Monday
I continue to be astounded, not at the egregious things that Donald Trump continues to spew, but at how Republicans act as though it doesn’t matter. In a comment last week he complained that Americans are allowing the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Petti to overshadow his magnificent accomplishments. In doing so, he reminded me of Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s satire.
First of all, here’s the quote:
You arrest thousands of rapists. You arrest thousands of the worst people. You arrest the drug dealers. I mean, we had drug kingpins. We had murderers. Thousands, no incident. We bring ‘em back to their country. Two people it’s bad. I hate it. I hate even talking about it. Two people out of tens of thousands,” Trump said during Wednesday’s interview.
“And you get bad publicity. Nobody talks about all of the murderers that we’re taking out of our country,” he continued.
In other words, he is accusing the American public of having “a nice, unnecessary scruple.” Which is the accusation Gulliver levels at the giant king of the Brobdingnagians in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels.
A small man, both literally and morally, Gulliver seeks to impress the king by offering him the secret of gunpowder. It’s like Trump thinking he can impress people by bombing multiple countries or kidnapping the Venezuelan president:
In hopes to ingratiate myself further into his majesty’s favor, I told him of “an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. That a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near.
I’ll get to the king’s rejection of Gulliver’s offer in a moment. First, however, let’s compare Gulliver’s bafflement with Trump’s. Trump can’t figure out how people can be so dumb (“narrow principles and views,” to use Gulliver’s words) as to reject his gift to them. On the one side, there are “thousands” of rapists, murderers, and “worst people” arrested. On the other, two dead Americans.
Now to Gulliver:
A strange effect of narrow principles and views! that a prince…should, from a nice, unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into his hands that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people!
Of course, there’s nothing that Trump desires more than to be an absolute master. The Brobdingnagian king, by contrast, proves himself to be truly big by expressing more of an interest in the welfare of his people:
And he gave it for his opinion, “that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
As for his opinion of those who lionize violence:
He was amazed, how so impotent and groveling an insect as I” (these were his expressions) “could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines…”
An impotent and groveling little man. To be big, you have to put your country first.
