On The Stage I Saw
This morning I was copied on an email sent by a friend to another friend. The note was a bitter farewell, a dismissal of relationship on account of one’s unconditioned, sycophantic support of the President. The email was laden with fear, revulsion, and sorrow. I understood as I read. I could not have written it, but I understood perfectly, without any confusion.
When the stakes are ultimate, nothing less than the destruction of a society, then one employs every measure to turn the tide. There is no foretelling of the future, because the future is fashioned from the acts and words of today. An ancient quote comes to mind, “every word is a completed deed.” Words are not frivolous, they add up to substantiate the reality which comes inscribed within a certain set of ideas.
That is why the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg were important and ultimately so destructive. The events were not mere entertainment, epiphenomena, like summer concerts in the park. They created a future, a future entailing the death and displacement of tens of thousands.
A friend who is an ardent Trump supporter commented to me that if the President were unobstructed, “he’d take care of things.” That is exactly what those of us who oppose him fear, the will to take care of things, to steam-roll all opposition, to vitiate alternative points of view.
I offer for your mindful reading this passage near to the conclusion of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. There is within each of us a enduring struggle between a primal, wolf-like self, and the domesticated civilized self. This is as it should be, discomforting as it surely is. In this excerpt the wolf-tamer is a Trumpian figure who happily uses a savage cruelty to beat the wolf into submission.
On the stage I saw
…..an animal tamer—a cheap-jack gentleman with a pompous air—who in spite of a large moustache, exuberantly muscular biceps and his absurd circus getup had a malicious and decidedly unpleasant resemblance to myself. The strong man led on a leash like a dog—lamentable sight—a large, beautiful but terribly emaciated wolf, whose eyes were cowed and furtive; and it was as disgusting as it was intriguing, as horrible as it was all the same secretly entertaining, to see this brutal tamer of animals put the noble and yet so ignominiously obedient beast of prey through a series of tricks and sensational turns.
At any rate, the man, my diabolically distorted double, had his wolf marvelously broken. The wolf was obediently attentive to every command and responded like a dog to every call and every crack of the whip. He went down on his knees, lay for dead, and, aping the lord of creation, carried a loaf, an egg, a piece of meat, a basket in his mouth with cheerful obedience; and he even had to pick up the whip that the tamer had let fall and carry it after him in his teeth while he wagged his tail with an unbearable submissiveness. A rabbit was put in front of him and then a white lamb. He bared his teeth, it is true, and the saliva dropped from his mouth while he trembled with desire, but he did not touch either of the animals; and at the word of command he jumped over them with a graceful leap, as they cowered trembling on the floor.
More—he laid himself down between the rabbit and the lamb and embraced them with his foremost paws to form a touching family group, at the same time eating a stick of chocolate from the man’s hand. It was an agony to witness the fantastic extent to which the wolf had learned to belie his nature; and I stood there with my hair on end.
—excerpt SteppenWolf by Hermann Hesse p. 194-195
One thought on “On The Stage I Saw”
There is good reason why grandiose stories of power-wielding have echoed down the millennia: thunderbolt-hurling gods; mighty warrior-kings; strongmen of all sorts. All had in common the ability to “take care of things,” as your friend put it — to make events flow the way they wanted. Who has not fantasized similarly sweeping aside life’s annoying obstacles? It begins in childhood when you don a sparkly cardboard crown, declare yourself the Boss of Everything, and start proclaiming orders.
What generally gets left out of such imaginings is that the power act by definition is dual. It doesn’t work without two parties: the Powerful who give orders, AND the Powerless who carry the orders out. (A boss without underlings is just a lunatic ranting away to himself.) And everyone who yearns to play this game without exception fancies himself in the former role — the plum, the prize, the glory. Nobody even proposes such play without the conviction that he’ll be giving the orders. No one advocates for strongman rule without foreseeing that he himself will be part of the strongman’s team, not a bossed-around underling.
In real life, though, one rarely gets that choice. After all, somebody — LOTS of somebodies — have to hold up the single pinnacle on a pyramid. Those lower blocks also want to be the block at the top — maybe the wolf in the story did once too — but odds are much better that they always will be stuck only holding the top block up.
At that point, it’s too late to prefer a different system.