"What's that he says?" shouted M. Verdurin, with an air of disgust and fury combined, knitting his brows as though he needed all his concentration to grasp something unintelligible. "It's impossible to understand what you say. What have yo got in your mouth?" inquired M. Verdurin, growing more and more furious , and alluding to Saniette's speech defect.
"Poor Saniette, I won't have him made unhappy," said Mme Verdurin in a tone of false pity, so as to leave no one in doubt as to her husband's rudeness.
"I was at the Ch . . . Ch . . ."
"Che, che, try to speak distinctly," said M. Verdurin, "I can't understand a word you say."
Almost without exception, the faithful burst out laughing, looking like a group of cannibals in whom the sight of a wounded white man has aroused the thirst for blood. For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alive. And we all of us laugh at a person whom we see being made fun of, though it does not prevent us from venerating him ten years later in a circle where he is admired. It is in like manner that the populace banishes or acclaims its kings.
"Come, now, it's not his fault," said Mme Verdurin.
"It's not mine either, people ought not to dine out if they can't speak properly."
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 965
I was looking over this section again and trying to make sense of the sections I had marked and the notes I had included in the margins and came across this sentence in my painfully childlike scrawl, "M. Verdurin is a dick." It's hard to read his abuse of Saniette without having an almost visceral response, that is unless you're rich like the Verdurins. Even his wife is more posing than she is truly horrified, or maybe she's just been beat down and desensitized over the years. I really need to devote less time to Twitter (my time on the blog is easing up now that our year-long Discography discussion has come to an end) because it increasingly makes me angry, although in other ways it's therapy because it allows me to reach out to like-minded individuals and also to call the President a tyrant twenty times a day. I brought this up because I'm so often horrified by the utterly heartless Tweets released by Trump and his sons and other members of the super-rich swamp that passes for an administration. What people don't realize when they talk about White Privilege is that it is not simply an act, but rather the mindset that made the act possible. One of Trump's sons was mocking members of the LGBT community the other day, and it was so obvious that he had led such a sheltered existence that he couldn't even imagine the suffering that another human being underwent. And yet, these are the people that we choose to run our government? How angry and disillusioned (and, let's be honest, racist and misogynistic) would you have to be to think that these people would actually help you when they have such utter disdain for you? The entire Trump junta has the compassion of M. Verdurin.
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