I can't (and won't) recommend this book for various reasons, which I'll get around to elsewhere, but in the last story there's a line which I thought was worth a bit of a chat-up.
It comes just four pages from the end of the final story in this collection, "Rocket Man." You don't really need any context for it, but here's a bit anyway: a young boxer who is getting ready for a big fight visits his friend / mentor, who is in a detox facility, and the older guy says (in part) this:
"...in every human breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancour and malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent's tooth, and waiting only for an opportunity of venting itself, and then, like a demon unchained...."
There's no reference to the fact that these words belong to Arthur Schopenhauer...and I'm pretty sure that the only philosopher referred to in this story is Friedrich Nietzsche...which seems kind of unfair...but it's not my party, so I'll leave that at that.
Anyway, I thought that was good stuff, and since I was sure that it wasn't a Thom Jones original, I went looking and found the source (big surprise if you're familiar with Thom Jones--it was from Arthur Schopenhauer) and a bit more of it:
"...of storming and raging. If a man has no great occasion for breaking out, he will end by taking advantage of the smallest, and by working it up into something great by the aid of his imagination; for, however small it may be, it is enough to rouse his anger
—Quantulacunque adeo est occasio, sufficit irae—
and then he will carry it as far as he can and may. We see this in daily life, where such outbursts are well known under the name of 'venting one's gall on something.' It will also have been observed that if such outbursts meet with no opposition the subject of them feels decidedly the better for them afterwards. That anger is not without its pleasure is a truth that was recorded even by Aristotle; and he quotes a passage from Homer, who declares anger to be sweeter than honey. But not in anger alone—in hatred too, which stands to anger like a chronic to an acute disease, a man may indulge with the greatest delight:
Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure,
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
Gobineau in his work Les Races Humaines has called man l'animal mechant par excellence. People take this very ill, because they feel that it hits them; but he is quite right, for man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it."
Well. That's some powerful shit, isn't it? I think it's the perfect explanation for the crowds at Trump rallies. In their daily lives, they have had to suffer all kinds of shit. The everyday shit that everybody puts up with in some cases. Extra shit if they belong to the undereducated, underemployed, and underinteeligent. They desperately need to take their anger out on someone, and Trump not only offers them a target or two, he also gives them a venue in which they can congregate and expel their venom in one huge, monstrous orgy of hatred. Who wouldn't want to feel that ecstatic mass ejaculation surging through and around them? No wonder they don't care what Trump says or does...even if it is counter to their own self-interests. He gives them this.
Nobody else does.
Let's put it this way: have you ever stayed with a bad partner because the sex was at worst pretty good? Well, then. Trump's base is only going to leave him if he stops jacking them off. And he looks like he can still go a few rounds.
And that's the truth.
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