By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column
“It is the very nature of a Faustian bargain that the winner later becomes the loser.” …Efal Revillot, essayist and novelist.
If you take the moral and political temperature of America at this point in time, you will see the etchings of a “new” America in which the GOP party, including the MAGA faction, are willing to make a Faustian Bargain with the offerings to them of power and control as embodied in the person of Herr Trump.
It is not as if the power-seeking GOP cannot compute a simple spreadsheet of what is at stake if they continue to allow themselves to be bamboozled by the trinkets and confetti of the “devil.”
Understand one thing in a Faustian Bargain, the participating parties, the “devil” or his representative, and the person or persons accepting this unequal contract know that each is offering the other what the other wants…but.
The “but” portion of the devilish deal is that the human bargainer is so desperate for the consummation of the deal that common sense and moral prudence are jettisoned for immediate gratification of matters like power, wealth, temporal wisdom, favor in love or other things that the human bargainer feels is more important than their “soul” or value.
The human bargainer, allowing his or her conscience to be seared as if with a hot iron, treads into the lair of the devil, thinking that, at the end, she will prevail over her adversary.
Literature in which Faustian Bargains are acted out, be it in a morality play or used in an allegory as a teaching tool, always ends for the human participant either in crushing agony or an inability to seek restoration back to the time before the Bargain was entered.
In other words, it is like the childhood ditty, “Oh, now you done it, you done, done, done it!”
Remorse, agonizing tears and sorrowful repentance are of no avail since the once glittering and then agreeable terms of the Bargain must now be consummated.
In the current swamp of politics, we have the participants to this devil bargain: representing the devil, the one and only Donald Trump, and representing the hapless bargainer, the beguiled GOP party which is willing to obtain and keep power at seemingly any cost.
Donald Trump knowingly and convincingly plays the role of the avatar who is offering to a base of disenchanted GOP voters a chance to again air their grievances of America not being the America that they grew up in; and for their avatar to Make America Great Again!
The avatar knows the seeds of lies and mistruths and distortions that he has been planting for years in the fertile soil of a population who believe that they are becoming a “minority” in “their” own country and, unless something radical is done, they fear that their stake in America is being irrevocably threatened.
Forget that the base of the GOP party cannot conceptualize the glaring lie of their avatar, masquerading as a populist, is made of whole cloth.
Forget that the same base is “history challenged” and fails understand that Donald Trump is simply a member of a long line of political hustlers who see a buck to be made (in this case, hundreds of millions of dollars!) and he has no qualms of concocting a fabulous story now known as the Big Lie.
Forget that the base is tone deaf to hearing from neutral sites or persons that a simple reading of the extant records will voluminously indicate that the Big Lie is a con of the first order.
Until and unless you understand that Herr Trump is not the cause of this present political cancer but rather is only a person who was able to artfully tap into the angst and fear of the MAGA base, you will be misled into thinking Trump is some type of political genie or savior who will save America from itself.
The crossroads that America finds itself is whether people with a working knowledge of history and people who are not moved by feigned racial fears being generated by the MAGA propaganda machinery will vote to rid the political landscape of political carpetbaggers and opportunists (Steve Bannon anyone?).
There is no Martin Luther King Jr., or a Walter Cronkite or a Billy Graham(?) who has the moral reserves and who can appeal to a vast number of people, telling them to reject extremists for the common good.
With the advent of the Internet, any buffoon can spew forth gibberish (and get paid for it!) so that the gullible are taken captive and what is considered truth, is now considered suspect at best.
Up is down and down is up. Moral relativism is considered to be on par with moral certainty and institutions of standing and renown are now viewed as suspect.
And for Mission Control…? Hold on, the line is still busy.
P.S. On the tragic death of Melvin Thomas: We continue to be our own worse enemy!
Do Black Lives Matter? Yeah, sure. Next!
Contact Lafe Tolliver at tolliver@juno.com