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Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honor bred, with one Who were it proved he lies Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours’ eyes. . . I had been intending quoting the above lines on Trump and was somewhat chagrined to learn that I had been pipped to the post by Stephen Burt at http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture-poetry/stephen-burt-reading-yeats-age-trump . But I thought I would throw in a word of caution. Burt's article is very much worth a read. His grasp of Yeats' poetry is very comprehensive, his grasp of Yeats' politics much less so. But I think what most worries me about Burt's advocacy of a turn to Yeats, is Burt's failure to recognize the Nietzschean temptation. The phenomenon of Left Nietzschean has puzzled me for a long time now. Nietzsche was a through and through figure of the far-right. There is no contradicting that with a reference to his madness. What he wrote he wrote and much of it was vile. But the appeal for leftist intellectuals, seems to me to be that Nietzsche strikes a note of oppositionalism. His is the pose of the neglected isolated thinker, artist, philosopher. We can glide over the facts that, when he is being oppositional, he is bemoaning that we do not slaughter the "botched", and that we have turned our backs on slavery, etc. In the poem above Yeats is telling a friend to exult because the masses are against him and his loss proves his worth. We must rather hold to a belief in the masses. Not a naive one of course, but we must hold to the fact that some 75% of Americans either did not vote or voted against Trump. So there is no need to be "secret and exult". We must also rejoice in the fact that Trump's party was thoroughly spoiled by the sheer mass of the Women's protests. One day of protest will not bring Trump down. Of course not. But even given the uneven consciousness on display, the Women's protests were still a carnival of resistance. And there is much in that to give us hope. comradely Gary _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
