In Michael Morcock’s classic, The Final Programme, the world as we know it ends when an experiment goes haywire and produces a single remaining being, a caveman, who now has the task of shouldering civilization.
When this book first appeared in 1968, few probably expected to actually experience this societal condition and, God willing, didn’t. But those of us still around now inhabit a version of that dystopia, saddled by a reversion of our Enlightenment experiment to pre-enlightenment times, and an experiment – for the moment – gone desperately wrong, resulting in a president who connects on the same level as that club-wielding caveman.
It’s sad, even tragic, for the powerful – but delicate – foundations of our country came about when men grappled with all the world’s prior political philosophies to create the best, and, yes, the most enlightened documents for the many, seeking to elevate humanity with a direct appeal to reason, the opposite origins of these shameful, cowed, and self-serving Trump-era depths.
Imperfect, of course, the founders gave us the way to form “a more perfect union.”
We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, “endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” challenged to find and embody these fundamental and restorative human qualities. Our domain not only asks but demands that we voyage beyond the tiny partisan constructs of leader-idolatry, totalitarianism, and simple-minded hate mongering. What a profound disappointment to see men dislocated from the unique demands of modernity, or that challenge framed at our founding on those vital gains made in the classical age, and the enticement now to realize our core evolved identity as a country. All around us, we see American males content to crawl into the caves of pre-history, with no better frame of reference than prejudice, mental lethargy, and hate.
How we got to this point is really no mystery.
In the last century, the American philosopher Mortimer Adler made the urgent argument for equipping every citizen (especially those of us seeking economic justice as a policy priority) with the Great Books, to keep our minds not only intact and ever curious, but to maintain the civic aliveness of the roots and relevance of our precious system. We didn’t pay attention, of course, and what a horror that we failed to understand this fundamental responsibility to our republic’s maintenance. Here smolder the results: a great social experiment hampered mostly by the contemporary male, anchored to 1859 factionalism as a baseline, afraid of appearing weak and so discarding – essentially – his brain – to conform to a group-thinking horde. The basic Trump follower is not a reader, obviously, but a person content to gorge himself on warmed-over Joe McCarthy propaganda, feeding on the hate spewed by Fox News and its adherents to attain the anesthetized state – not of an informed, tough-minded, and tolerant – in the truest sense – citizen – but of a devitalized MAGA underling.
Trump and his minions take every issue and go after the weakest as a starting point to supposedly project strength, oversimplifying each target with dehumanizing rhetoric, whether it’s undocumented workers (“illegal aliens”, in their parlance), people with disabilities (can you ever forget Trump doing an imitation of reporter with a congenital joint disorder), even the President of Ukraine, the attacked party with his countrymen in a war for survival with Russian aggressors, in an oval office ambush. We could go on. Greenland. There’s a toughie. Canada. another one. New Jersey native Rachel Zegler. Let’s gang up on her next. Educators. Let’s go after all the real threats.
In a word, it’s just unmanly – and shameful that any American male, empowered as a matter of birth, summoned as a matter of human decency, whatever your particular religious or moral background, in a civic vein, prioritized by the aims laid out in our United States Constitution, would organize as his starting point even for just conversation, let alone a political agenda, the worsening of the plight of the weak, the oppressed, the scorned, the scourged.
We are strong, gentlemen, not weak. Diversity, protected by our first amendment, is, in more than a passing way, that somewhat more advanced expression of a fist.
The Department of Education exists critically – in a complex country – in order to prevent precisely the fatal fracturing that our founders identified as a legitimate danger in The Federalist Papers. We must keep alive the dialogue and discussion, indeed the debate, Henry Clay style, as we better refine how we educate the most precious in our midst. But you don’t show solidarity in a country still haunted by the Civil War (obviously) and threatening a return to state’s rights in a way that persecutes the minority, by dismantling a common key to understanding, even if on some critical policy points you disagree. But, of course you do when your aim is to make America great “again.”
Senator Benjie Wimberly (D-35) ought to know. A football coach and recreation director in the City of Paterson, the senator last week told InsiderNJ that Trump’s order to scrap the Department of Education on the recommendation of billionaire Elon Musk goes to the heart of the problem with Trump’s presidency. “It’s the last thing we should dismantle,” Wimberly said. “There are so many parts to the Department of Education, including special education funding, student loans, professional opportunities in education for those young people who want to become educators, just as a few examples. In addition, when there is a shortage of educators, you do not want to dismantle this department. What it comes down to is this: if you want people to be less informed, and dumb down the country, take away the Department of Education. You take that away and what you’re going to get is uneducated folks voting against their own interests.”
Talking to Wimberly reminds me of another coach, the late Bill Bruno, formerly the assistant director of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA), who died in the days following his organization of a cross-country competition in Union County. Over a lifetime, coach Bruno successfully organized such events for young people seeking to better themselves, kids who along the way found a role model in his unique combination of nobility and humility. It reminds me too of an anecdote I read about the late George Foreman, who, reflecting on his teen athlete years, said he first realized someone cared about him when a football coach told him to tuck his fingers in, so they didn’t get chopped off on the line. I appeal to you, those of you schooled on the playgrounds and athletic fields, on the blacktops and alleys, in the backyards and public parks, stop looking to a TV personality, born to wealth, and his friends, with precious little life experience about the hurly burly, easily swayed to assume the roles of barbarians for lack of coaching and breeding. Don’t look to those unmade by the lifelong pursuits of education and training and coaching – for enlightenment.
You won’t find it.
Do us a favor, if you still can. Listen to the simple words of a public school coach, who devoted his life to helping kids, a proud Italian-American from New Jersey, coached by his father to care, to constantly push his finger in collective resistant chests, daring the next generation to be more and daring mere mortals with no special abilities, to be great – to be a team. “Never forget where you come from,” he said.
Never forget, people, that we come from a place called America.
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One of the great gifts a person can have in life is a good friendship. Once found, we are fortunate if it continues to develop and thrive for a long time. This is what happens in the play King James, currently playing at George Street Playhouse. Written by Rajiv Joseph, the show centers around a friendship which develops due to the amazing career of NBA superstar LeBron James. The friendship is between two young men who both love basketball. But it becomes more than that as it goes on.
