Who’s Afraid of Michael Wolff?

Old Gadfly:  The buzz dominating the current news cycle is Michael Wolf’s book, Fire and Fury:  Inside the Trump White House.  Your thoughts?

IM:  I watched his interview on Meet the Press this morning, and he said he was welcomed into the West Wing with no agenda.

AM:  Is that possible?  As a graduate of Columbia University and Vassar College, a copy boy for the New York Times, columnist, and entrepreneur, Wolff took advantage of a money-making opportunity.  He clearly had an agenda.  How can any individual claim to have no preconceived notions or predilections?  He claims to have been allowed to wonder about, “to sit on the couch,” simply observing and asking occasional questions.  If so, members of the White House appear to be open and transparent.  If so, they did not suspect Wolff’s intentions.  Knowing the public has yet to turn off all the fake news, Wolff generated material to feed off of this feeding frenzy.  He will become wealthy, possibly with “30 pieces of silver” from this book.  Perhaps someday he may come to grips with a conscience like Judas.

IM:  The picture you paint reminds me of an observation by Cicero:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

AM:  Ironically, in 1962, Edward Albee wrote a book that became a hit on stage:  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?  He also made a fortune from this work.

The themes in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? dealt with reality and illusion.  Although Michael Wolff claims he had no agenda, based on the themes in Albee’s book, it seems Wolff may have “plagiarized” Albee's creative essentials to sensationalize human behavior in an atmosphere already agitated by a swarming anti-Trump mainstream media.  Here is a critique (presented by Wikipedia) of Albee’s work—notice the parallels to M. Wolff’s book:

. . . this play stands as an opponent of the idea of a perfect American family and societal expectations as it "attacks the false optimism and myopic confidence of modern society".  Albee takes a heavy-handed approach to the display of this contrast, making examples out of every character and their own expectations for the people around them. Societal norms of the 1950s consisted of a nuclear family, two parents and two (or more) children. This conception was picturesque in the idea that the father was the breadwinner, the mother was a housewife, and the children were well-behaved.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? smashes these conventions and shows realistic families that are far from perfect and possibly ruined. The families of Honey and Martha were dominated by their fathers, there being no sign of a mother-figure in their lives. George and Martha's chance at a perfect family was ruined by infertility and George's failure at becoming a prominent figure at the university. Being just a few of many, these examples directly challenge social expectations both within and outside of a family setting.

Old Gadfly:  On a broader level, this book episode merely affirms the progressive left’s notion that man is perfectible—the Marxist notion of a state-created Utopian paradise this side of the grave.  Trump is caricatured by the progressive left as the antithesis of their holy mission.  I'll just close with this.  Earlier this week, I watched a Star Trek movie, Star Trek:  The First Contact.  It introduced the Borg.  I could not help but suspect it could happen much earlier than their timeline.  Like now.  In witnessing today's political and media behavior, this line from the movie stood out:  "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."