Our Home For The Aged
Today
violence is the rhetoric of the period,
the empty rhetorician has made it his own.
When a reality of human existence
has completed its historic course,
has been shipwrecked and lies dead,
the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric,
where the corpse remains for a long time.
Rhetoric is the cemetery of human realities,
or at any rate a home for the Aged.
The reality itself is survived by its name, which,
though only a word, is after all at least a word
and preserves something of its magic power.
-excerpt The Revolt Of The Masses, by José Ortega y Gasset p. 117
“Make America Great Again!” That is the battle cry, the rally point for the party of Trump, formerly known as the Republican Party. The party is a conglomeration of the disaffected, those left behind by the ever widening economic disparity. There is the financialization of the economy — who doesn’t hazard enslavement by debt? With successive waves of “quantitative easing,” or the PPP loans to businesses large and small in the time of COVID, the result is the same: an inflation rate of 8 to 9%, a tax everyone pays.
So the disaffected rise up, rally around the empty bloviators, Trump acolytes, DeSantis of Florida, McConnell of Kentucky, Abbott of Texas, promising salvation. What do they all have in common? — an unqualified repudiation of liberal democracy, and of the Democratic party in particular, and the present occupant of the White House.
What is left? Words, words, empty but they yet have power…
