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Wednesday
I’ve been thinking about all those people out there who make our lives a little better, including the federal workforce that Donald Trump decries as “the deep state.” He has so brainwashed his followers that some can’t even recognize when people are trying to help them, a situation that reminds me of a character in Voltaire’s Candide.
Before discussing the barons of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, here’s a story I heard from a childhood friend a few weeks ago. Recently retired from a career spent in legal aid, she told of working with a man who had significant medical expenses. Even though she had come up with a way for him to hold on to his house, he turned to her at one point, with contempt in his eyes, and said, “You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?”
She noted that her political sympathies had nothing to do with seeking to protect him, but he left and didn’t return. Later he lost his house.
He’s not the first, of course, to behave this way. Ever since Ronald Reagan did incomparable harm by declaring, with his folksy charm, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,'” Americans have been savaging civil servants. Reagan used his attacks on social services to hollow out the middle class while engineering large tax cuts for the wealthy, and Trump has been doing the same in his attacks on the federal work force. Many of these workers have provided a check against his and his cronies’ corruption tendencies.
As a young man, Candide is chased away by the local baron for not being good enough to exchange amorous looks with his daughter. The baron’s family can boast of a lineage of 72 quarterings whereas Candide has only 71.
Disaster will befall all of the characters multiple times, with Candide several times providing invaluable service to the baron who exiled him. Yet each time he proposes marriage–Candide is now dealing with the baron’s son, Cunegonde’s brother—he runs into the same prejudice. Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, Jr., in other words, is behaving like my friend’s client. Here is situation at the end of the book, by which time Cunegonde, because of her various trials, has lost her looks:
Cunegonde did not know she had grown ugly, for nobody had told her of it; and she reminded Candide of his promise [of marriage] in so positive a tone that the good man durst not refuse her. He therefore intimated to the Baron that he intended marrying his sister.
“I will not suffer,” said the Baron, “such meanness on her part, and such insolence on yours; I will never be reproached with this scandalous thing; my sister’s children would never be able to enter the church in Germany. No; my sister shall only marry a baron of the empire.”
Cunegonde flung herself at his feet, and bathed them with her tears; still he was inflexible.
Candide, having become far wealthier than the baron, is finally able to stand up to him:
“Thou foolish fellow,” said Candide; “I have delivered thee out of the galleys, I have paid thy ransom, and thy sister’s also; she was a scullion, and is very ugly, yet I am so condescending as to marry her; and dost thou pretend to oppose the match? I should kill thee again, were I only to consult my anger.”
“Thou mayest kill me again,” said the Baron, “but thou shalt not marry my sister, at least whilst I am living.”
Throughout the United States, there are ideologues who are rejecting the good faith efforts of legal aid lawyers, medical professionals, teachers, social workers, federal workers, and others whose mission is to help them. Many of my classmates and many of my students have gone into these professions out of the idealistic belief that they help make the world a better place. My friend, who attended Duke Law School, could have gone into a far more lucrative field of law than legal aid. Then they run up against ideological rigidity.
At such times, MAGA resembles a self-destructive cult, willing to sacrifice their goods and even their lives to prove their loyalty to their grifting master. They have contempt for those who care about them.
In Voltaire’s works, one of Candide’s friends wants to drown the Baron and another to return him to the slave galleys. In the end, they return him to Rome, where he been serving as a Jesuit missionary. In doing so, “they had the double pleasure of entrapping a Jesuit and punishing the pride of a German baron.”
