Is Jeffrey St. Clair right — when he writes that President Trump is "middlebrow" America's mirror?

21 Aug 2017

An interesting hypothesis

CounterPunch's editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, described three different populations' view of President Trump:

Trump is a familiar character to most of the world. He is the unvarnished embodiment of the American bully, who has stalked the planet for the last century taking what it wants and leaving corpses and ruin in its wake. There is in Trump no pretense to the humane, no guise of benevolence or cloak of empathy.

The poor recognize Trump for what he is: he’s the guy who collects the rent, who turns the water and electricity off, who spits at you when you ask for money for food, who sends your kid off to war while his goes big game hunting, who snitches your mom out to the cops for her Oxycontin habit.

They aren’t shocked by Charlottesville [a white supremacy terror attack, see here]. They’ve lived that reality most of their lives. And they aren’t startled that the perpetrators have sympathizers in the government. That’s the way it’s always been on the mean streets of America.

Now middlebrow [see definition below] America is getting a glimpse of itself through the mirror of its own bombastic, vindictive and racist leader. He has fractured the rituals and conventions that desensitized most Americans from what our system is really all about. The elites fear Trump because he gives the game away.

He personifies the reality they’ve been working for decades to conceal. The role of most presidents has been to comfort the nation when it recoils at a sudden view of its own depravity, from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib, assuring the citizenry that the system isn’t as malign as it appears.

Trump pours acid on the wounds, as when he impertinently reminded the country that its two most revered founders where big time slave-owners.

What is a middlebrow?

The Collins Dictionary defines the term as:

a person regarded as having conventional, middle-class tastes or opinions, and as being anti-intellectual or pseudo-intellectual

Google is blunter:

a person who is capable of or enjoys only a moderate degree of intellectual effort.

"Middle brow" defines the alpha and beta sheep, who run and populate much of the United States.

St. Clair is probably correct

Have you noticed how vehemently most anti-Trump blowhards try to claim that his perspectives are not theirs, yet having done everything in their power (over the decades) to make someone like Trump an American inevitability?

How else (other than St. Clair's hypothesis) to explain the overblown outrage with which Democrats, generally, attack the president — while remaining oblivious of his immediate predecessor's same-direction (but rhetorically smoother):

(i) plutocracy-based

(ii) white establishment-preserving

(iii) Military Industrial Complex record?

Psychologically speaking, most of us tend to overreact against what is negatively true about us, when someone else mirrors it or unapologetically throws it in our faces. President Trump does both regularly.

The moral? — Spiritual rot is difficult to see from the inside

The operator of Sylvanaqua Farms (serving Charlottesville) had something pertinent to say (in May this year) about another white supremacist rally. He essentially agrees with Jeffrey St. Clair:

It isn't Richard Spencer [see here] calling the cops on me for farming while Black. It's nervous [Charlottesville] White women in yoga pants with "I'm with Her" and "Coexist" stickers on their German SUVs.

Second is the sheer degree of cultural appropriation going on with businesses in the city proper. It's little things - e.g. shops and other businesses incorporating wide swaths of hiphop culture into their branding while having not a single Black owner, partner, employee, or vendor. And those businesses are KILLING IT here.

This is a town where Blackness advances White-owned brands and subjects Black-owned businesses to inspection by law enforcement.

Do you really think that problem comes from people like Richard Spencer?

Check out C'Ville Weekly's Instagram feed when you get a moment, and try not to notice that the few depictions of Black people are limited to sports, singing, criminal justice, or single parenthood.

White people, meanwhile, are represented as political activists, chefs, cogs in the gig economy, musicians, dancers, people who get married, visual artists, songwriters, architects, landscapers, thespians, artistic directors, wedge-heel-wearing rugby players, dog lovers, farmers, firefighters, and people who play with their kids in cul de sacs.

The answer is a lot closer to home than Richard Spencer or Lee Park [—the park where the 13 May 2017 white supremacist "you shall not replace us" get-together had been held].

I can deal with vigorously visible white supremacists like Richard Spencer.

It is the figuratively "non-uniformed" hypocrites that make up the bulk of the American Establishment that are Soul's most insidious enemy.

PeteFree.com

Is Jeffrey St. Clair right — when he writes that President Trump is "middlebrow" America's mirror?