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."
