Magick tricks: eating and holding a cake

A Compromise:

Engaging in Machiavellian Prudence

“So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honor his word when it places him at disadvantage[…]”
-The Prince, Machiavelli (57)

An aggressive righteousness cultivated a generation of “upright leaders” fit to guide their people out of moral slavery into the promised land of democracy. The project to sanctify the salt-bedded land of Sodom, ever underway, not only grooms with the best education, it rears with purpose, and within that purpose, gives a charge to live honorably. This has been the American conservatives’ battle for the last century, the game of politics, where everyone’s soul, through electoral vote, hangs on a precipice. By becoming the influence and authority in the land, those who envision moral revival hope to delay or destroy the political strata’s decay, from top to bottom. Amid the zeal, there is never a thought to the spiritual health of the individuals who dedicate their lives to political servitude. Can they maintain the integrity which they wished to impute? Underneath the strains of diplomacy and the body politic, is it possible to instigate domestic resurrections, maintain national security, law and order and remain honorable? To what extent must a moral leader impinge his honor, his word and with muddy hands, play the game?

Politics and pragmatism have been united, covertly, since Machiavelli’s Prince. One need not be honorable so much as maintain the appearance (59). Leadership cannot lead solely through honor and consistency: in order to gain power, one might have to cut heads, bribe, usurp, supplant, even smash toes. Without a claim to inheritance, political acquisition relies upon the assistance of others who demand payment through appeasement and preference (22, 34). Thus a constitutional principality* begets a balancing act between patrician and people:

“ The worst that can happen to a prince
when the people are hostile is for him
to be deserted; but from the nobles, if
hostile, he has to fear not only
desertion but even active opposition”(33).

Therefore, our honorable politician who is a man for the people, by the people, ought not worry about the people, but rather, his peer. For, to build on people is to build on dirt (35). Having established the necessity of any politician, which is to retain the favor of his patrons, senators and beneficiaries, we can quickly foresee what our honorable leader might do to ensure co-operation within his cabinet and furthermore, future reinstatement or worse, dissuade impeachment.

Clear becomes the priority of our official: survival. Maybe he owes the public, but he controls by catering his peers. Survival transforms the political forum into a gladiatorial arena of professionally dressed beasts striving to remain alight on the food chain. “ One must [become] a fox in order to recognize traps, […] a lion to frighten off wolves,” Machiavelli instructs, insinuating a change from moral human into an uninhibited and wily creature (75). A politician must be unscrupulous in his preservation of self and state. Succinctly put,“ […]a prince who wants to maintain his rule is often forced not to be good […] good deeds are your enemy” (63). Therefore Prudence, a probity subscribed to the righteous, becomes the chief virtue of the politician who possesses the feral aptitude to discern intrigue, betrayal and command the same.

To check his opponents he must be capable, to survive, become shrewd. In Machiavellian pragmatism, Good equates necessary evil, a wardrobe for the prince to don during press conferences, national holidays and campaigns; wickedness seems to be the product of such a décor, little better than a satanic angle disguised by seraph robes. But we must not think that Machiavelli promotes an unrestrained ill, for he gives roll calls of bad men who disregarded all for their own interests resulting in losses both state and self (28). A prince must be both loved and feared, but feared more than loved, for “ love is secured by a bond of gratitude which men […] break […]; but fear is strengthened by dread […] which is always effective” (54). Thus the tool of fear safeguards the physical principals that it presides over.

Above all the physical princedom concerns the prince most. Without a country to rule a ruler has no function. Primarily interested in regaining Italy’s nationality, Machiavelli charges his reader, Lorenzo de Medici** of Florence, to oust the stench of “barbarous tyranny” and restore order (3,85). Written during a time of great turmoil, perpetual chaos riddled with risings and fallings of multiple leaders, Machiavelli compares his prince prudent to Moses (82). The Prince has no Christ-like qualities or theocratic agendas which teach of metaphorical kingdoms built upon temples of the heart; his very nature lies earth bound, and as such would only care about the soul if it produced a tax, census or military draft. In the Machiavellian model the vocation of the prudent Prince safeguards and does not intermeddle with crises of the soul.

How then can our upright, moral Christian attempt to revive a culture of God-fear by straddling spiritual piety and political prudery? Shall he become a magician who shape-shifts between the office and domicile? Should he artistically lie to reveal a “greater truth within”? What is the justification for the juggled performance he will undoubtedly engage? The choice between success and failure materializes; either descend into jaded hypocrisy, little better than the society one wished to redeem, or become a weakling begging to play with big boys while retaining the childish blanket of righteousness.

If Conservatism cannot retain herself during tumults of politics, remain consistent with her moral code and be the change it desires to instill, then she cannot contend. To keep her faith and ask the inconceivable –to perform a balancing act of eating and holding cakes- mocks the stringent black-and-white, unyielding Truth that she breathes. Place Bush into office, call him an upright man who keeps his word, but as a prince, even he sleeps soundly while the inmates at Guantanamo Bay are dehumanized underneath the postscript justification named “National Security.” Which is fine, because this is politics, this is prudence, this is keeping the interest of the constituency safe, this is what a constitutional principality allows their prince to become, and in becoming, rule.

*Constitutional principality: this country allows “ […] a private citizen [to become] the ruler of his country neither by crime nor by any other outrageous acts of violence but by the favor of his fellow citizens […]” (32). Machiavelli claims that such a leader ascends to his position through democratic or an oligarchic system. There is ambiguity as to whether the two are interchangeable or combinative, as he notes a power struggle between noble and the peoples for the favor of the prince (33). Thus a constitutional principality can be taken as a mixture of noble and plebian class election, or one of the two installing governed rule.

**Lorenzo de Medici: probably the most renown of the Medici clan, Lorenzo was the offspring of Cosimo de Medici, an Italian banker who became wealthy and powerfully influential by loaning huge sums to popes and kings. Eventually the Medici family established rule in Florence and Lorenzo and his brother governed the city in what appears to be a family coo. During a time of political unrest when Northern Italy suffered from the abandonment of both pope and leader alike, Lorenzo provided a firm, if not overbearing backbone to the Italian Florentines. By forming shrewd alliances and supporting foreign powers through his wealth, he contributed economic stability, though not necessarily enduring peace. Hated by many Florentine citizens for his control and worldliness, Lorenzo’s dictatorship belies the many contributions he made to the arts. Under his liberal patronage, thinkers and artisans such as Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli, found freedom to explore the waves of humanistic thought and expression which had previously been unthinkable in Medieval Europe. Through the Medici line, and especially through Lorenzo’s generosity towards the humanities, Florence became an epicenter where the Renaissance would seed and take Europe by storm.

Doyle, Leonard. The Big Question: Will the detainees of Guantanamo Bay ever face a proper trial or be released?. The Independent: June 6, 2007 .
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2617407.ece

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Bull, George Trans. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Chpt iii: human nature

:::Columbus and the Indians, Part 3:::

She had to have the Twinkies.

He had to fuck a little girl.

Chpt ii: a philosopher was born to us

:::Columbus and the Indians, Part 2:::

I was told a story by a group of missionaries which involved a heathen and a stick of wood, crudely hewn from a tree. While repairing a damaged limb of his dankini, the savage cut his hand with a stone, and upon seeing the blood, thick red, against the wood, asked; “Why do I fix my god's hand, when he does not repair my own? Who is this god which must needs be made by his subject?” From this inquiry he went to the shamans, confused but elated by the quest which lay before him. The shaman, angered by his insolence, cast him out of the village. The man wandered, from tribe to tribe, petitioning each shaman for an answer, but each one turned him away, some with laughter and others by violence.

Half way around the world, a petty girl with a pencil behind her pigtails and a notepad filled with cursive notes began to cry when she asked the youth pastor about God. “How can He be a good God, when somewhere around the world an Indian, in the deepest dark of Africa, will die and go to hell because he doesn't have a Bible?” Her strangled weeping is addressed with Kleenex and a brochure to the missions field. Later on she goes to her mother, who gives her a passage about God's grace. For several days she bitterly mourns and everyone admires her for being compassionate. After a while, they become bored with her; their response hasn't changed and yet she remains unsatisfied. Warningly, the pastor reminds her of inward sin which stirs the soul of contentment to dare question the Almighty. Her mother, worried about devil's whispers, scolds her until she asks no more and sits quietly at dinner.

Today my classmate wept with a Kleenex box by her side. “How am I to know of God? How am I to live?” And a roomful of outcasts, the Indian savage, the pretty girl, Boethius, Melchizedek, Socrates and Rilke and Dostoyevsky nodded their heads as she sobbed, inconsolable yet hopeful, grieving and alive.