the rule of law versus the role of madness


THE RULE OF LAW versus THE ROLE OF MADNESS



One  conception of politics, according to Paul W. Kahn, involves "a commitment to both history and territory" (time and space), and "the rule of law is an organization of institutions, practices, persons, and objects with the ongoing historical and spatial project that is the state. The state occupies time and space not as an object in the natural world, but as an imaginative construction of temporal and spatial meanings.  The state's time is history; its space is territory.  These are the subjects of a legal aesthetic" [The Cultural Study of Law ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 40].  It is unfortunate that few of us were ever taught that the United States of America as a state is actually a work of fiction upon which we are obligated, as citizens, to impose a patriotic sense of something possessing four dimensions, celebrated in flags,  song, pledge, and prayer.  It is unfortunate that few Americans want to admit that we live in a fiction that we constantly write and rewrite.  The few of us who dare to make the admission live in abject agony, because we realize the main protagonist in the 2017 fiction is not an epic hero but an epic disgrace.  Yes, tweet boy, of thee I sing.



In its ideal iteration, the Office of the President has an honored place in the rule of law, despite the foibles of individuals who have occupied the Office since George Washington.  We respect the Office even if our ideologies,  party affiliation, wretchedness, needs, and desires preclude our giving allegiance one occupant or another.  When the occupant tweets his disrespect for the Office on a daily basis, we are  ---to put the case obscenely ---in deep shit!  The swamp is the cesspool, and all of us stink appropriately.  President Trump and his most loyal, unconditional supporters have served notice that the work of fiction is profane and ungodly.  It is stupid to hope for better, to bury our heads in patriotic sand.  How can we hope when our senators and representatives are complicit in the plot?



Perhaps we have just what the minority of voters wanted  in November 2016 and had confirmed by the Electoral College ---the replacement of democracy with a fascist tweetocracy.  Cognitive dissonance is a faithful American servant, and  it cooks and cleans with all the gusto white uncles and mammies can muster.  And the Master and his trophy Mistress can never be satisfied.  The state is rendered  infirm by the role of madness.



If we are capable of being surprised by anything, we are likely surprised that President Trump hasn't sworn on a stack of false religious texts that Harvard Business School has denied him the affirmative action he was born to inherit.  Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria chose not to write about him in their excellent book In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005).  Leaks from the WH condemn them for being left-leaning and unkind.  But it is judicious for Mayo and Nohria to be unkind.  Theirs is a study of "contextual intelligence ---the profound sensitivity to macro-level contextual factors in the creation, growth or transformation of business" (xv)  from  1900 to 1999. They are concerned with pristine capitalism.  When they published the book, the rule of law was intact.  Grounds for excluding Trump can be found in the seven key lessons they itemize in the epilogue, pages 354-360:



1. Context matters --moving beyond the "great man" theory

2. Different paths to greatness

3.  Great leadership is a function of context plus personal characteristics plus adaptive capacity

4. Betting on the right person for the right time

5. Betting on the right company at the right time

6.  The importance of business history

7.  Enhancing your contextual intelligence, becoming a "first-class noticer"



Despite the fact that our protagonist did make a great deal of money by calculated accidents, he earns a grade of "F" for each of the seven lessons.  Methinks Henry James and William Dean Howells sketched Trump's prototype in the nineteenth century.  What a shame the President of the United States of American is not worthy of being in the company of Cyrus H. K. Curtis,  Henry Ford,  Sarah Breedlove, Earl Graves, Christine A. Hefner, Peter H. Coors,  and Reginald F. Lewis. His shame anoints us with unadulterated dread.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 1, 2017

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