Discussional Metaphorce
Let us polish our swords with our enemy's unseen blood!
Or let his buckler meet our thrust and the return blow
Silence the brilliance that spurted out of our throat...
Otherwise, let us summon the soured scapegoat!
Let us polish our swords with our enemy's unseen blood!
Or let his buckler meet our thrust and the return blow
Silence the brilliance that spurted out of our throat...
Otherwise, let us summon the soured scapegoat!
My history as a reader of Hemingway is one tainted with physical violence.
The first time I was reading Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises when a fight broke out in the tram. This man in a suit got fed up with a blabbermouth who was noticeably mentally challenged. Twice I had to intervene in order to push them apart. Both of them exhibited a bull-like determination to keep on altercating.
Yesterday in the subway, while reading Hemingway's hunting feats in his Green Hills of Africa, an African woman almost punched a young couple after the girl called her stupid as she didn't want to change seats allowing the couple to sit side by side.
Curiously, the times I spent reading The Old Man and the Sea don't seem to have affected nearby fellow passengers. That major work on the struggle of mankind with natural elements didn't beget any physical violence, if we except the fish I helped killing with each Sashimi I was nearly forced to eat while reading that book.
But let's blame Hemingway for those two events. Or let's blame the electricity needed to run both those public transports.
Unfortunately the human trait of selective memory tells me otherwise: my brain, trying to find meaning and, in the process of finding meaning, a cause, collated those two episodes of violence and made me ignore all others that would challenge my selected scapegoats.
And that leads me to Donald Trump.
Trump has been a master at summoning scapegoats, and became himself a scapegoat. Muslims, Mexicans, Chinese, Blacks, all are now favourite selected victims for Trump or for his followers, while Trump is being blamed for inciting people to violence and racism when he's just a catalyst, not the creator.
I'm inclined to think that historical moments make the historical man and not vice-versa. That a similar character in different historical conditions wouldn't achieve the same results.
A true entrepeneur, Trump's drill and pipes have struck a deep and dark oil field. If there wasn't crude there ready to burst out into the surface, he would have died impoverished and alone in the desert sands of Narcissiland instead.
In the meantime, I'm going to read only books on Zen while travelling in electric powered public transports. Just in case I'm wrong all along.
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Bibliography (besides Hemingway's):
- Charlie Campbell, Scapegoat - A History of Blaming Other People, Duckworth Overlook, 2011
- Robert T. Carroll, Becoming a Critical Thinker - A Guide for the New Millennium, Pearson Custom Publishing, 2000
- Dietrich Schwanitz, Cultura - Tudo o que é preciso saber, Publicações Dom Quixote, 1999
