the rule of law......(revised)

THE RULE OF LAW versus THE ROLE OF MADNESS (revised)

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 some of us were taught that the nation must be an immaculate sheet of white parchment upon which white hands divinely authorized to write in white ink.  It is unfortunate that few Americans want to admit that we live in a self-contradicting  fiction that we constantly write and rewrite, daring to violate the rule of whiteness with ethnic colors.  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, DJT, tweet boy, of thee I sing.

Kilroy:  I am no guinea pig!

Gypsy: Don't kid yourself. We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God!  Humanity is just a work in progress.

Tennessee Williams, Camino Real, Block Twelve

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!  Blut und Boden und Scheisen! The swamp is the cesspool, and all of us stink appropriately.  President Trump and his most loyal, unconditional supporters  (especially his legions of white nationalists) have served notice that the work of fiction is profane and ungodly.  It is stupid to hope for better. It is buck wild stupid to bury our heads in patriotic sand.  How can we hope when our senators and representatives are complicit in the plot, their ostensible sides of the aisle babbling in fractal tongues?

Perhaps we have just what the minority of voters wanted  in November 2016 , what they had confirmed by the Electoral College ---the replacement of democracy with  fascism.  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 morally  infirm by the role of madness. Yes, DJT, tweet boy David Duke Doppelgänger, of thee I sing.

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 and tricks of questionable legality, he earns a grade of "F" for each of the seven lessons.

 What a shame. A President of the United States of America 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.

Blut und Boden und Scheisen!

Blut und Boden und Scheisen!

Blut und Boden und Scheisen!

From a hymn in Charlottesville, VA, August 11-12, 2017

But his shame is no shame. His imperial shame anoints us with unadulterated dread from history's cup of trembling.

We first met him in The Satyricon by Petronius Arbiter.  Then his name was Trimalchio.

"Sometimes God's creative overtures are almost too much to handle."

Bulletin, August 13, 2017  St. Raymond and St. Leo the Great Parish

J.S. Paluch Company, Inc., 2017. With Ecclesiastical Approbation.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 13, 2017