Major Piece

The Fall

by Allison Peda

In a recent class we were given the prompt “Where do you see examples of good versus evil in modern culture?” I sat for a while and went over the canned responses, “Is there such a thing as good and evil? Do real people actually fit into this binary? What about the gray area?” I just wasn’t sure if I believed in such clear cut definitions. I always try to be judicious, in order to be a fair and balanced educator I think it is essential to be able to recognize that characters in books might be good and evil, but people, especially students are not. That is how I approach most things though, as an educator. The bully in the hallways was not born that way, their is some root cause behind those actions. We need to treat the illness not the symptoms. I want this to be true, but there is one glaring example from modern culture that flies in the face of my worldview: Donald Trump.

I heard an interview on NPR with author George Saunders earlier this week about a piece he had published in The New Yorker titled “Trump Days”. He was trying to figure out where all these Trump supporters came from and what type of people they were. Through interviews and first hand experiences he discussed the way that Trump supporters had developed an emotional attachment to their candidate. When faced with logical reasons why Trump is an unfit candidate, they would answer with “Yeah...but...he’s an honest guy.” No matter what the argument, people deferred logic with pure emotion. As a teacher of writing, I often stress to my students just how powerful the effect of pathos can be on an audience, it can be manipulation in its most extreme form. Trump is pure pathos and he has connected to an audience in a way that is frightening and often simply dangerous.

Saunders said that Trump rallies had two very distinct parts. At the beginning of the rallies, before Trump took the stage, people would joke around with him, tease him about being a liberal, enter into discourse with him like normal adults. The second part of the rallies is when things get unsettling. He called it a sense of “ungentleness” that permeates the crowd. People who are normal healthy, probably decent individuals began to behave in a manner that is damn near inconceivable to the rest of us. We have all seen the videos of men, women, and children acting like savages. The violence and hate I have seen in those crowds makes me shudder. Their is no sense of decency, no right or wrong, only the mob mentality. They are pure emotion filtered through a man who only peddles hatred and intolerance. I have to ask, what is happening to us? Are we devolving? We are about to witness the fall of the Roman Empire and instead of panicking people are lining up their foldable chairs, packing a cooler, and buying popcorn for the show. I see a future in which we will be warming ourselves at the trashcan fire that was once the American Dream.