I have been amazed on a regular basis for the past year or so at how now President Trump could get away with saying things that were obviously not true. But he seems to have proven to be invulnerable not only to factual disputation, but also to self-contradiction. I'm not cynical enough to think that all of his followers . . . or, for that matter, even most of his followers . . . are idiots. So (to borrow a phrase from St. Roy's Gospel of The Naked Flame), "Where is it at to get to this?"
Well, today I went to A Reader's Corner bookstore, a lovely li'l place which is about 9 1/2 miles from my front door--which is about twice as far away as the farthest of the two Half-Price Books locations, so I'm sorry to say that I don't get to ARC very often. But as Jacqueline and I near the end of Les Misérables, I have found that I am not ready to let go of Victor Hugo, so I've been trying to convince her to read The Hunchback of Notre-Dame / Notre-dame de Paris. And for some reason I can't explain, I want to find a nice hardback, illustrated version of the book. I've been online doing reconnaissance, but it's hard to get the details from most of the descriptions, so I've made several runs to each of the Half-Price Books locations, hoping that something Hugo would turn up. Nada. So I made the long drive to A Reader's Corner.
Which did not have what I was looking for.
But since I was there . . .
And I tried to resist temptation, I really did. But there was that two volume edition of The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Volume I: The Blessed Damozel & Longer Poems, Volume II: The House Of Life & Shorter Poems . . . which was published in the early 1900s . . . and only cost $15 for both volumes . . . so that had to happen. And then there was a book of short stories by Eugène Ionesco, The Colonel's Photograph, and Other Stories, and (1) I didn't even know he had written any short stories and (2) there was a short story version of Rhinoceros--imposerous!--so of course I needed to read that. And then there was Them Jones's The Pugilist at Rest, and a book of saints by Sister Wendy that I had to buy for Jacqueline (yep, Saint Lucy was in there), and a cool book entitled Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts which I had to look at . . . and I read something that not only made me laugh out loud, but made me bark like a Chihuahua . . . . And by then it was too late to be reasonable, so when I saw Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy by Stephen David Ross, well I just had to have a look, didn't I? And I opened the book and read this:
"There is no difference in the way in which a belief is held that can distinguish it as true or false. Truth and error occupy the same terrain. Not only is the psychological criterion inadequate: it obscures the aporia that while assent is a form of emotion, truth is not, while there is no knowledge that is not truth assented to. Knowledge is ensured in aporia in a theory that requires that all knowledge originate in lived experience."
Wow. Is that some heavy shit or what?
And there it is, ennit? Because first and foremost, Trump does not have followers, he has believers. And assent is a form of emotion. So it's not really a question of an inability to discern the truth, it's just that it's not a matter of truth. Sorry for the invidious parallel, but it's like telling a Christian that the resurrection story can't be true, because human beings do not rise from the dead--never have, never will.
So until people stop believing in Trump, he can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants to do and say whatever the hell he wants to say. Truth and Reality aren't even on the table.
The only hope I see is that at some point he will do something that will make his believers stop believing.
We'll see.
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