From today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :
Today President Donald J. Trump made it clear that the provocations he and his administration are escalating in Los Angeles and now elsewhere are using the issue of immigration to suppress dissent entirely.Which reminds me of Simone Weil’s comment on force:
In the Oval Office today, Trump said of the military parade scheduled for this Saturday: “If there’s any protester wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.... For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.”
To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.
Simone Weil, The “Iliad,” or the Poem of Force , trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956).
comments: 3
Such a nice surprise to see you quoting Ms Weil. When I went to the Troy exhibit at the British Museum my feedback was that their exhibit gift shop should include her little book. I studied her as part of my Outstanding Lives course at community college. (The other two lives were Thomas Merton and Gandhi)
Say, I well remember the luck of the draw: my class was lively and affectionate, the other section (which I transferred out of) were dead fish, as evidenced at our final exam. I asked the prof about them, he said a class can be good for participation if there are (I forget the number; probably three or four) live wires.
Yep — a handful of live wires can do the trick, and their participation can (at least eventually) spur others to pitch in.
I’ve had something about attention from Weil in the sidebar for many years. When I heard that threat/promise of “force,” her observation about the Iliad came right to mind.
I just realized that I’ve cited her observation about force more often in these pages than I’d realized.
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