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Friday
The other evening I was discussing Donald Trump’s increasing incoherence with my Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar, along with how Trump has been covering for himself by calling it “the weave.” In response, Mladen mentioned a Heinrich Heine poem that, when I checked it out, works as a perfect rejoinder to someone who hates labor unions and has, throughout his life, stiffed workers. It also captures the candidate who has begun threatening to unleash the U.S. military on all of his enemies, at home as well as abroad.
First about the Trump weave. John Stoehr of the Substack blog Editorial Board believes that Trump is discussing it because he senses he’s slipping into dementia. By talking about his growing mental deficit as though it were a mental asset, he “wants us to believe that cognitive decline is extraordinary.”
“In reality,” Stoehr observes, “the weave is what happens when an aging brain flits from topic to topic without any apparent reason for doing so.”
Trump’s habit of projecting his own vulnerabilities onto his foes, we could add, provides another indication of his condition: he has been calling Kamala Harris “retarded.”
Heine envisions Silesian weavers responding to the bosses who ruthlessly put down their 1844 revolt over exploitation and wage decreases. After killing 11and imprisoning many others, the Prussian military banned the subsequent poem and sent to prison a man who publicly recited it.
Although the weavers’ revolt was unsuccessful, however, it proved a harbinger of the revolutions that would break out all over Europe four years later. Meanwhile Karl Marx published the poem in his newspaper Forward! while Friedrich Engels translated it into English.
Imagine the weavers as the voters who, if there is justice in the world, will send Trump packing three weeks from now. It would be our own version of the weavers’ shroud.
The Weavers
By Heinrich Heine
Not a tear in the dark eye
From darkened eyes no tears are falling;
Gnashing our teeth, we sit here calling:
“Germany, listen, ere we disperse,
We weave your shroud with a triple curse —
We weave, we are weaving!
“A curse to the false god that we prayed to,
And worshiped in spite of all, and obeyed, too.
We waited and hoped and suffered in vain;
He laughed at us, sneering, for all of our pain —
We weave, we are weaving!
“A curse to the king, and a curse to his coffin,
The rich man’s king whom our plight could not soften;
Who took our last penny by taxes and cheats,
And let us be shot like the dogs in the streets —
We weave, we are weaving!
“A curse to the Fatherland, whose face is
Covered with lies and foul disgraces;
Where the bud is crushed as it leaves the seed,
And the worm grows fat on corruption and greed —
We weave, we are weaving!
“The shuttle flies in the creaking loom;
And night and day we weave your doom —
Old Germany, listen, ere we disperse
We weave your shroud with a triple curse.
We weave — we are weaving!”
Trump’s weaving deserves a counter weave. Although in our case, we are weaving a shroud to save our Fatherland.
