Thank You Now Please Leave

2016 will go down in history books as the year we almost lost our collective mind thanks to Donald Trump. Yes, we ought to thank him the same way we should show our gratitude to everyone on death row for enacting the deed that the rest of us have repressed or at least learned to contain. He has given license to our most loathsome impulses.

The candidate is nothing more than a yuge mirror, wavy and cracked held up to the mindless face of America. He has helped us see ourselves in the aspect of a self-aggrandizing lynch mob in a prolonged tantrum. Shocked and awed as we were maybe, just maybe, we will wake up and take a long look at what we have become.

Yet all this begs the question: From whence he came? Like Schrodinger’s cat is he part toxic wave, part orange particle? How did such a creature emerge?

I would argue that The Republican Party of the past eight years has seeded him. They have pandered to the God and Guns discontents, given rage to grievances, incited them to loathing and fanned a latent native racism to delegitimize the President. My guess is the cauldron will continue to simmer for a long while.

It is nearly the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein. Her monster actually had no name. We have appropriated the doctor’s name as his own. Whether she was warning of the menace of an Industrial Revolution or bad science or a dozen other interpretations the experiment got out of hand. Unlike in movie versions her creature spoke, even recited Milton’s Paradise Lost. But he was also so repulsed by his own distorted image he turned destructive. Our man Donald shows no such discernment. He can’t get over himself, his genius, his lovable nature, his magnetism and irresistible appeal to woman everywhere.

Trumpenstein didn’t rise from a scientist’s table on a dark and stormy night. He is more of a Golem assembled from grease, poison clay and mud, an inevitable result of malicious leadership in Congress,talk radio and cable TV. The creators are now themselves fleeing to nether regions, disowning their creation. Sorry folks, he is yours.  He roams and blurts with impunity. He is the newest American horror story.