Like it or lump it

Like it or lump it is common in English, and

‘lumpers’ unload from United States docks

(such as Gloucester in Mass.), but the

Germans (as often) make best use of Lumpen,

a rag-word (not ragwort) pursued by

a ragtag of rag and bone words like

Lumpensammler, and

Lumpensgesindel, and dear old

Karl Marx’s (maybe insulting)

Lumpenproletariat,*

those at the bottom, the

ones most degraded, the

working class, poverty-

ridden, prone-to-diseases,

consumptive, those dying too young,

those losing their children, so that

one single name might be

used for two infants, (confusing

descendants and family historians),

for whom children composed

all their wealth, and the loss of one,

two, or more was like losing the

bank notes hid in your mattress, or

having a thug mugging you down some tight

alleyway, coshing you, uncashing you,

or a man skyscraper-leaping on

hearing investments have gone down the

plughole. 

     Lump is a mass undiffer-

entiated, the lumper the man who

understands mass, who humps on his

single hump the weight of a camel whose

double humps saddle the mass of a

man.  Lumpensgesindel, the

rag-taggle rabble, whose weight

dear old Karl wrangled into his

brain, commonsensical,

dialectically logical,

straining to see, to bring to

reality the Proletariat Dic-

tatorship, to envisage the

people, the workers, the mass in

charge, to see the demise of the

capitalists, to see inequality

quitted.  Marx was the

Lumpensammler, the rag-and-

bone man whose revolutionary

ideas were red rags to

bulls who horned them up,

tossed them, crossed them and

in general lost them.  Red was the

colour of their true love’s hair, but

this girl was blood through and

through.


Footnote
Hilary Clinton's equivalent is 'the deplorables.'