My Year With Proust - Day 268

   Meanwhile, I looked at Robert, and my thoughts ran as follows.  There were in his cafe, and I had myself known at other times in my life, plenty of foreigners, intellectuals, budding geniuses of all sorts, resigned to the laughter excited by their pretentious capes, their 1830s ties and still more by the clumsiness of their movements, going so far as to provoke that laughter in order to show that they paid no heed to it, who yet were men of real intellectual and moral worth, of profound sensibility.  They repelled - the Jews among them principally, the unassimilated Jews, that is to say, for with the other kind we are not concerned - those who could not endure any oddity or eccentricity of appearance (as Bloch repelled Albertine).  Generally speaking, one realised afterwards that, if it could only be held against them that their hair was too long, their noses and eyes were too big, their gestures abrupt and theatrical, it was puerile to judge them by this, that they had plenty of wit and good-heartedness, and were men of whom, in the long run, one could become closely attached.  Among the Jews especially there were few whose parents and kinsfolk had not a warmth of heart, a breadth of mind, a sincerity, in comparison with which Saint-Loup's mother and the Duc de Guermantes cut the poorest of moral figures by their aridity, their skin-deep religiosity which denounced only the most open scandal, their apology for a Christianity which led invariably (by the unexpected channels of the uniquely prized intellect) to a colossally mercenary marriage.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 423-424

For some reason, I guess not all the surprising, truthfully, this passage really speaks to me.  Proust is commenting on the anti-Semitism of his age, and drawing, partially, a distinction across generational lines.  It's difficult to not think of the raging Islamophobia haunting the country now, fueled by ignorance and hatred and, in turn, propping up the dreadful candidacy of Donald Trump.  It seems like a lifetime ago when John McCain, who I have profound political and philosophical differences with, but who I have tremendous admiration for, decidedly and deliberately and courageously shut down a woman who decried Obama as "an Arab" by pointing out that, instead, the future president was "a decent family man."  On the surface it was a clumsy moment, but also one that seems an almost inconceivable statement from one of the alt-right racist lunatics who seem to be dominating way too much of the GOP message.  Compare this to any number of Trump responses, but here's one from last year in New Hampshire when he had the opportunity to make a statement; sadly, he definitely made a statement.  Some of it comes from Trump's own racist ideology, and some of it is shaped by his ignorance and general idiocy and pathetic, childish need to be idolized and thus pander to the crowd, but in the end all that matters is that he's making a bad situation worse by creating a comfortable space for racist morons to take center stage.  As I've often pointed out, what's more troubling is the tens of millions of people who have essentially abrogated their responsibilities as voting US citizens to bring an unstable buffoon this close to the White House.  If you're just an unrepentant racist, OK, so this is your wet dream.  However, what if you're "a decent family man" yourself?  How do you reconcile your faith with your support for a philandering con man, beyond just espousing a hateful racist ideology which Jesus would hardly understand?  Proust definitely has it dead on when he speaks of "their aridity, their skin-deep religiosity." It is a sad, sad time to live in America.  That said, by my temperament and my education and my faith an optimistic man, and in the end I think Trump will lose and it will be by a comfortable margin in the Electoral College.  And one hopes that he hasn't done irreparable damage to the nature of public discourse in the US, and maybe, just maybe, providing an open, welcoming space for the vermin to gather will shine a light on a situation that we desperately try to ignore.