How will historians handle Donald Trump? Not the man. I’ll leave his legacy (autopsy?) to the psychopathologists and tragedians.
It is the phenomena which should command our attention; the
shame and the stain. How was it possible for so many Americans to abandon our
foundational precepts and willingly inhale his noxious air?
Ever since he appeared with his fake hair, faux promises and
bogus rants his followers seem to have multiplied like a supporating infestation
on the body politic. Providing we survive the festering wound inflicted on democracy,
he may have served a useful purpose.
He has laid bare the latent racism, toxic nationalism and
pseudo religiosity of a significant chunk of the electorate by tapping into a
well of fear and discontent. He only had to proclaim; I hear you. And now, I
will tell you whom to hate. Furthermore, I am a brilliant billionaire, follow
me.
Of course, the would-be potentate had no clothes, no ideas,
no program and a 4th grade vocabulary. But he was so brazen, so void
of decency and self-examination he became a model for millions to project their own primal instincts as
if there were no age of enlightenment, no science, no feminist awareness or civil rights movement. A mirror has been held up to our vapid faces, a selfie
of disgrace.
Trump drew the map and brought us to the crossroad of compassion
and humanity or loathing and degradation. He erased from the collective
consciousness the reason we fought WW II. Hitler made a comeback in his
incarnation. Any study of Germany in the
1930s would serve as a guide to our descent.
These years might also serve as a rebuke to Marx’s valorization of the downtrodden masses. We now know that the working class can easily be flipped into a lynch mob which only serves the interest of those who would keep them downtrodden. Grievances of the underserved are real though the aggrieved in his tent are misaligned.
At the same time we are threatened by global extinction through avarice and denial. Historians will answer how we survived this juncture of urgently needed action at the moment of rampant mindlessness.
The mass movement to the far right will go into reverse on cat's feet. It will happen unreported as light bulbs, by the thousands, go on overhead. Nostrils will sniff the stench of betrayal. In the movie, Twelve Angry Men, the rush to judgement falls away shedding racism and dismissal of the foreign born, recalling perhaps, that this is a country of immigrants. How one man ignited the embers of our perverse nature will be the subject for the centuries to come.
How do I know all this, I hear you ask. I have an advanced copy of a mid-century news-feed.
Ach - thank you for this! I must have already shared with you the most Buddhist wish I have been able to manage for this blight on our nation? May he be remembered poorly, and soon.
ReplyDeleteThose two words are better than my entire store of adjectives.
ReplyDelete