Finding Your Disowned Trump

In 1980 as part of a group poem Allen Ginsberg gave his class the opening line, I’m going to vote for Ronald Reagan because…

It was an exercise in liberating the imagination by probing the part of the brain we don’t wish to visit. In another sense he might have been asking us to embrace, if for a moment, that dark side of our self where our own Ronald Reagan lives.

In this vein I’ve decided to list my reasons for voting for Donald Trump without the usual filters of my censorious mind.

1-   Because I didn’t burn the raisin bread toast this morning and Peggy is well and therefore the world is already perfect.

2-   Because I hate figs, feta cheese and fettuccine for no good reason.

3-   Because I just lied about the fettuccine.

4-   Because it will bring us closer to revolution.

5-   Because I’ve always loved Canada

6-   Because sometimes I need someone to hate

7-   Because I’ve always secretly wanted to act in a movie about Nazi Germany.

Now I am traveling inward to find my own Donald Trump. Here I am, age fourteen, berating some twelve–year old kid on the soft-ball team for dropping a pop fly. Maybe I also ridiculed his speech defect or promised to negotiate a higher grade for him with his teacher.

Come to think of it I did meet my inner Trump in 8^th grade. I had been in P.S. 99 since Kindergarten obeying all the rules and behaving myself. I sat up straight, played well with others and didn’t run with scissors. It was time to overthrow the regime, to burst out of my knotted tie, my penal servitude.

I became part of a gang of guys, dedicated to malicious mischief, who nominated the worst student among us for class president to deliver a speech on Graduation Day. Robert Haimowitz had been left back 2 or 3 times. He was probably autistic or brain-damaged. In today’s world he would have been in a Special Needs program. We were cruel and stupid, feeling our oats.

We got him elected. Ms. Seabury, our teacher conferred with the principal and un-elected him. We were reprimanded soundly. The snicker disappeared from my face. For a few hours I walked in Donald Trump’s shoes feeling superior. Do his voters realize they are having their Robert Haimowitz moment?