The Power of the Hoi Polloi

Once upon a time before he was old, the old man read a book and saw a movie called The Razor’s Edge. It was written in the first person by Somerset Maugham about a young member of the wealthy American socialite elite who had experienced the horrors of the 1914-18 Great War. After returning to the socialite scene he told his possessive fiancé he needed time to travel and find out what life was all about, urging her to join him in that pursuit. She refused. He searched for the rest of his short life. Before it ended he came near to some meaning with some fatherly guru in the high Himalayas. Periodically Maugham himself would run into his hero (strangely, shortage of money never seemed to be a problem for Maugham or his heroes) and bring the reader up to date on the fascinating adventures of the man’s search. One scene of the movie seemed to be at a social function on the French Riviera. It provided the only line of dialogue from the movie I remembered ever after, when Maugham, looking around the cocktail party scene, told his protagonist “I hate the propinquity of the hoi polloi!” From time to time since then I found occasion to steal that line for my own purposes.

            I was reminded of the scene when I got a copy of Linda the Activist’s (see my recent post Portrait of an Activist) latest letter to the Catholic Teacher’s Association. The letter compliments the Association for being among increasing numbers of “intelligent advocates … taking steps to be proactive” about the wireless-in-schools issue. She followed that up, however, to take a stab at the hoi polloi with this: “Negative public and corporate reaction is, to me, astounding, as it tells us how very far behind the majority are in their awareness of this issue, and how far we have to go.  Also, how strong an ignorant stance can be, and how powerful money is in the big scheme of things.”

In her causes Linda has never been afraid to call a spade a spade, although she certainly knows that whatever her cause, calling the ignorant opposition ignorant is unlikely to win many of them over to her side of the issue. Still, I sympathize with her feelings and admire the strength of her commitments. There must be hundreds of examples of the ignorance of the powerful and the power of money and position in today’s current events. It has been so since the early days of recorded classical history and before, even among the ancient Peloponnesian gods!  A few current examples can be cited in this issue of the Post as they come to mind.

I cannot match Linda’s certainty as to the truth of facts or the righteousness of causes. She knows my disposition, age and condition prevent even a limited career of tilting at windmills. I think she still accepts me for what I am. I have considered my brief appearance on the planet a bit of an accident of nature. Often it is been a lonely struggle for survival and a search for kinship. For my puny efforts I got an overflow of good fortune in achieving that survival well beyond expectations as to quality and duration as outlined in a memoir appropriately called A Minority of One. I still claim to live in the best of times and the best of places on earth though my examples of current stupidity make me wonder how long they will last. At no time, however, did the old man have the strength, the chutzpah, the manipulative ability, the desire for prominence or the lack of inhibitions almost every teenager in today’s world seems to have. They perhaps can sustain such ongoing struggles for change.

Still, through this medium, the old man can sometimes release his inhibitions in spite of the possibility of post-publication ridicule! For me, the most obvious examples of stupidity among the rich and powerful can be observed on CNN almost daily in this American election year. Specifically, the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in the endless primary election process are almost frightening in their competition for the right to lead the world into the next one hundred years of war and destruction. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to call each other names, to spread lies and rumours about each other and to call the current commander in chief a complete disaster and worse. It is a wonder that some even more stupid religious nut of the ultra conservative right has not found a way to assassinate Obama in spite of his tight security! The only one of the four to sound half reasonable is the old man running on a libertarian anti-war platform. I agree with the man’s ideas of personal responsibility and freedom from government intervention in every aspect of life. Unfortunately, people are not ready for such freedom. The result would be anarchy even if ever achieved. Common sense tells the old man that whatever their intentions each candidate knows in his heart that he will have no better chance of “changing Washington” than did Barack Obama after his 2008 campaign.

A few more examples of what I consider ignorance in power can be seen in the Canadian political environment. I have generally supported the conservative right side of our broad spectrum in the hope of weaning an ever more demanding and dependent population from the notion that any particular government in power, federally and provincially, is somehow responsible for everything that goes wrong in the life of any individual resident. Whatever party rules, however, each insists on the righteousness of ever increasing rapidity of growth. Whatever happened to Small Is Beautiful? Harper’s new Conservative majority is no different than any of the more leftist parties. None believe it would be good to “conserve”. If global warming is accepted as a fact, we must exploit, use, extract, develop, and sell all the goodies revealed by the rapidly receding ice. Thus we must dig up all the miles of muck known as the Athabaska Tar Sands to make oil so we can supply the world with ever more pollution.  To do so we must use more and more fresh water, a resource much more precious and critical to life on the planet than the few re-usable hydrocarbons gleaned from the oil sands. Wars may well be fought this century over access to potable water.

A related Canadian example of stupidity in power has to do with the current environmental assessment hearings on the viability of the Harper government’s proposed pipeline to send the half treated oil sands product through the mountains for shipment by sea to China. After the staggering financial cost of extracting and treating the product in Alberta, the investors must have their pound of flesh whether it gets sold to Americans or Chinese. From my own less than scientific assessment, both options south and west are undesirable. Furthermore, it seems to me inevitable that the combined pipeline and tanker option will be the cause of any number of monumental environmental disasters, whatever the government eventually decides, environmental hearings notwithstanding.

All I have left to say is, Let it be in the hands of the gods and not in the hands of the hoi polloi!