is just a job, but Dean was better than that and saw it in more dignified, more lofty terms. He drank a lot too, which is how you survive.

Dean was a Korean war vet, came out of it all to get his degree in History and that was the department down the hall. He was always just a few offices away. His thing was Proto-Indo-European cultures, heroes, and Dean was a Dumezilian. Now that may not mean much unless you know what that means. Dumezil was a French scholar who read a lot, knew a lot, and made bold, indefensible statements using details no one else could master. Being a Dumezilian involves a LOT of difficult languages, a lot of myth and ritual, a lot of structural thinking and imagination, so it's got it all if you are a humanist. Dean was always more at home in the study of religion. We study everything. Much of what the Dumezilians say is strangely true and even less of it is provable. It was long out of fashion before I learned it and Dean Miller was still doing it, even to the last. And he was a character. He'd wander into your office, shoot the breeze, talk about scotch and wear a kilt to important events. He had married well and never worried about money but he wasn't about to quit his job in Rochester to return to Chicago---a far better, more interesting place, but compared to Rochester, you'd have be stuck in Scranton or Joplin or somethin'. Anyways, he hung in there not because he needed the job but because he had things to say and mostly because he liked the intellectual life. That is something I really loved about him maybe because that's about the only thing I really love about my job too.

Dean had a thick frock of white hair, wore corduroy blazers, and still went to history conferences hating everything about how things had gone. He published article after article about IE ritual and heroes and other dashing fellows, and I'm sure he taught me that when you write and what you study is really just yourself and who you want to be. He finally retired and History hired far less colorful and, to my mind, less interesting people. He wrote me a few times, I wrote back. He died at 87 last week. That's a good run. He would have preferred to keep living. Professor Dean Miller. I'd bet there aren't three people left at the UR who remember him. That's what a lifetime of work and a career buys ya'.

The Moral Equivalence of War, Democracy on the Brink Must be the Norm

For President's Day I reread Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Its most familiar bits about malice towards none and charity toward all remind us that this hope was not realized but reversed in the aftermath of his death. The Confederate traitors largely did not pay for their crimes of treason but rather freed black people who were denied just about everything including freedom. Had Lincoln's vision extended across the land to realize the new birth of freedom he'd proposed at Gettysburg perhaps we would not be where we are today.

Progress may always be incremental in a world in which we must compromise, and so by definition corrupt ideals and values to accommodate those with whom we deeply disagree. Diversity demands that we accept our differences will create controversy and deep disagreement, that we will be uncomfortable with ourselves as we struggle to fathom another whose values are so dramatically unlike our own. To build a world on compromise requires we come to the very brink of tolerance and decide which boundaries we will not cross. To refuse, to thwart and reject even the idea of compromise is how we have arrived at our current impasse.

As much as I approved of President Obama's executive actions regarding immigrant protections (though not his larger immigration policies), I lamented that he felt it necessary to take those measures because an absolutely intransigent Republican Congress had decided _even before he was inaugurated_ that everything, _every last thing_ he proposed was to be unequivocally rejected. Republicans declared the _moral equivalent_ of war on the fragile ethics that we must all choose in order to participate in compromise. No one wants to give up their cherished project or position. We may always be at the precipice of our own personal standards just to entertain the others' opinions. We may have to reject their views as unacceptable. And then what?

But this is not what has happened. What happened is not a moral equivalence. Mr Obama may have gone a step too far with executive powers but the Republican Congress had openly declared their complete unwillingness to participate in _any_ compromise, even after he had won a convincing second term. This brings me to another portion of Lincoln's second inaugural address where he writes, "Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

The war came not with armies poised on a battlefield in central Pennsylvania but in the halls of Congress where Republicans declared their disdain for democracy itself. We can argue whether Democrats could have behaved differently but I will not indulge further the false equivalences.

Democracy's purpose is to create the possibility of living together in plausible disagreement, it is a messy, uncomfortable business. Or at least it should be. When one side refuses to play the game at all it is not so simple as to retreat to play another day. For eight years Republicans established a norm of moral warfare in which their strategy was to use democracy for any purpose but its purpose. When Trump came along, utterly ignorant and blithely indifferent to learning anything about systems of government, Republicans got their natural leader. This is why McConnell plays the toady at this phony "national emergency." It isn't merely to placate an imbecile who is as incompetent as he is cruelly narcissistic, it is because McConnell is as craven for power. The Republican base has refused democracy and he knows it: all that is left is _their_ America in which there is no room for anything but them.

To compromise is to relinquish some portion of one's power for the sake of living another day, making a go of it, working together because the alternative is war, anarchy, discord, and collective failure. We are failing because _one side_ acts in bad faith, in contempt of the very processes that prevent "war."

With a Democratic Congress the system will not correct itself but it can be used to low the machinations of failure, the slow tempo war on democratic values. I would end only by saying that those values are _at their very best_ when we find a way to live with ourselves in some kind of compromise. Functioning, progressive democracy requires that we live in the space between what we want and what we can achieve. When the other side will not cooperate than that incongruous place becomes a battlefield and as the terms of engagement escalate the possibilities for civility deteriorate, we are left with a sham. And so we are.

What remains without a deeper reengagement of purpose will be only profit for the few, justice for the privileged, and a system that will not itself "save us." To save the system we will need the rule of law and, more importantly, a change of hearts. Will the side that has chosen a debased absolutism chooses to do the more difficult work of compromise? They showed signs in the deal they cut last week that Trump signed. When no one is really happy with the outcome we have arrived somewhere in the disturbing purgatory that allows for tomorrow.

What Trump has done with his phony declaration will not be rejected by elected Republicans until their electorate understands that being the minority they are places them in a completely untenable future should they decide compromise is too complex. Everyone wishes for simple until it arrives. Our choices are still complex despite the vile simpleton and his sycophants. That is, for now, the best thing we have going: that there is enough institutional provenance, enough history of democracy as the best worst system to survive until they can be removed from office. Of course, that depends on whether our system itself is not rigged to suit their debasement of Lincoln's most worthy proposition.

What Republicans will discover if we survive this debacle (because they will become a minority party) is that in this assault on decency and moral war on democracy they have the most to lose. What Democrats must do is hold fast and not forget to leave room in the room even for those who have chosen absolutism or nihilism as their moral standard.

Every Character in the Story, A Religion as Politics Primer

You can always count on the lessons of religion to help you explain the worst of politics. That's because both are rooted in fraud and some kind of hope for the better. We're so confused about that we can't quit. If there is a best too then never forget it comes with its shadows. But let's not get too deep, too soon. Some lessons are simpler than that. Skip to the last paragraph if you don't have the time.*

Religions not only offers up saviors but in the case of Indian religions, all kinds of saviors that you too can aspire to be. It's not a one off, like Jesus or Mohammed where you get mere aspirational "be like." Indian religions give you the whole entrée (indecisive accents): Sure, Buddhas are really really nice, Siddhas are generous in their irascibility and mayhem, and Tirthankaras come, well, naked. Who doesn't wish they were? But the scam is on. Add "guru" and you've been had. Who doesn't wish for Swami Somebodyananda or that they could be? Have a seat. But don't sit in SwamiJi's seat. That's taken and you've been too.

Americans don't vote who they are but who they wish they were. It gets richer than that once you suggest that who you want to be also means punishing demons. You can't quite ever destroy them---demons alchemize in a world in which things don't disappear---but you can make them pay for their sins...umm, crimes, it doesn't quite matter. Don't sell them short even when they are dumb. Dumb often wins. Trump won. Think 62 million American idiots.

And this whole Satan thing is typically mixed up theology like most western conceptions of most everything religious but once again we have other fine examples of complex panthedemons (that's a word I just made up because you can do that, think: pantheons but with demons). India comes through again. Jai Hindustan hai.

And wouldn't ya' know? Pick your demons, they are real.

We have the uber-rich for profit as all that matters Republican; we have the dumb as rocks (apologies to rocks) aspirational poor guy who wants to be rich and is playing the lottery every week with every spare dime (ummm, that last bit is cutting close to home); we have the bigot blaming otherness either shamelessly on display or thinly veiled, it matters not, because the deeper play is some dark stuff, often without the slightest shard of self-awareness. Then we have religious fanatics, gun fanatics, free market fanatics, we have a coalition of all sorts of wing nuts, extremists, and politi-cons ready to con and be conned. We have attested versions of pure evil (think: Cruz and McConnell), evil couched in a complicated past that you once thought had a conscience (you were mistaken) (think: Lindsey Graham), evil that is stupid and just gets busted but will likely get off (Chris Collins, first to endorse Trump and reelected in my Congressional district while under indictment, the wealthiest of the lot "serving" a poor constituency), evil that doesn't care about anything but evil (Manafort, Stone, the opportunists), evil that can't quite fathom that it's doing evil because it somehow can't think (Susan Collins), evil as an intelligent pathology (think: "conservatives" like Sasse, Will, David Brooks, et.al.). And then the Orange Menace which is the meanest, dumbest, most fucked up of all evil, which is why he will never lose that 34%, not ever.

So much evil, so much plentiful stupid, never a shortage of pathology, and all of it driven by some ability to collect in the same place aka the Republican Party, all of it incapable of even a shard of the truth which is that it is nothing but self-interest working for its own self-interest. All this is the veritable definition of demon in Sanskrit lore.

We vote for what we wish were true because reality, well, that's far too hard. We underestimate how deeply structured we are towards self-interest---those selfish genes are real---and how so much of our altruism is ambition or necessity. We're so famously deluded we think that consciousness came before consciousness evolved from chemistry (think: the foundational error of Kashmir Shaivism that can't be repaired, fixed, or rationalized because it's simply wrong) or even worse we think that "freedom" is something innate, a self-evident truth, when, in fact, freedom is learned, it must be taught and revised and retaught and that it's not one thing but a million different things that we don't fully grasp but want. We're capable of any kind of self-delusion to get by in this hard world and that's not a crime at all. When you can choose your discomforts that's a definition of privilege you might embrace. The rest you didn't earn.

We lionize those who sacrifice themselves and call them saints but if we all did that we kinda' know that the whole real world would just fall apart. Only be a saint if you are one. Please don't play one in the yoga world. We need more someones to fight back and never give up because the bad guys who want everything for themselves are not going away---that turn the other cheek nonsense is about as free as a Free Tibet bumper sticker. It's so free that the Chinese just moved in and ate your tsampa. Fighting back never wins you all that much joy in life unless you figure out it's what you love more than comfort. What exactly do you love more than comfort? Now that's a marginally more interesting question.

*busted...
Take away: don't stop wishing for what you want or stop trying to be who you want to be. But do ask yourself if there's something in it for more than just you and yours. Ask yourself how discomfort makes you more interesting and purposeful to some end that serves you _and_ others. Make plenty of room for the demons but don't exactly give in to them. Treat your demons better than they treat you. Not only is that the right thing to do, which actually feels good when you do it (like giving money to public radio or something), it's actually the most efficacious choice in a world in which the best of us have to live with the worst of us. The most important thing is to remember that each of us is both that best and that worst of the all of us.

Made of History, Making Ourselves

Most folks don't register self-consciously that they have "a view of history." 

But truth is, they do. For progressives the present is the beginning of the future. For conservatives the present is the end of the past. For the one there is a horizon of hope and concern about forgetting past lessons; for the other there is fear of the unknown, anger for what will never be again, and a desperate clinging to what has gone. It's not difficult to explain this difference; it's difficult to persuade people that they are made by their views.

The New Radical Left is to Blame...Or something. But how to pay the bills?

Morning Review of the News
Day 31 of the Trump Government Shutdown

Fox News is telling its viewers that a new "radical" element of the Democrat party is taking over _their_ country, that Covington students were smeared by the left, oh, and that Adam Schiff is the real problem, not that Trump is a grifter and could be involved in treason. Breitbart is really in a lather over whether even giving three years to work out DACA is "amnesty": the wingnuts want nothing but deportation now and anything less drives them only further into snow blind whiteness. So Trump has a small problem with his base and discontent among them is always a good thing though it hardly seems to matter because liberals are worse than dictators or death. Still everyone has to pay their bills, so what's next?

That a lot of Trump voters are about to miss another paycheck is nowhere on Fox or Breitbart this morning. Just so you know. This is where ideology and identity becomes real and what's at stake is more than a Fox fantasy or a MAGA rally. What will these folks with bills to pay do?

*Will they continue to do what they are told, principally by their handlers, Fox, Coulter, Hannity, and Trump? At least for a while longer because faith is never that helpful and they have lots of it, they would be turning on their leaders, and admitting tacitly their mistakes.
---Take away: So they will be told to blame Democrats. Will they? Of course. Will it matter? Do they stick it out?

*They have been taught since Reagan to hate government and that government is always the problem---even when the work for government or depend on it for, you know, living in a modern world. Unlike Democrats who do not share this ideological manipulation that serves only the rich and manufactures only chaos...
---Take away: Republicans get to prove their theory that government doesn't work when the government is put out of work. That too will be Democrats' fault but there's something strangely satisfying to Republicans here even as they suffer.

*Destroying the world to save it is built into their politics and, importantly, their religion. Republicans are tied to messianism and apocalypse deep, deep in their structure bones, in their memories without even having to call it up. (Structural realities don't demand awareness or application to be influential.) They view Trump their savior and if he brings the end of the world, well then, Jesus. In the meantime there is a fast track to global environmental catastrophe, endless war, authoritarianism, malice towards anyone who is "against them", meaning, not them, and not the slightest care for the values of the past or the shape of the real future---because armageddon is coming and Jesus will usher in the new Jerusalem. I don't need to make this up, just listen to them. Really. You can find this out the same way you learn about Greenland's glaciers, with the facts at hand.
---Take away: Never underestimate how much their deep religious belief aka stupidity informs their world because little else does.

Storm Upon Storm, A Winter's Tale, Another Sunday Sermon

We all want it to stop. Relentless. That's the part we haven't felt before. That it doesn't let up. The turmoil is ordinary but the madness, the depth of the illness, an illness of character and basic decency, is unfamiliar. We're not used to being under siege, that being a privilege of American life.  Its very forms offend and invite us to wonder how we arrived at _this_ and what we can do about it.

There's a fair preponderance of opinion across Punditland that Trump is worried, scared, and at the end of his rope. That there will be some fair and just end game too. I'm skeptical of the latter not because the rule of law will fail but only because so few understand or ever consider the idea. That takes effort that is not demanded of the citizenry.

Of course, I know only as much as the rest who look from the outside and I'm not going to dismiss those working in that environment with keen professional eyes. But I don't think Trump is any more of his deeply problematic emotions than he has ever been, which is to say that I don't think he is worried or concerned or fearful like any normal person would be. Can we even think about normal anymore? What's that?

We all have reason to feel anxiety or fear or worry. In truth, we don't _need_ reasons to feel any such ways: it comes with our humanity. It's normal, if by that we mean these are experiences selecting us. Life's ordinary storms come as they do, no matter our preparations or care. What more that is asked from us also will also come from our humanity. But it will require more, more than mere indulgence of life's precarious terms of survival. To flourish is a ceaseless endeavor; the task to ask for more and that requires skills learned.

We're not born or naturally equipped to fathom what life presents to us as human beings. We were born with the ability to feel what ordinarily happens and a good bit of that is well beyond our control or comprehension. We have to ask more about what we can be. The deeper resources aren't provided, we have to invent them. Some never do or can't. Some chose to pass it off, project it on their God to do the work that they well-understand is beyond their ken.

Becoming more human remains unfinished no matter where we turn to find that more. There are complex reasons for that too, whether or not we care to inquire. Looking for ways to care for ourselves and others isn't a requirement, it's an opportunity we must help create and nurture whenever possible. We all work from within worlds that created us and not all seek to create.

Trump, as he always is, is wrapt inside layers of narcissism and self-approval that he's needed since boyhood. Unable to win father love, learn from mistakes, or cope with his limited cognitive circumstances, Trump has few skills and can only repeat the same strategies. It's bluster, "charm," threat, the same old story, same old act. He won't change any of that because he can't.

Truth to tell, he hasn't the emotional intelligence to grasp much at all---ask Rex Tillerson or Tony Schwartz, they know how little he comprehends whether that is intellectual or emotional. He doesn't want anymore and none of the work. We might reduce it to something pathetic, warranting compassion or sympathy, were it not so debased, craven, cruel, and threatening to our shared fate as citizens. Instead we have a citizenry held hostage.
The majority of us know we've yet seen only the outlines of criminality and depravity, that the depth is yet to come as Robert Mueller untangles this sordid tale. But a significant percentage sees a portion of themselves in this sick, wounded, tortured man. They cannot possibly be as wholly debased as Trump because they haven't had the privilege that fuels his spiraling mental illness.

But what appeals is the power, the ability and audacity not to care what anyone else thinks or feels or does. They want a certain kind of autonomy over their lives; they want to protect what leaves them vulnerable or makes them victim to a world they barely manage, much less control. Trump believes that they will believe anything he tells them and I think, for the most part, he's right about that. Why?

For that 89% of Republicans who just last week reported that they still support Trump, their needs match his even if their circumstances do not. They _need_ the feeling of being right, persecuted, besieged and triumphant because those are their resources, their means, the ways they cut the emotional deal.

For some others, the especially wealthy, matters are simpler: they use Trump because they want their wealth or power at any cost, they _want_ and the rest can just be damned so long as they can profit. But the majority, the Fox voter, the rural poor, the suburban once-middleclasser feesl a deeper desperation and despair, no matter how that configures into real world problems.

It's not the desperation that singles these folks out. It's the different strategies and shapings of experience. I'd wager most of us here too feel the rushing water of the deep blue sea just below the oak plank we use to keep from drowning in the everyday. We hold ourselves upright and know that what keeps us barely dry is a strange alchemy of kindness and terror. It storms too from above, so it's coming from all directions. Such is a life that promises nothing more but invites better.

But unlike the Trumpists, for whom the desperation has projected remedies and deals in assertions, we look to a different set of emotional tools, feelings that demand more ambivalence and nuance, like empathy and constructive forms of frustration that point as much towards as away. We're looking for questions as much as answers and the sort that might not answers. Some folks just don't want that or the consequences.

What's different for Trump and his followers is that any form of denial or affirmation suffices until the next one and the next one---but the truth that mines the unfinished while admitting vulnerability is cast aside.

Looking at yourself is no small matter. Some, it's important to remember, just can't. They never learned, they don't want to, they don't believe in the powers of reflection, self-inquiry, or constructive critique. These are not structured into a life of self-learning and won't be. It's easier to trade in more sanctimonious forms of assurance, the sorts that reside in more settled opinion or "values" to be asserted but not questioned.

When the world brings its inevitable turmoil or failure ensues and salvation does not, they find redemption in fantasies that come with religion or some other belonging-club, it could be guns or sports or 'family', it doesn't matter, something, anything that says "us and not them."

It's harder to take in a world that promises nothing more than the chance to love, accept those costs, and ask for what else is possible that can better a human life.