SAEVA
INDIGNATIO AND STEPHEN COLBERT
Mon.
May 21st, 2018
(Note. It is over two years since I last blogged. I thought I would try again, and see if it works.)
Stephen
Colbert has a polarizing effect on people.
I don’t think his mockery of President Trump is effective. An ancient Roman literary critic summed up
the Roman satirical poet Juvenal by saying that Juvenal had saeva indignatio (savage
indignation). In one of Juvenal’s poems
he criticized shoddily constructed multi-floor apartment houses in ancient Rome
which collapsed, killing everyone unlucky enough to be inside when they
fell. It gives you a perspective on shoddiness
or bad workmanship (or sleaziness as it is called in America nowadays). Shoddiness or sleaziness is not a new thing;
instead, it is part of human nature (part of the gene pool). But to get back to my point about saeva indignatio. The question for Democrats is, how shall we
disagree with President Trump? What
style of speaking or writing should we use, when we want to disagree with
President Trump’s messages, actions, and assumptions? My idea about savage indignation is that it
is ineffective in our society. It must
have something to do with the huge number of clever people in the United
States. When you have as many clever
people as our country has, you have a lot of sarcastic people. And sarcasm effectively neutralizes savage
indignation. I don’t know whether savage
indignation brought about any constructive results in the past. But I don’t believe it does today. As I look back on Hitler, I wish Germans
hadn’t tried to laugh him off. I wish
the Germans had criticized Hitler in a very serious way from the
beginning. Trump isn’t as bad as Hitler,
but Trump could get worse. Democrats
need to study how to speak persuasively to Trump’s supporters. Sarcasm isn’t the answer in this situation.
It's
hard to do, but we need to try.
Frank
Newton
