Grotesque Mediocrity

 Grotesque Mediocrity

Describing Trump as a "grotesque mediocrity", a line out of Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, I recently clapped back at the folks using their pedagogic skills to teach us about the "dangers of 'socialism'". His description of the historical events and conditions in France that led to the rise of  Bonapartism - a state of political crisis where a strong man takes over when society is seemingly falling apart and who works to "return the state to its former glory" by engaging in vainglorious and ostentatious public works, regaling military might, stupid wars and absolutism - are analogous. 

Marx's explanation of materialism notes that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." 

Historical events and conditions allowed for the usurpation of power by Napoleon Bonaparte, and then consequently by Napoleon III's coup of 1851, conditions that had been fulminating for more than eighty years: revolution, 1848; Charles X's flight, 1830; the charter of 1814; Napoleon I, 1804; French Revolution, the Thermidorian Reaction, the terror, etc.

In Brumaire, Marx expands Hegel's historical Darwinism by concluding with his famous line that in allowing for the assumption of power by the brutal and callous Napoleon Bonaparte to be followed by the feckless Napoleon the Third, history had repeated itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Trump embodies both. 

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Regrets

"The old lady's soul took with her the electricity in the house abruptly, leaving the hot house without air conditioning and light and scaring the shit out of her family."

My mother died. This date. Some time ago. It had been two weeks of the horrific experience of watching my family's bedrock literally waist away. I left immediately. No funeral for me. No internment. I refused to acknowledge, as I had done with the diagnosis and watching her pass, that she was gone. My grief was overbearing. For a very long time I would burst into tears. Eventually those tears, like the disease that had taken her, would wear away the millstone of my hurt, accepting that she was gone and relishing the good things she had done for me. 

Memories also bring regrets. I share my stories with my wife. She is quick to chide me when I point out things mysterious I tell her from my and my mother's past that I ascribe to "just coincidence". I ridicule things spiritual (I'm an intellectual, don't ya know?)(and ex-Catholic, so there's that too) so my stories about my mother has made the two of them kindred spirits. 

She is so tickled with my mother's moralistic agnostic Santeria bent that she has made her center spot in a little altar she has constructed in our living room. And, because she knows my history, one with large dollops of regret, the scars I bear about the priggish things I did or didn't do and what I said under license as the oldest male (Puerto Rican) child, she originally put that garlic there (long story) , something I repeat each year, partly to make amends the only way now that I can, but also, as tribute.

MY MOTHER WASN'T PERFECT

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