Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
Guess you don’t see the irony about Dems generally?
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Have you read
Blood Meridian? You should. It makes
Lolita seem conservative, and
Moby Dick about 300 pages too long.
Anyway, there’s a character called The Priest in it, and the Priest simply can’t think outside the rules in the Bible, in his creed, of his discipline. And then there’s this cat called Judge Holden who’s basically a redo of Milton’s Satan from
Paradise List (or as Ty might like it, a sane and viciously rational Col. Kurtz). The Priest argues against Holden’s barbarism but Holden has no interest, and when pressed, he advises the Priest that the Priest’s rules are moral rules, man made rules to even the score between power and weakness, which have never really applied or mattered much.
The rule of power has always controlled. We all know that. It’s just dressed up differently, sold differently, from time to time... Trump’s disruption is just another iteration. In response to it, one must throw the rules of law and political normalcy at the moment out the window. But to say that to a lawyer is to geld him, for that’s all he’s got. His facility with those rules, those precedents.
Or as the Priest said to the Judge when the Judge advised he’d only obey the rule of power and the Priest should tell him otherwise,
Nihil dicit. Trump’s daring people like Ty, stepping over lines, and Ty pleads, “You’d better follow the rules... morality matters... precedent matters. One side is wearing a white hat... one is doing its job, and is more pure, and the other is not and should not be allowed to throw the rules, the conventions, out the window... we all must play the game as I understand it, as lawyers would understand it.”
Yeah. Well, that ain’t life. That’s the life lawyers and those with reverence for systems and institutions worship. The people who change the world, even accidentally, share one common view... An assessment they can test, damage, perhaps overcome, the institutions’ enforcement capacities.
And then of course when they succeed, they go wrong and form new types of controlling institutions. And someone comes along and disrupts them, while a Ty complains earnestly that the system is worth protecting.
The cycle can’t help but repeat, endlessly. Some philosopher wrote a book about in 1916... Basically said there will always be an elite group at the top taking over thru an overt or clandestine power play, and that group is always, necessarily, going to be toppled by another, with few of them ever lasting very long.
