A Man Looking at A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, A Review — Part 10 — Conclusion
Language is a tool, a way of communicating existential phenomena, like feelings and objects, and this shared understanding of these tools allow us to communicate.
Hustvedt says that she now enjoys her authority, which is more than grandiosity. She says that she, “Dances, romps, howls, whimpers, rages, lectures, and spit[s] on the page[s] now,” (Hustvedt, p. 134). Weird that a person would “enjoy their authority.” This seems to me like a psychological weakness. Such a person has shot to be an expert, but who forgets that as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, Take a position on anything and I will take the opposite and win every time, which he did. I think as human beings, we recognize mere points of view, where every position can be criticized from any other position, and a position holds because of the eloquence used to defend it or that it seems to ring of the truth. Even so, as with Trump getting elected, even the truth can be ignored or not comprehended or acted on. There is so much space between the rungs of a ladder vs. the ladder itself.
Pombo i Sallés said, “Finally, let us be aware of the big space between the rungs of the ladder and of the ladder itself. It is great to be tolerant and thus accept a multiplicity of points of view. However, excessive tolerance of different ideas expressed with superb eloquence is also dangerous. Hitler was very eloquent, a great orator, and look what happened. Trump, like Hitler, is mentally ill; but he is no great orator. He just speaks basic rude English to say what many North American people want to hear, people who are either disillusioned with former politics, lost in their expectations, also uneducated people and, of course, those people who are the great accomplices of the Capitalist oligarchy who use Trump as a means to their end. I hope he does not win the next election!”
