Correspondence: We didn’t even get a road....

Prisoners working on
R504 Kolyma Highway

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Between 1932 and 1953, more than 250,000 Gulag inmate labourers died while building the R504 Kolyma Highway through the Russian Far East. Historians often cite the loss of these lives as a horrific example of Joseph Stalin's brutal leadership of the former Soviet Union – but at least the country wound up with a usable road that functioned through impossibly inhospitable weather and across unbelievably rugged terrain.
    From January 2020 through November 2020, more than 250,000 Americans died from Covid-19, and the country didn’t even get a road out of the loss of all those lives. One has to wonder what historians will have to say about American political leadership during this era.

R504 Kolyma Highway (in red)

Positive

My daughter and son-in-law have tested positive. They found out last Monday that they had been exposed and took the quick test that was back in 15 minutes and then took the blood test which came back yesterday. They do have the virus but are so far feeling fine. She was over here last Sunday, so we have an appointment for Tues. We'll be getting a blood test so will not know anything until about next Friday. Thought you should know just in case.

From Richard Fausset & Pranshu Verma’s Nov. 20 NY Times column, “Presidential Transition: Georgia Completes Full Recount, Reaffirming Biden’s Win”:

In the strongest criticism of President Trump by a fellow high-ranking Republican so far, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah on Thursday night excoriated the president on Twitter for his continuing and overwhelmingly unsuccessful efforts to overturn his election defeat earlier this month to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
    Mr. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said that the president had exhausted his legal challenges in several battleground states and had resorted to trying to defy the will of the voters.
    His rebuke of Mr. Trump came on the same day that the president invited Republican state leaders in Michigan to the White House to discuss their efforts to stop the certification of the election results in the state.
    “Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the president has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” Mr. Romney wrote. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”

Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1778,
National Gallery of Art

Apropos of nothing, here are a few of my favorite quotes of Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet, Voltaire, 1694 – 1778]:

“If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace.”

“Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of all men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each another as though they were of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to those who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these free and peaceful assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand spoken over the child, others go to church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.”

“No opinion is worth burning your neighbor for.”

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”

“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”

“Now, my good man, this is no time to be making enemies!”

[Said by Voltaire on his deathbed in response
to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.]

Prompted by William Silveira’s Nov. 17 West Coast Observation “Will Trump Be Indicted for Anything after January 20?,” I just ordered from my library a copy of Eric Hoffer’s book, The True Believer, one of the most significant books I read as an undergraduate. I am happy to find libraries are still carrying it and that classmates remember it as required in Western Civ, as we called the course.

Actor Alexander Held plays
Franz Schober

    Hoffer presents the case for the compelling authoritarian figure that derives from the character of the German father, of which a prototype is portrayed in the father/grandfather character of Franz Schober in the German TV series Tannbach (retitled Line of Separation for U.S. distribution), which is about a German town (Tannbach) that was split down the middle following World War II, half in West Germany and half in East Germany, with even some families split apart.
    Hoffer’s profile of that personality type and the vulnerability of children growing up with an authoritarian father are key to understanding why some children become adapted to that father figure and come to need to follow him in politics, and in life...such father figures as Trump and other authoritarian leaders as well.
    I am not sure that we are prone to buy such a simple explanation today, but there is clearly an appeal to less successful people who feel they aren’t being “heard” or valued, much as the sons of German fathers were devalued in Hoffer’s experience.
    Trump supplies some validation for these undervalued people, and we can see that squelching him won’t result in silencing him. The cause of his appeal is what must be corrected in a more equal distribution of wealth and opportunity.

Saved by
the Muse

My muse saved me last night. She was probably stimulated to explore why I was experiencing a feeling of “something not right” yesterday as I was processing the Word doc you sent me. Somewhere around 3 a.m. she he was asking me whether I compared the two documents in the correct order. Well, the answer is, I didn’t. I compared the later copy with the earlier one, rather than vice versa; I was identifying things to go back to to rather than to go forward to!
    I know [another correspondent said], it can get confusing. I have all these different versions and I go through and erase them after I make changes, but sometimes there are quite a few. I also back up on a thumb drive and the cloud, so I have to go in there and root out the deadwood too. Always holding my breath that I don't erase the wrong one.

Live in the moment
Life is temporary
and precious

The pain of loss of a loved one helps remind me to live in the moment. Life is temporary and precious. The people in our lives we care for are also here for a short time. We must acknowledge our feelings for each other when we have the chance, and get solace in the fact we crossed each other’s paths, and had that time together. However, this does not make the pain less, or the sorrow more bearable. It simply gives context to the emotions. How you choose to reflect on your relationship, remembering the good times, and relishing what was meaningful in your exchanges, gives evidence of why you are saddened to lose them. Time lessens the hurt, and reflection may offer comfort to you when the sadness returns.

By Zohar Lazar

From Michelle Goldberg’s Nov. 13 NY Times op-ed, “The Post-Presidency of a Con Man”:

It’s hard to tell whether Donald Trump is attempting a coup or throwing a tantrum....
    But there’s cause for comfort, of a sort, in signs that the president is preparing for life outside the White House in exactly the way one would expect — by initiating new grifts...Axios reports that Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal.
    These moves suggest that while Trump may be willing to torch American democracy to salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is getting ready to leave office.
    When he finally does, some political observers and Republican professionals assume he’ll remain a political kingmaker, and will be a favorite for the party’s nomination in 2024. The Times reported, “Allies imagined other Republicans making a pilgrimage to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida seeking his blessing.”....
    Maybe. There’s no doubt that Trump has a cultlike hold on his millions of worshipers, and a unique ability to command public attention. But there are reasons to think that when he is finally ejected from the White House, he will become a significantly diminished figure.
    Once Trump is no longer president, he is likely to be consumed by lawsuits and criminal investigations. Hundreds of millions of dollars in debt will come due. Lobbyists and foreign dignitaries won’t have much of a reason to patronize Mar-a-Lago or his Washington hotel. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch could complete the transition from Trump’s enabler to his enemy. And, after four years of cartoonish self-abasement, Republicans with presidential aspirations will have an incentive to help take him down.
    “His whole life he’s been involved in a bunch of litigation,” said the superstar liberal attorney Roberta Kaplan. But post-presidency, “I have to assume that, given the amount of civil litigation and potential criminal exposure, it’s going to be at a completely new dimension.”
    Kaplan is pursuing three high-profile lawsuits against Trump, including the writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case. Carroll, you might remember, accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room during the 1990s. Trump called her a liar, and she’s suing him for damaging her reputation.

This is just to say thanks to the Moristotelians whose contributions have helped me begin to understand what it is about the millions of Americans who can – against all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary – still approve of Donald Trump. I have, of course, had my own version of Paul Clark’s label, “delusional idiots.” But that doesn’t explain the Trump-approvers, any more than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s “fucking idiot” explained Trump himself.
    Thanks especially to William Silveira for suggesting we read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. In fact, I’ve already picked it up. As I thumbed its pages, a gem of an insight jumped out at me: “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” Trumpians do seem to fall into line, don’t they? (But you yourself, Moristotle, had already, weeks ago, denoted Trumpists as “true believers,” which I guess only goes to prove that you, too, have read Hoffer.)
    Penelope’s comment on Paul’s latest post is helpful too: “a cohort of ‘stupid’ people who, due to their ‘stupid’ parents, will only ever vote for one particular political party, regardless of who is the head.” That actually seems to support Hoffer’s thesis about the authoritarian father figure. Good stuff! Thanks again. Keep it up.
    And what’s this about Paul Clark’s being “emeritus”? When is he going to be listed again as currently active?
    [Paul’s entry in the sidebar has now been moved back up to Contributing Editor.]

Wow, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer begins with a quotation on p. v from Blaise Pascal’s Pensees that could have been referring to the apparent psychology of mass movements of people – Trumpists included – in our time:

Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.

Warning: Reading “What is the Cabal and How Dark Forces Control the Masses” [by the staff of Gaia, Dec. 6, 2019] may make you dizzy because you may already be under the Dark Forces’ control and of course not yet know it. At least that’s what they say...

A late arrival, the Trump Commemorative Stamp:

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle