Strongmen

A friend who posts reactionary memes every day on Facebook admitted to me he not only gets his jollies provoking "your kind," but secretly wishes Trump were president.

You probably know a lot of people like him.

I wish they'd all read Strongmen, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat's 2020 account of modern authoritarianism, now out in paperback.

It's the scariest read you'll find outside a Stephen King novel.

Ben-Ghiat finds every modern strongman—including Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Amin, Pinochet, Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, Gaddafi, Hussein, Orban, Putin, Modi and Trump—cut from precisely the same vile cloth.

Strongmen are all emotionally stunted weirdos who seize the levers of power because dominion over others fills an inner need to prove they're not emotionally stunted weirdos.

They're masters in the dual arts of disguise and deceit.   

"They don the cloak of national victimhood, reliving the humiliations of their people by foreign powers as they proclaim themselves their nation's savior," Ben-Ghiat writes. 

"Picking up on powerful resentments, hopes, and fears," she continues, "strongmen present themselves as the vehicle for obtaining what is most wanted, whether it is territory, safety from racial others, securing male authority, or payback for exploitation by internal or external enemies."

Strongmen rely on distortions, myths, lies, and propaganda to build a faithful audience, banking on followers' willingness to abandon the real world in favor of the fantasy world the strongmen create.

Eventually—as in the case of my misguided friend—there's no talking to a strongman's followers.

"They believe in him because they believe in him," Ben-Ghiat writes. 

Their unshakable faith in the strongman leads them to insist you—by believing in a world where people strive to live in peace, right systemic wrongs, and work for prosperity and progress—are "drinking the Kool-Aid."

But strongmen really don't give two shits about their followers and, in fact, are openly contemptuous of them. 

All they really care about is robbing the treasury, punishing critics, controlling women and women's bodies, and pursuing vainglorious goals.

Soon—to every other citizen's detriment—chaos, bankruptcy, and warfare ensue, as strongmen lose what little is left of their ability to distinguish the difference between personal lusts and their nation's needs.

Their sick, self-aggrandizing projects invariably lead to their comeuppance and to a national apocalypse, as our parents witnessed in World War II and we're witnessing in Ukraine now.

"Authoritarian history is full of projects and causes championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect," Ben-Ghiat writes.

Why don't Trump's followers see that?

POSTSCRIPT: Should you find the inclusion of Trump in the company of strongmen like Mussolini and Hitler far fetched, bare in mind that Trump's press secretary has acknowledged he openly admired other dictators' ruthlessness.

"I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him," Stephanie Grisham told The Hill. "He loved the people who could kill anyone."

Historian Ben-Ghiat says the "strongman's golden rule is: do whatever is necessary to stay in power."

We see Trump apply that rule every day.

Ukraine

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Putin is the richest man in the world.

His cronies are among the richest.

Why they are compelled to crush Ukraine culminates from their unfathomable wealth.

It also culminates from their remoteness from 99.99% of humanity.  

"Love of money is blind," says artist Erik Pevernagie. 

"Greed and money make people forfeit the quiddity of life, banish them from what is essential and alienate them from themselves. They lose their identity and become drifting exiles."

Above: A tank rolls through Kherson, Ukraine. Photographer unknown.

UPDATE: Early this morning, Ukraine announced its forces have launched a counter-offensive outside Kyiv, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Hieronymo Girolamo

If we look to the saints, this great luminous wake with which
God has passed through history, we truly see
that here is a force for good.

— Pope Benedict XVI

Despite being raised a Roman Catholic, I struggle—as most Americans do—with believers.

Believers who practice what they preach have my admiration; but far too often your garden-variety believer turns out to have worse moral failings than the rest of us. He just doesn't know it.

I'm also not sanguine about church leaders; the opaque and bizarre organizations they run; or about the wily ways they exploit weakness and ressentiment.

More than most Americans, when it comes to religion's role in society, I tend to agree with Napoleon: "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."

Saints, nonetheless, captivate me.

The Catholic Church recognizes over 10,000 of them.

Saints are venerated by the church for "heroic sanctity." They're history's first responders, only with missals. 

And saints are often "patrons"—sponsors of causes and cities and professions, and guardians of individuals when they're caught in a bind.

Catholics celebrate saints' feast days, take their names at confirmation, and pray to them when they're wanting. 

Saints' life stories are generally fascinating.

One of the 10,000 saints I just discovered is Hieronymo Girolamo, St. Francis of Jerome.

A Jesuit in the 17th century, Hieronymo spent 40 years of his life preaching in the rural areas surrounding Naples, where his sermons would draw as many as 15,000 listeners.

His followers said he had god's gift on the soapbox and would often drag sinners before him, so they could hear his outdoor sermons. He spoke of the wickedness of sins, the need for repentance, the suddenness of death, the tortures of hell, and the salvation in Jesus.

Hieronymo spoke 40 times a day, always choosing streets and crossroads where recent crimes had been committed. Whenever he concluded, the crowd would crush forward to kiss his hand or touch his garments and beg forgiveness of their sins. 

"He is a lamb when he talks, but a lion when he preaches," listeners said, "not a mere mortal, but an angel expressly sent to save souls."

Hieronymo also earned a reputation for miracle-working—a requirement for sainthood.

He was said to have received communion directly from Jesus Christ. He was also witnessed asking a prostitute's corpse where its inhabitant was and receiving the answer, "I'm in Hell!"

Hieronymo preached in the streets until the age of 73. "As long as I keep a breath of life I will go on," he said. "Even if dragged through the streets, I will thank God. A pack animal must die under its bundle."

He died in 1716 and was canonized 123 years later.

By my count, Hieronymo delivered well over 670,000 sermons during his lifetime.

Time is On My Side

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

— Somerset Maugham

I don't care for many aspects of aging.

The mysterious sore knees and feet and back muscles.

Pretty women calling me "Sir."

Automatically getting the senior discount.

Those things suck.

But one noticeable aspect of aging pleases me immensely: discovering the power of patience.

Without patience, I could never have made painting my second career.

Because painting consumes time—tons of it. (I just spent 30 hours painting a single eye and am not finished with it yet.)

"Patience is bitter," Rousseau said, "but its fruit is sweet."

Why I had to grow old to at long last discover patience puzzles me.

Maybe I lacked the patience to look for it.

Maybe I had no time for patience.

What eluded me, I think, was knowing that patience wields power impatience lacks.

Patience is a weapon.

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait," Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace. "But believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all."

I guess all this is a roundabout way of saying that age, if you're lucky, brings with it a sobriety that's missing in youth and middle age. (No surprise, some AA groups recite an "extended" Serenity Prayer that adds, "Grant me patience for the changes that take time.")

English borrowed the word sobriety seven centuries ago from the Latin sobrius.

Sobrius meant not only abstemious, but calm, steady, unhurried, still.

In a word, patient.

Age means, though vastly finite, time at last is on my side.

Above: Five of Five. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches. Available.

The Outlook for Events is Gloomy

If people don't want to come to the ballpark,

how are you going to stop them?

— Yogi Berra

This week marked the second anniversary of WHO's admission that Covid-19 was a problem.

Perhaps no other segment of the economy, except for the airlines industry, suffered worse from the pandemic than the face-to-face meetings industry.

I've been a Cassandra all this time, I'll readily admit. 

But four decades working in the industry told me the road would be rocky.

It will continue to be so for quite a while. 

As Covid-19 remains a threat to our wellbeing, organizers should expect no more than half the pre-pandemic audience to return to their live events in the coming three years.

That means organizers, if they honestly want to serve their paying customers, have a duty to reimagine their events with only half the customary audience.

Pollyannish thinking won't cut it.

Educating exhibitors in sales and lead-gen is the place to start.

Were I still an organizer, I'd devote an hour a day to learning from my smartest exhibitors precisely what they need to make my event pay off. 

Then I'd use my findings to create simple programs of benefit to every exhibitor—even those who in their unfounded arrogance believe they "know it all."

Yogi was right. 

You can't stop people who don't want to come to the ballpark.

But you can teach the players to up their game.

POSTSCRIPT: A bellwether event, SXSW opened Friday to a "noticeably smaller" audience.