This narrative emerged, writing about Harry Sanderson’s recollected state of mind as a ten-year-old, who had just suffered a deeply traumatic event, an assault on himself and the killing of his dog Gypsy. He blames himself for Gypsy’s agonizing fate, the dog protecting him from the predations of a violent itinerant, who had forced the two of them into the forest above the E&N Railroad line in Chemainus.
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Harry was so traumatized and ashamed by what he judged his own cowardice, that he never told anyone what had really happened. He simply said Gypsy vanished into the woods, then howled in terror and agony, and could not be found anywhere afterward.
The first person he told this truncated version of his story to was his mother, who consoled him as best she could, and tried to assure Harry that Gypsy might find his way home. After that, Harry would sublimate the tale of Gypsy’s disappearance into someone else’s story: His imaginary friend Art had been accosted in the woods above Chemainus, and heard his dog being killed. Then the imaginary Art moved away.
At this point The Mural Gazer will zero in on Harry’s need to confront the truth of what happened in that forest, now known as The Hermit’s Trail. In the time remaining he must expiate his guilt and sorrow by, at long-last, remembering and making his terrible confession, one he’d partially made to Charlie Abbott, the legendary hermit whose trail is part of Chemainus’s mind-scape.
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I have been reading two books lately that are giving rise to cognitive dissonance: Disloyal, a tell-all memoir by former Donald Trump acolyte Michael Cohen; and A New History of Western Philosophy, by Anthony Kenny.
There’s nothing anyone could write about Trump that would surprise me anymore, although Cohen’s account of the utter sleaziness of America’s president has confirmed in lurid detail the disgust I harbour toward this reptilian specimen. The word Cohen has not yet uttered, however, is almost more telling than what he has said.
Trump is portrayed as crass, vicious, misogynous, greedy, undisciplined… insane, pretty well sums up his character. I could have reeled off those epithets and more before reading what Cohen had to say. But the former ‘personal attorney to President Donald J. Trump’ has yet to attach the ideological label that explains the true threat Trump represents: The man is a fascist.
And what shocks me in Cohen’s account is how mesmerized Trump’s followers are by the bare-fisted power of ‘the Boss’, how overwhelmed they are by his all-consuming ego, which has become the ego of his political brand, the MAGA nation.
In true fascist form, Trump has latched onto the disgruntled facet of the American soul, and given it voice. He has justified for his followers all manner of bitterness and rebellion, and amplified their distrust of a political system that has certainly made itself worthy of condemnation. But the glaring irony of his presidency is that he, of all people, is the most ruthless user and abuser of average Americans. There’s only one American that truly counts in Trumpian logic: Donald J. Trump.
Trump has taken the US to the brink, and anyone who thinks the threat to democracy he represents was beaten in the recent American election is living a delusion. ‘The Divided States of America’ is an apt moniker for the US psyche right now.
Cohen’s book underscores the deviancy of a president who supposedly stood up for the common man in Middle America, while reaching out to other fascists of his ilk like Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kenny’s history of Western philosophy attempts a distillation of the thinking that has led from Ancient Greece to ‘Philosophy in the modern world’. It’s fascinating in its scope; daunting in the depths it alludes to. Right now I’m reading about Kantian logic, and how it plays out in the formulation of morality and ethics.
A central theme of this tome is the quest for moral knowledge and thereby certainty with regard to ethical behaviour. Over and over again, philosophers have attempted to apply reason in response to the question: What is morally right and wrong? And why should I obey the edicts of morality, rather than simply look out for my own interests?
Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ comes down to a statement that moral behaviour is ultimately self interest taken to its logical extreme. I won’t go into a detailed discussion about a philosophical conclusion I haven’t yet fully understood, but the categorical imperative basically says that to act morally, I should always ask before doing something: What if everyone behaved that way?
For example, why shouldn’t I steal whenever I want something and it’s obvious I can take it without being punished, either because I’m cunning, or powerful, or both. The answer is: If everyone behaved that way, there would be no such thing as private property, and the social structure I rely on to lead a better life would collapse. So I’m acting in my own, and everyone else’s interests when I adhere to the edict: Don’t steal.
Kant’s is just one perspective in the history of morality in Western philosophy. The point is, there have been great thinkers throughout the ages trying to answer the fundamental questions about right and wrong, and find some basis for ethical behaviour.
If you have persevered this far, you probably have identified the cognitive dissonance I am experiencing reading Michael Cohen’s Disloyal at the same time as Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. It comes down to this: What’s the point in enunciating philosophical statements about morality and ethics when, at the end of the day, it’s always the immoral and unethical pit bulls like Trump that come into power?
I’ll suggest a couple of answers, but with the disclaimer that I can’t resolve the conundrum for anyone else. You’ll have to come up with your own answers for behaving in what you believe is a moral and ethical manner.
First, it’s a mistake to conclude that Donald Trump is behaving immorally or amorally. He may not have formulated his moral code in comprehensible English, but clearly he believes that you take whatever you can get, by whatever means are available to you, without the least concern for the harm you do to others. Lying, bullying and cheating are techniques for achieving an end, and with few exceptions, other people are a means to your ends, not entities you need concern yourself with.
There are millions of people in the world who share Trump’s morals, and always will be.
So, for ‘morality’ in a less selfish, less brutal and dishonest form to survive, it must be articulated, and espoused, and championed by millions of others. Always, and every day.
Morality isn’t a ‘pillar’, in any physical sense of the word. It’s not something that exists outside human consciousness, that you can put in place, then walk away from, secure in the knowledge it will hold up your sky. Morality and ethics are ideas that have to be stood up for every day, and exemplified by people who believe as strongly in their moral codes as Trump and his associates believe in their’s.
That comes down to the responsibilities that are the obverse side to our charters of rights and freedoms. Morality isn’t comprised in vociferous complaining about the excesses of Donald J. Trump and his ultra-rich coterie. It’s about how we live our own lives, and try to persuade others about what’s right and wrong, fair and unfair in the world around us.
Cognitive dissonance is an essential state of mind, when you think about it.
The woman I have identified as my fictional character Harriet Phipps in an upcoming The Mural Gazer story
Ultimately, every story is as much about the author as the characters he describes. It’s characters, no matter how laboriously presented as fiction, are inspiring creatures of his own experience and imagination. So it’s not surprising that, in writing the Mural Gazer, I am having to become a mural gazer myself, drawn into the settings and scenes on Chemainus’ walls, just like Harry Sanderson.
This morning I met Harriet Phipps in Mural #41 – The Outdoor Gathering. She was Harry’s great Aunt. He knew her in childhood, and is occasionally reminded of her by a framed portrait that sits on the mantle above their fireplace at VORLand’s End.
She plays a central role in the Mural Gazer story I’m working on at the moment. In the scene I’m describing, Harry is comparing the portrait on the Chemainus Seniors’ Centre wall, with the framed photo of his great aunt, which he’d brought with him in his jacket pocket. It will be her beckoning glance that draws him into the mural, because – though he did know her personally in his early childhood – he sees things in the portrait he’d never appreciated in real life, and he wants to meet this suddenly mysterious woman…
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He fumbled the photo of his great aunt Harriet out of his pocket. Studied it. Held it up to the portrait in the mural. “Could be,” he mumbled. But the likeness wasn’t perfect by any means. What startled him most about the woman in the mural was her imperious, blue eyes. His Aunty Harriet had died long before the invention of Kodachrome, but he remembered her piercing gaze – even as an old woman, it held you fast when she stared. She didn’t often stare, though, Harry remembered. It was as if she’d learned not to, the same way you learn not to point a gun, but always keep the barrel slanted down, toward the ground.
She was old, in his faded photo; the woman on the wall was young, and arrestingly beautiful, Harry thought. “Not pretty,” he opined, “beautiful.” She appeared to him a woman who knew things about herself and her world that others could not possibly fathom. A woman who made up her mind about things, and said exactly what she thought at exactly the right moment.
Exactly the right moment, he repeated. Exactly the right moment…
Then he was gone.
Harry Sanderson
I didn’t know how much I wanted to meet this woman, until I wrote this passage. You can get into the evolving stories in my Direct-to-Web novel, The Mural Gazer.
