The Disappearance of Virtue From American Politics

[pbrower2a]

I agree. I cannot imagine Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford calling McCarthy voters "crazy" or the other side's voters "deplorable" or calling for the other candidate to be locked up. Carter took heat for telling Playboy he lusted in his heart. Trump bragged about what he could get away with as a celebrity, and we all know the result.

The 'lust in my heart' admission by Jimmy Carter humanized him and his (southern Baptist) sect. Well, don't we all have lust in our heart?

But Carter could control his lust. Donald Trump bragged about his lust. There could hardly be a bigger difference.

[pbrower2a]

It's the lack of virtue in our economic and intellectual elites that does the harm. The economic elites call for great sacrifices among people not within those elites -- for the indulgence of the economic elites. The intellectual elites offer depravity in mass culture. In the former one has the ethos of the worst possible rulers -- gangsters, tyrants, and feudal lords. We can all see where such leads.

The intellectual elites at their best bring out the best in ourselves. At the worst the intellectual elites either become enforcers of the economic exploiters of lead the masses to a celebration of primitive depravity. Maybe we get entertained but we also get soiled. 

[pbrower2a]

Professional athletes form an elite in economic results.. but whether they retain elite status once their (usually short) careers end is very much in question. The late Jim Bunning maintained elite status by becoming a high-level public official, and the late Alex Karras joined the intellectual elite as a film and TV actor. But those are oddities. Those who have adequate intelligence and can keep their lives clean might make good money as sportscasters.

Many of the rest show their prole characteristics  (did you ever hear Mickey Mantle speak? Gaak!) throughout their lives. For comparable figures look at winners of the Super-Duper Megabuck Lottery who are the same people but simply end up with more money.

It's easy to remember Roger Staubach and ignore Larry Bethea (Cowboys' player who ended up committing an  armed robbery after his football career ended and killed himself as he was about to be arrested) or Cal Ripken, Jr. and forget Alan Wiggins, the latter getting hooked on heroin and dying of AIDs through dirty needles.

Pro athletes are hard to figure. Some use their athletic careers to catapult themselves into higher positions in the pecking order. Some revert to the losers that they were as kids. Go figure.   

[pbrower2a]

Here is an interesting critical article:
https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/5095/i-was-told-there-would-be-more/

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The writer of the article to which you link cites the equine character 'Boxer' as a devoted worker with child-like faith in the system... Hitler and Stalin need plenty of such people to make their dehumanized orders churn out the weapons and provisions for aggressive warfare.  Once exhausted or crippled of such work one was expendable, like 'Boxer'. One started griping, and one went to a labor camp where one would be finished off by intensified toil on starvation rations. For humans that is the 'glue factory'.

Orwell was as much a critic of fascism as of Stalinism. Many now apply 1984 to Trump's America for the linguistic fraud, the inculcation of fear, and the disparity between official ideals and the vile reality. What is missing from fascism or Stalinism is the climate of personal fear when people dread the knock on the door at 2 AM from the Gestapo or the GPU.

Nasty systems, whether the plantation order of the Old South, fascist regimes, Stalin's Soviet Union, Japan of the WWII era, or Iraq under Satan  Hussein, compel people to work with promises of better (even if what is better is 'Pie in the Sky When You Die' for those who dedicate themselves most completely to providing the toil that the Master turns into his indulgence) things that never arrive. Such requires child-like faith in a brutal order... Education to bare literacy might even be excessive for a plantation slave, but bare literacy -- enough to allow one to be a factory laborer or cannon fodder in aggressive wars.  Anyone who runs afoul of the amoral exploitation by showing the dichotomy between demands and promises will be murdered.

...We are at the stage of economic development in which the production of more material objects  is unlikely to satisfy people except those with a 'hoarder' mentality. Except for fuels and food, most of our productivity in manufactured goods seems to go to replacement of worn, broken, or obsolete goods. Nobody is excited about getting more underwear, and most people excited about the newest electronic gadget are suckers. People can work, but much of the work now seems dedicated to paying off rentiers who make easy money by exploiting a scarcity that the rentiers maintain. Here's looking to you, President Trump!

The people who praise selfless toil of the common man  yet exploit that for their own extreme indulgence are the basest of hypocrites.