It’s August 7, 1974 and Barry Goldwater’s feet hurt.
The Senator (R-AZ), along with House Minority Leader John Rhodes (R-AZ) and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-PA) have just made the trip from the Capitol Building to the Old Executive Office Building a little west of the White House, to meet President Richard Nixon and discuss his ongoing… unpleasantness.
To wit, they have come to explain to him that they are not going to stop impeachment proceedings, and very likely the President will be impeached, removed from office, and indicted on federal charges springing from the Watergate break-in and earlier campaign improprieties.
No one else was in the room where it happened and we don’t know exactly what was said, but Nixon resigned 2 days later, was then pardoned by his hand-picked successor, and ambled off into historical infamy.
Which brings us to our current President’s… unpleasantness.
The walls are closing in on Dump, and one speculation is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will sooner or later be making a similar trip to deliver similarly unwanted news.
The problem, as always, is Dump is a toddler.
Goldwater & Friends took the walk of shame to tell Nixon the gig was up because, despite being as morally twisted as a corkscrew, Nixon had sufficient self-awareness and connection to reality to recognize a losing hand.
Dump has neither. It’s not just that he is so emotionally arrested he doesn’t care about anything but himself. That would be garden variety NPD. It’s that he is also so intellectually arrested he doesn’t see anything but himself.
That brings us to my favorite philosopher, all-around life of the party Arthur Schopenhauer, photographed below in a lighter moment.
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer is keen to explain life, the universe, and everything as a juxtaposition of “the will” — that unconscious interior “be”-ing-ness you have right this instant becoming increasingly impatient with me, and “representation” (in earlier translations for us Olds, “idea”) — everything else.
Will isn’t the “you” I’m making you think about right now. That you is part of the representation the will has fashioned from the world in order to get the things it wants. It also isn’t consciousness, which is the mechanism that you uses to look back upon itself in order to function usefully for the will. It’s not mystical, either, it’s very down to Earth, and you’d really need to read his 300 pages to get the picture. I promise you, despite my poor efforts here, he’s clear. And funny. No, really. But the important thing to keep in mind for our purposes is that what gives us our self-awareness is a purposefully constructed “self” to give the will a lever to move the world with, as well as an understanding of that self’s place in the “world,” which itself is also a purposefully constructed representation of everything outside the will to give it a notional arena within which to play out its whims.
My man writes:
The will, considered purely in itself, is without knowledge and is merely a blind, irresistible impulse, as we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable nature… The will receives, by the accession of the world as representation, which is developed for it, the knowledge of its own willing and what it is that it wills. And that is nothing but this world, life, precisely as it exists. For that reason we called the phenomenal world the will’s mirror, its objectivity.”
The fly in the ointment here, AND GETTING BACK TO DUMP (as you suspected I never would), is the phrase “precisely as it exists.” Because that is the golden key that allows this whole complex machine to do work in the world.
What brings this “mirror of the self” map rigged up inside our consciousness into correspondence with (and therefore of use as an interface to) the world as it really is are all those functions and experiences we call “maturation.” As we grow from childhood to adulthood we slowly develop an understanding of the world congruent with how other “selves” see it. Most particularly, we grasp that our self is just one of many equal selves within that map of the world, each only immediately grasping things from its own perspective, and thus incomplete.
But Dump is a very special breed of cat: a self with no maturation. It is a pure proto-self that has never been touched by the recognition of its narrowness and fungibility with respect to other selves, and consequently one incapable of looking back upon itself critically and developing the higher understandings we associate with adulthood.
Dump is an actual 71-year old toddler. And because of this, even if McConnell et al. took the Walk of Shame under identical circumstances to 1974, Dump, if he listened at all, would be literally incapable of understanding what they were saying. From the Dump-Toddler perspective, there can be no mapping ideas like “the good of others” or, for that matter, even “others” onto his mental model of the universe. For Dump, there is only an unspoken, unaddressed ME at the center of that consciousness. A ME so total it doesn’t even have a view of itself, it is simply “all that is.” Dump is probably as close as a human being can get to being a portal of the actual and unvarnished will itself. It’s not that it just lacks self-awareness. It’s nearly without “self” in the sense of the recognition that a perspective is speaking from inside the skull that is displaced from what is willing it to speak. Dump is almost a direct participation in that will without any critical reflection.
So there is no way to reach him. Or, It. Or whatever.
The Republicans are in a dilemma. I see no way out for them or, rather, I see just one, which will test whether Bill Hicks was right.