Yesterday from Wordsmith's a-word-a-day:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. -Robert Lynd, writer (20 Apr 1879-1949)

From The Guardian this morning:

‘We’re Catholic first’: Sunday mass attenders weigh in on Trump’s feud with Pope Leo

Trump’s presidency is what evil looks like: absurd, frightening, cruel

Nesrine Malik

Commentators have said that the US president’s clownishness and lack of ideology somehow make him less dangerous. They’re wrong

Over the past few weeks, a random kaleidoscope of images has been flashing through my head. Some are characters from movies not seen since childhood. Others are snippets from literature or iconic art. What joins them all is an exaggerated, almost kitschy evil.

These images seem to be standing in for the real carnage my brain is trying to process: the bodies pulled from the rubble in Gaza, a school full of young pupils blown apart in Iran. The more than 1 million people in southern Lebanon expelled en masse from their homes. (Alex in the film of A Clockwork Orange appears, eyes clamped open as liquid is dripped into them, unable to blink away what is scorching his vision.)

What is so bewildering about the cruelty is how it has been allowed to pass, its casualness. Donald Trump hovers above the circus of death and chaos. (Billy, the clown-faced puppet in Saw, pops up rasping, “I want to play a game”.) Trump defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy. His wars, killing of innocents, and indeed, the threatening of entire civilisations are reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan. He is animated by little more than momentary impulses and resentments.

Trump’s seeming lack of vision or ideology are misread as attributes that make him somehow less dangerous than the authoritarians of the past who have become the template for what evil looks like. Take the debate over whether Trump can be described as “fascist”. “You can’t be a fascist,” said the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim, “without in any way meaning to be one.” Trump is inept, inconsistent, “puzzling and exasperating”, but not a fascist, he claims.

Trump also does not adhere to the style or affect of the fascist model: he doesn’t hold rallies, wear uniforms or make fiery speeches from balconies to flag-waving throngs. He hasn’t (entirely yet) overturned the constitution and dismantled democracy. He is an addled comic figure, a man whose very soul is bared in his angry outbursts on social media or in rambling speeches without self-awareness or self-consciousness. He talks about the war on Iran flanked by a gigantic Easter bunny, posts an image of himself as Jesus. He “always chickens out”. (A Wheeler from 1985’s dark fantasy Return to Oz: screeching, giggling, chasing, then wincing and withdrawing when its quarry strikes back.)

But isn’t this what evil is? A projection on to the world not of overbearing and large intent, but smallness and fear? The consequences of violence are secondary to the validation that comes from inflicting it. Trump’s constant self-aggrandisement, his grudges against political adversaries, the fury at being challenged by the press, the revenge he promises to wreak on the Iranian regime. All are ways to erase and avoid what is a permanent terror of humiliation and obsolescence. (Goya’s Saturn, wild-eyed, devours his son.)

It is in that very puniness that insatiable evil lies. In 1931, after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party had surged in the polls, he was interviewed by the US reporter Dorothy Thompson for Cosmopolitan. “When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof hotel,” Thompson recalled, “I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”

“Think of Benito Mussolini,” wrote the journalist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in the LA Times, “jackbooted, lantern-jawed, squeakily bombastic, posturing from the little balcony of his office on Piazza Venezia in Rome – that remarkably dopey stiff-armed Fascist salute, the absurd oratory. Think of that funny man, that consummate buffoon”, and remember that “just because something is silly doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous”.

We tend to imbue history and all its grave events with a seriousness and coherence that we struggle to apply in the present. And I think that’s because it’s hard for the human brain to encounter evil in ludicrous form, and still recognise it as such. That’s how it creeps up on you. That’s why you ask how such crimes were allowed to happen in the past. The answer is that it rarely arrives with the intent and identifying hallmarks of a villain. It arrives in the form of broken people, whose power lies in their unquenchable desire to make themselves whole no matter the consequences. Alongside Trump’s absurdity sits the fact that he has access to the means of nuclear annihilation and a sociopathic appetite for escalation. (Milton – “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”.)

Evil is composed of frivolity and nonchalance and fragility, as well as relentlessness and insatiability and brutality. Another recollection from my reel. In the movie franchise The Purge, the United States has passed a law that for 12 hours, all crime is legal, in order to purge grudges and blood-let the inherent darkness in all humans, so that the rest of the year can be free of crime. But it is not enough for the population that they ravage each other for a day. They also dress in elaborate costumes, wear gaudy makeup, fashion masks and blast music in a ritual of relish.

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What the film gets at is that crime is not satisfying without the performance. Without the assertion that as you commit the gravest of sins, your power in doing so comes from approaching it trivially, with the privilege of play. It is not the act, but the licence. It is not enough that ICE separates families and uproots lives, it is important that the whole thing is rendered as celebration, with images of Trump standing next to alligators wearing ICE caps next to the line “Alligator Alcatraz” in movie poster font.

There is no cajoling or humouring of this sort of jubilant wickedness that will make Trump spare his quaking allies. No minimising of it as nothing ideological or without a strategic purpose, and therefore ultimately manageable. The unbridled cruelty and violence that he is unleashing and enabling domestically and abroad draws on all its precedents, and can only be fiercely fought – and with urgency – or it will consume all. (Patrick Bateman, American Psycho: “My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape.”)

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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Years ago an Episcopal priest who, whether he ever realized it or not, was a theological and moral mentor to me (mostly absently because I was always far away in later years) told me "I don't think you should do it." I was 22 year old at the Time, maybe 23, a college graduate, married with a baby, a young Navy officer, and I was discussing with him my intention to go to Sewanee and heading for ordination and life as a parish priest when I finished my three year Navy commitment - - heading for seminary. I heard David say, "I don't think you should do it." Taken aback, almost stunned, I put the idea away, I thought permanently, and augmented from USNR to USN, committing to a Navy career for that second twenty-year chapter of my life - - an easy decision at the Time because I was loving my tour of duty in a destroyer, a warship where I was so affirmed.

As it, my life, turned out of course, the roads I took when they diverged in Frost's yellow wood, I ended up being summoned back to the seminary and ordination track some twenty years later. Ten or fifteen years into it, fifty-five or sixty years old, I was visiting with Fr David and reminisced about that ancient conversation, asked if he remembered, and he actually did remember. I said that his words to me had surprised me, rerouted my life, and turned me away from all thoughts of ordination. David was shocked and denied saying that, but I told him the words were engraved in my mind and I remembered them exactly. He then said that I had not heard what he intended to say.

By then he was long retired, and I was not for from my own second retirement, this Time as a parish priest. Not long after that reunion meeting, the mail brought a little package from David with a plaque that reads,

I KNOW YOU BELIEVE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU THINK I SAID, BUT I AM NOT SURE YOU REALIZE THAT WHAT YOU HEARD IS NOT WHAT I MEANT.

Fr David has been dead for years now; but judging by the sticker strips on the back of the little plaque, David had peeled it off the wall of his study, where, he told me, it had helped him understand why parishioners so often understood totally differently from his intentions what he had said in sermons. I've experienced that too, going by the piety that no matter what we intend to say, the Holy Spirit will stand between our words and the listeners' hearing, interceding as the hearer needs.

Usually, anyway. It isn't always like that: in my forty-some years as priest-in-pulpit, I twice had a parishioner, two different people at two different parishes I served, challenge my, to me, positive sermon, as quite hurtful. But usually.

Why am I here this Tuesday morning late in my 91st April? Because from past experience I should have known that something I wrote recently was not unlikely to be read and received differently from what I was contemplating when I wrote it. I was thinking about Life, every human Life, including not only my own Life and the Lives of those I have known and loved, but the Lives of the most famous and the most invisible humans in human history. Abraham Lincoln - - Winston Churchill - - the nameless slave-girl child of one of Pontius Pilate's slaves - - the most insignificant soldier who died in the wars of Alexander the Great - - the lowest ranking soldier under the centurion who headed that Good Friday at Calvary's Hill - - the most nameless unidentifiable rotting corpse bulldozed into a mass burial pit at Auschwitz - - we, all of us humans finish up and leave Life behind as at most a name on a grave marker that someone will stroll past on their way to another grave with a fistful of flowers.

Someone did pick up on it, though, remembering a Muslim acquaintance quoting, We are dust, We are nothing.

We are anonymous ants fighting among ourselves, hating and killing each other on a beautiful blue planet, a priceless gift that is but a speck among billions, trillions, quadrillions of specks. And does the Pantokrator know us, does he love us, each and every one of us? That nameless soldier fighting with Alexander? Pilate's slave-girl? Will the Creator remember each of us as his Creation, this Universe, continues to expand until its heat dissipates, cools to absolute zero, and vanishes with no evidence of ever having Been? As I Seek the Truth, my inclination is to seek among the writings of Thomas Hardy.

Seeking, I will say that I also am Catholic first. I will say that, like Nesrine Malik, I also see the cruelty. Astonished, appalled, yet will I not despair - - close, but no, I will not. Someone once said in a contemplative group I was part of that "despair is the greatest sin." Maybe so. IDK.

T90

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A stream of consciousness, this blogpost may be linked on my Facebook page for the moment, and it may stay up and accessible a few hours before I take it down. Always RSF&PTL.

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