Reflections On The American President’s Latest Actions and Rhetoric

A tyrant is not a man who desires bad things. (No one desires bad things.) A tyrant is a man who is ignorant enough to have no idea what a good thing is or where to find one; who was raised poorly enough never to have learned the difference between wishing something could be so and believing one has every right to force it upon others; who is vain enough to be offended at the very suggestion that his actions (yes, even his) could lead to unintended consequences quite different from what he imagined he was trying to accomplish; and who is foolish enough to be genuinely shocked when those unintended consequences rise up to engulf him, his dreams, and his country.

From W. H. Auden, the modern poet to whom I return most often these days, we have two short works:

This:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.¹W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1966, p. 127.

And this:

Standing among the ruins, the horror-struck conqueror exclaimed:
‘Why do they have to attempt to refuse me my destiny? Why?’²Ibid., p. 191.

Philosophy is the ultimate consolation, to be sure, but there is occasionally wisdom to be found in art, too.

Motives.– Whether it be a craving for Jewish donors, Arab bribes, Venezuelan oil, the approval of a Russian mobster, or the devotion of a trembling mass of frightened white men in search of a saviour, it is increasingly clear that one man’s Nobel Peace Prize campaign may be a hundred thousand other men’s death and destruction.

I don’t like Canada much either. But I will not systematically destroy the economies of two countries, and the savings and livelihoods of millions, just to vent that distaste.

Few things are sadder than the spectacle of millions of people who sincerely feared and opposed socialism for years, now eagerly embracing it, along with all its darkest totalitarian implications — and its “Some animals or more equal than others” realities — simply because a clever fool relabelled it “patriotism.” And no, “clever fool” is not a paradox. There is nothing inherently wise or even knowledgeable in cleverness, just as there is nothing about folly that precludes an animal’s self-preservational instincts.