The dread is with me every morning and sets more deeply into me each day of what I think of as slippage towards an apocalyptic time to come. My imagination plagues me. My imagination wakes me up, and at 3 or 4 in the morning I conjure visions of what this country has done to itself and how much worse it will become. I do not know how to shut it off. I know I am not alone.
So let me tell you a story to illustrate the long line of my dread.
A few weeks ago in the mountains, the internet shut down, phone shut off, nothing but the wind off Mt. Adams coming through the windows, home from a long hike, the exhausted dogs deep in sleep, we watched the machines from Mars rise out of the streets of Bayonne and begin to turn humans into puffs of chaff among empty, floating rags. A news team showed Mr. Cruise how a Tripod’s crew arrived in lightning bolts to pilot the long buried machines into the rich hunting grounds of America, for Martians too needed blood, and in driving before them all those terrified refugees, they had hit the motherload.
And there he was, appearing in my mind’s eye, the inescapable Mr. Trump, piloting the tripod, braying out its monstrous herd-making noise, crushing human beings and their homes and gadgets, Mr. Trump, the unavoidable, the center of each day, riding a machine he had unearthed from rich American soil, that old American contraption of overt, yahoo-ready-to-rumble racial hatred made new again wherever he set himself down at rallies across the old Confederacy, and wherever else his disciples gather together to chant and cheer, their master before them, their pilot, ready to give voice to those hatreds they now felt free to shout, free at last, free at last, God help us, free at last.
I am only an old white guy and this hatred brings out my deepest fears and revulsion.
All of these imaginative invocations are happening without watching 24 hour news talk shows, useless comedians, and video of most any kind of the key political actors of the day (Democratic leadership included), especially the President and any of his court and Party of eunuchs or his debased, nausea inducing children. To do so simply invites a deranged response, a sputtering ranting string of mothertrucking humping chucklehead venom. Pavlov’s poor dogs have nothing on me. I take my news in print and that is enough. I can remain calm and actually think in the light of written words.
One way or another, the modern world has always been going to the devil or been on the cusp of disaster barely averted. My generation tumbled under desks and covered up in hallways to practice our survival moves in anticipation of bombs hurtling over the Arctic and bringing the real, everlasting end. We watched the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold in real time. We lived with the murder of the Kennedys and MLK, with cities burning, with the endlessness of Vietnam’s televised blood and ruin.
But this feels different, several ongoing, jagged nightmares all unraveling before us hour after hour after hour without respite. Extinction rates among flora and fauna increasing at a geometric rate, bees for God’s sakes, bees, approaching a population drop off point, the planet growing hotter by the month, refugees desperate for life and for the lives of their children streaming away from wars and gangs and dictatorships and climate change in Syria, Central America, parts of Africa. Most European countries beset by home grown fascist movements, Israel moving toward an apartheid state, Saudi Arabia run by an unapologetic butcher with lots of friends in DC, Iran looking more unstable, the old fashioned kleptocrocy of Russia and the post-modern totalitarian China extending their influence internationally. And here, My God, Here!*
Trump’s utter shamelessness, his pathology — his ability to lie effortlessly, his complete lack of imagination and empathy, his command of our attention so that he makes himself the center of every day — all of these qualities make him without comparison in American history.
The Union feels as if it is splitting along half-a dozen fault lines — divided by class, race and region, by politics, by social and religious views. The Republicans in Congress have become acolytes to this Caligula-lite. The sea is eating Florida and Louisiana, We, you and I, with our tax dollars, are running concentration camps along the border (where we do not yet know even a portion of the full horrors yet to come to light). The tax rate is rigged for the super rich and their banks and corporations. National ideals of sacrifice and community are being shredded. Families and friendships are being sundered. Children are being torn from their parents by ICE.
I wonder if this is what Yugoslavia felt like before it blew apart in ethnic and political hatreds.
I keep envisioning precipitating events that will bring on calculated attempts at absolute power, a host of peculiarly American Reichstag Fires — a collapsed economy, assassinations, who knows (I could go much darker but those are my nightmares), but then I look around and think “I’m delusional. This will pass. He is an aberration. Look at the normalcy of life outside DC. Look at all the good people I know who support him. They will never allow all this to spin out of control.”
Then I am reminded of something John Updike wrote, “As in our mundane reality, it is others that die, while an attenuated silly sort of life bubbles decadently on.”** I think it is the good people who support him, who brush off his corrosive policies and all pervading moral ugliness who will get us killed.
Trump is not an aberration. He is the primal ugliness of that darkest of all other American personas. He is the anti-Lincoln, a cunning, race baiting imbecile with power, the nihilist showman who knows how to entertain while first corrupting and then leveling everything in his path. When he is gone, we will have to walk among ruins for a long time.
* “Today, everyone is entitled to his own facts, or their own facts, since even grammar has changed. The message from the Trump White House, and from Boris Johnson’s rise to prime minister in Britain, is that facts don’t matter. The bald-faced lie is perfectly acceptable, so long as it keeps you at the center of what passes today for attention. The important thing is to feed the machine. Shock is the best fodder. Social media dies without outrage.
In the mid-1930s, a few years before World War II, Robert Musil, the author of “The Man Without Qualities” wrote, “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” The political culture of both the United States and Britain is sick. It is unserious, crooked and lethal. There is no honest way to dissociate the rise of Trump and Johnson from the societies that produced them.
The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. Johnson does a grotesque Churchill number. Nobody cares. The wolves have it; the sheep, transfixed, shrug.“ from The New York Times, Roger Cohen, July 26, 2019
**The Poorhouse Fair by John Updike
