by Mark Harvey
Most of the “better sort” were not genuine Sons of Liberty at all, but timid sycophants, pliant instruments of despotism… —Carl Lotus Becker
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself, and find something flattering to say. Tell them they’re handsome or pretty, strong or smart, and make sweet noises when they trot out their ideas. Literature and history are riddled with bootlickers: Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII, Polonius in Hamlet, Mr. Collins in Pride and Predjudice, and of course Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.
There are some good words to describe these traits: sycophant, kiss-ass, toady, lackey, yes-man. One of my favorites is the word oleaginous, derived from oleum. It means oily and one of the best examples of this quality is the senator from the oil state, Ted Cruz. That man is oilier than the Permian Basin—oilier than thou!
There is something repulsive about lickspittles, especially when all the licking is being done for political purposes. It’s repulsive when we see it in others and it’s repulsive when we see it in ourselves It has to do with the lack of sincerity and the self-abasement required to really butter someone up. In the animal world, it’s rolling onto your back and exposing the vulnerable stomach and throat—saying I am not a threat.
We have a political class nowadays that is more subservient and submissive than the most beta dogs in a pack of golden retrievers. Most of them live in Washington DC and are Republicans. They are fully grown men and women, some in their autumnal years, still desperately yearning for a pat on the head or a chuck under the chin by President Trump. You see them crowding around him when he signs a bill, straining forward like children and batting their eyes with pick-me, pick-me smiles.
There are dozens of theories about a nation as a whole and individuals as separate beings willing to bow and scrape to an authoritarian figure. Hannah Arendt suggested that loneliness had a lot to do with it. She distinguished loneliness from solitude, the former being isolating and disempowering, the latter being a desirable state to think and reflect and meditate on things. Most of us know the paradox of feeling very lonely in certain crowds or with certain people and not lonely at all on our own in the right setting. Read more »
