Politics

Free Melania

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patti-trump

I had never heard of Melania Trump before her husband ran for president.  When I saw her descending that fateful escalator the night he announced his candidacy, I dismissed her as a gold-digger willing to exchange booty for fabulous wealth.  However, now after the first few days of this administration, I see her in a different, more sympathetic light, as someone brow-beaten into marrying that brutish, boorish buffoon.[1]

What a wretched life she must lead.  Imagine sharing a bed with Trump. His snoring, I bet, could provide a convincingly horrid soundtrack for Dante’s Inferno.[2]  Let’s face it, sleeping with Donald Trump, eating breakfast with Donald Trump, listening day in and day out to Donald Trump bloviating about how fucking wonderful he is has got to get really old really fast.

I’d rather be sentenced to 20 years riding on Disney’s “It’s a Small World.”

small-world-copy

Melania’s Wiki bio makes it sound as if she had a stage mom, given that the future First Lady’s modeling career began at age five. Having a stage mom is bad enough, but having one in the former Yugoslavia certainly must have made it worse. Imagine coming home after an exhausting shoot to a dingy self-contained living unit in a soulless Soviet era high-rise lined up like a domino along the diesel stench of a poorly maintained highway. Plus, her old man was a Marxist-Lenin fanatic, which is probably just as bad (or worse) than being reared by a fanatical Christian evangelist.

If beauty were her ticket out, who dare blame her? Sure, she could have stayed in Milan and married a calcio[3] star, but certainly the lure of New York would be hard to resist.

* * *

Wiki claims she met the future president at a Fashion Week party where she refused to give the lout her phone number because he had another date (or perhaps because he resembled a mutated, bulbous tangerine sporting a hairstyle that a Teddy Boy might find outrageous).

 

 

Teddy Boy

Teddy Boy

Eventually, she gave in – imagine the relentless badgering she must have endured – and for a while she had the good sense to break off the relationship after it had started. But let’s face it, Donald always gets what he wants — if you don’t count the respect of Hollywood or the intelligentsia or at the present moment, 55% of the US population.

No doubt you’ve witnessed her daily humiliations, and if you haven’t, allow me to share two telltale images.

gracious husband

gracious husband

happy couple

happy couple

Not surprisingly, #FreeMelanie is now a meme on Facebook and Twitter, and I think her escape from the White House could make a killer pulp thriller if you changed the names and set it in the future. You could have her fall in love with a secret service agent or kidnapped like Patty Hurst and go rogue by helping her abductors knock off unqualified cabinet members.

Or how about a Greek tragedy with a CNN panel serving as a chorus?

Certainly, there’s a budding Dostoyevsky out there who could capture her feline Slavic beauty and concoct some redemption for her suffering in a 600-page novel.

I personally don’t know – and I’m serious – any sane woman who would trade places with her.

[1] I realize the too-too muchness of that relentless B-alliteration, its amateurish boom boom, but, people, I’m trying to echo Trump’s own crudity and amateurishness, so give me a break!

[2] For the sake of your and my own sanity, I’ll spare us a description of what I envision the “ol’ in-out, in-out” with Donald Trump might be like.

[3] I.e., soccer

3 Contrasting Visions of the Trump Presidency

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trum-piss

Boy, I really didn’t realize how dark Trump’s vision the US is until I read his inaugural address:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge . . .

I first thought Trump may have actually written this himself. I couldn’t think of a professional speechwriter who would come up with a simile so imagistically clunky as “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”  But it turns out Miller and Bannon are to blame.

Anyway, are you visualizing the image?

Florida National Cemetery, Headstones, war heroes

tombstones

rusted-out factory

rusted-out factory

 

scattered

scattered

Perhaps there are more than a few rusted-out factories in Michigan, but down here in South Carolina where I live I couldn’t locate one to save my life. I asked my son who drove up from Orlando yesterday how many rusted-out factories he’d seen during the seven hour trip, and he said that the only factory he saw had smoke coming out of the smokestacks.

Also – and I’ll move on – the children in South Carolina suffering from poverty aren’t huddled in inner cities but eking out their existence without Medicaid expansion in shacks that litter the landscape like, um, shacks.

Okay, now that I got that off my chest, I’d like to offer brief synopses of how three thoughtful pundits perceive the Trump presidency, and I’ll go from darkest to brightest for sanity’s sake.

Sarah Kendzior

skSarah Kendzior, the author of The View from Flyover Country, is an anthropologist who specializes in authoritarian states and writes for various newspapers. She considers the accession of Trump as nothing less than catastrophic. She foresees a coming kleptocracy as a fragile democracy succumbs to fascistic institution-gutting by Trump and his mob-like nationalistic white-supremacist cronies.

In 2014 she served as an expert witness for an Uzbek refugee. Here is her account:

My job was to tell the judge about Uzbekistan: a country ruled by a dictator who abuses executive power to obtain personal wealth, threatens independent media and protesters, spies on real and perceived enemies, packs his administration with lackeys and relatives, refuses to disclose his financial holdings, molds public opinion through media domination, persecutes innocent Muslims under the pretext of fighting terrorism, and distracts the citizenry with pageants and spectacle, often proclaiming that he is making Uzbekistan great again.

She goes on to note

American authoritarianism will not be a carbon copy of other states. Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism will exploit pre-existing vulnerabilities – corporate corruption, institutional rot, systemic racism, a weakened economy, a struggling media, celebrity worship – and exacerbate them until our nation is no longer recognizable.

Should this occur, it may look like home, but it will not feel like home. What may be wrenched from us is a fundamental sense of security and sovereignty. When cable outlets are not promoting white supremacists or debating the humanity of Jews – yes, this is what our media airs now – they occasionally document Mr. Trump’s kleptocratic behaviour.

It’s almost dark enough to drive me to the nearest burnt-out strip mall to see if I can score some smack; however, Dr. Kendzior preaches resistance, not submission, and yesterday’s massive protests offer some hope that we’ll not take Trump lying down.

But we are still here, we the people, the inconvenient background players in Donald Trump’s self-serving shakedown of the American dream. We the people have been calling our representatives, demanding to know what is going on. We the people never did form that more perfect union, but we are not about to trade in the red, white and blue for the gold-plated facade of a tyrant tycoon.

We the people look out for each other – even when no one looks out for us.

David Brooks

brooksChances are you’re familiar with David Brooks, the affable guy-next-door conservative columnist for the NY Times and frequent contributor to the soon-to-be privatized PBS.

Brooks is considerably more upbeat about the survival of our democracy:

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

He sees hope in the possibility that the polarization Republicans and Democrats will end as the two join forces to quell the megalomaniacal maelstrom that will be Trump’s governing style:

We’ve wondered if there is some opponent out there that could force us to unite and work together. Well, that opponent is being inaugurated, not in the form of Trump the man, but in the form of the chaos and incompetence that will likely radiate from him, month after month.

Brooks ends his most recent column with this Panglossian hope:

With Trump it’s not the ideology, it’s the disorder. Containing that could be the patriotic cause that brings us together.

Peter Leyden

d6qgkbh_400x400According to his by-line, Peter Leyden “is the founder and CEO of Reinvent, a media company.” He sees Trump’s inauguration not as “the beginning of an era – but the end.”

He posits that Trump’s atavistic wish to flip the calendar back to the USA’s manufacturing heyday is doomed because of the evolution of technology into an ever-increasing interconnectedness of digital technologies, which “will be totally global and operate on a planetary scale.”

Whereas Brooks sees Trump uniting the Right and Left, Leyden foresees him being the “vehicle that will finally take down right-wing conservative politics for a generation or two” by “completely and irrevocably alienat[ing] all the growing political constituencies of the 21st century: the Millennial Generation, people of color, educated professionals, women.”

He goes on to say suggest that it’s actually ultimately fortunate that Hillary lost because she “would not have been able to finally bring down the conservative movement and its archaic ideology.”

Wesley Moore

meWesley Moore is a very confused and woebegone blogger. He has no earthly idea what’s going to happen. You can find him at any number of Folly Beach drinking establishments or loitering in the parking lots of burnt-out strip malls.

 

The Other Liberace

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28 Jan 1978, Los Angeles, California, USA --- Liberace spoofs a day in his own life during a television special, including a scene where he baths in his $55,000 marble bathtub. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

 

Let’s face it, as far as taste goes, Donald Trump makes Liberace seem almost restrained.

No, that's not Donald Trump depicted in the painting

No, that’s not Donald Trump depicted in the painting

setting of many a historic tweet

setting of many a historic tweet

What’s with this rococo? Hasn’t Trump read No Exit?  Stupid question.

Imagine being his housekeeper, a fate worthy of Dantean damnation, Hell’s Tenth Circle, where the super avaricious have to scrub parquet floors to the eternal piped-in sounds of 3 Doors Down between chronic eagle-liver-plucking visitations from the Donald himself.

Okay, back to Liberace.  Hair style comparison.

liberace_colour_allan_warren_31944

side-hair

Where the two differ obviously is in their dress.  Trump seems to have some obsessive compulsive disorder that demands he wear exclusively dark suits and garish cardinal colored ties, most often red.

"Part of the beauty of me, is that I'm very rich."

“Part of the beauty of me, is that I’m very rich.”

Compare that with Liberace’s sartorial inclinations.

liberace_piano-300x300

Here are a couple  no brainers:  Which of these super celebrities had the sunnier public persona? Which one would you rather be in charge of the nuclear codes?

Trump and Hitchcock’s Birds

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the-birds-31

I fear that the sheer overabundance of disinformation/information that Trump generates overwhelms the capacity of the media to focus and fixate.  With Hillary, we had the relatively stable narrative of her untrustworthiness, and her private email server coupled with questions about the foundation provided her enemies and the press witha slow-moving target — if not a sitting target — like a hippo sunning on the banks of a muddy river. No matter that compared to Trump’s malfeasance, the emails – literally misfeasance – seemed like a bigger deal because we heard about them constantly. To switch metaphors, each day brought a new e-mail story, and the stories were stacked like blocks throughout the months until they formed a sort of Potemkin monument of mal – as opposed to – misfeasance.

Trump’s issues, on the other hand, remind me of the avian swarms we find in Hitchcock’s The Birds.  They are legion:  Trump University, Trump’s Foundation, stiffing contractors, pussy grabbing, bankruptcies, phantom tax returns, international intrigue, colossal debt, criminal associations, overt cruelty, the deluge of demonstrable false statements.

A flock of these issues comes at us fast furious squawking in a terrible cacophony, then dart away, before another, different swarm descends.  Meanwhile, via Twitter, Trump spews provocative or petty phrases that further distract those whose job it is to place things in perspective and then render them clearly visible.

For example:

 

A Year Most of Us Would Like to Forget

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Gebhard Fuge: An den Wassern Babylons

Gebhard Fuge: An den Wassern Babylons

A couple of posts ago, I stated that I wasn’t going to do my annual review because I lacked the courage; however, I’ve changed my mind hoping that the exercise might provide some catharsis, serve as a purgative to wash away pity and terror, as I rent my sackcloth and tear out my few remaining  strands of hair.

January

Prophetically setting the tone for horror over the horizon, my very first post this year was a New Year’s Day comparison of Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt, two doomed cool rocking daddies who both died on New Year’s Day 44 years apart.  Click Here.

hank and townes

Of course, David Bowie would die later that month while those undelightful Bundry Boys, who later would be acquitted, occupied federal property in Montana.  Instead of going there, I’ve linked the cautionary tale of my first acquaintance with alcohol.  Read it and weep. Click Here.

Folly Beach Tales of Intoxication

February

In February my Aunt Virginia died, which led to musing on mortality as my siblings and I scattered her remains to the Folly River.  Click Here.

ashes to ashes

Here’s also a review of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which I listened to driving to a funeral home after a stranger in a bar the previous evening showed me photographs of her husband’s severed finger stumps, which he had acquired a couple of hours earlier. Click here.

March

patPat Conroy, the father of a close friend, died.  She and her sister stayed with us during his hospitalization. Click here.

In addition, March brought us the news of the return of Judy Birdsong’s T-Cell Lymphoma, which, of course, was profoundly disheartening.

This post was created on Good Friday right after finding out the news.  Click here.

April

Teaching Keats while in despair proved quite difficult but do-able.  Click here.

And, of course, Prince, whom I dubbed “the Lord Byron of Pop, died.  Click here.

screen-shot-2015-12-08-at-7-58-05-am

 

May

Yet another death, this time a student’s.  Click here.

And I review Don DeLillo’s just released not-exactly-upbeat novel, Zero K.

 

Edward Hopper: "Morning Sun"

Edward Hopper: “Morning Sun”

June

dylan-ali-2-300x201June brought us a mass shooting in an Orlando Nightclub.  Click here.

Ali, a sort of boyhood hero died, which took me back to the early 60’s when my father tried to teach me how to box.  Click here.

So I decided to cheer myself up by reading the Brothers Karamazov.  Click here.

the author fleeing from an ant attack

the author fleeing from an ant attack

July

Trump + Putin = Love. Click here.

Also, there was that festival of bad taste known as the Republican convention. Click here.

Adelson's luxury suite

Adelson’s luxury suite

August

Okay, how about a little sunshine.  I donned my anthropological pith helmet and crashed a bachelor’s party at Chico Feo (click here) and talked a colleague into letting me publish a brilliant letter she wrote to her students (click here).

September

Snazell, Sarah; Doppelganger; Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/doppelganger-178168

Snazell, Sarah; Doppelganger; Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/doppelganger-178168

In September we travelled to Houston for treatment, and my Judy Birdsong met the other Judy Birdsong, a bright light in a year of darkness (click here).

October

Before Leonard Cohen died, I published this piece after reading David Remick’s splendid New Yorker article.  Click here.

13c6ce05571f948557d191ce5f1d7cb0

Blow Hurricane Matthew, break your checks, rage blow. Click here.

November 

Oh my God NO! Click here.

melania-libertyDecember

So here we are.  On the edge.  Waiting.  But, hey, thanks to all for reading, especially my regular crew.  Happy New Year!
.

 

Why Donald Trump Is an Orwellian Nightmare for English Teachers

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yakov_guminer_-_arithmetic_of_a_counter-plan_poster_1931

You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.

Charlie Marlow to his shipmates in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

No, Donald Trump isn’t a nightmare for English teachers because he uses bigly as an adverb. Nor is it that when it comes to oratory, Trump’s speeches make George W Bush seem practically Churchillian in comparison. No, the reason that Donald Trump is a nightmare for English teachers is that words to him are meaningless.

Why bother teaching someone the difference in shades of meaning between the words venial and abominable when 2 + 2 = 5?[1]

To Trump, words are just things, commodities to be manipulated for bargaining or seduction or braggadocio. We English teachers, on the other hand, tend to see words as sacred, as vessels of meaning, and we try to teach our students to choose them carefully so that their descriptions are as clear and accurate as possible, whether they are writing about their grandmothers or analyzing Lear’s betrayal by his daughters Regan and Goneril.

Of course, most if not virtually all politicians occasionally lie, but generally with subtlety and rarely when the lie can be easily refuted.  This is not the case with Trump who seems to be a pathological liar. His lies are legion.  He lies when it’s not necessary, seemingly for the sake of lying.  To me, this lying is a very big deal, and I believe it is both my patriotic and moral duty to point out to my students why his lies are lies when they are applicable to the literature we are studying, the way I would like to think I would with Hitler’s lies if I had been teaching in Germany in the 1930’s.

Our school prayer begins with these words.

May our words be full of truth and kindness . . .

Not only are Trump’s words essentially devoid of truth and kindness, his kleptocratic tendencies as evidenced by his violation of the emolument clause, his packing the cabinet with sycophantic billionaires, and his admiration of Putin as soulmate put our very republic in danger. Nor does it help that it seems as if most Republicans in Congress don’t care about the rule of law now that one of their own can aid them in dismantling health care and cutting taxes for the 1%.

Remember Whitewater? All those Clinton investigations?  Those were different people and different times.

* * *

To see what I’m getting at, allow me just one recent example of Trump’s misuse of a phrase (see italics below) and how it can distort reality to his favor.

Yesterday, on hearing that the Electoral College had made it official he would be our next president, Trump crowed, “Today marks a historic electoral landslide victory in our nation’s democracy.”

Never mind that he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million; here’s a handy chart mapping Electoral College margins of victory from Washington to Trump:

screen-shot-2016-12-19-at-6-35-55-am

 

Politfact quotes Larry Sabato, the director of the Center of Politics at the University of Virginia: “Calling a 306 electoral-vote victory a ‘landslide’ is ridiculous. Trump’s Electoral College majority is actually similar to John F. Kennedy’s 303 in 1960 and Jimmy Carter’s 297 in 1976. Has either of those victories ever been called a landslide? Of course not — and JFK and Carter actually won the popular vote narrowly.”

Of course, by declaring his historically comfortable but by no means overwhelming victory a landslide, Trump gets to have the words “historic electoral landslide” plastered in headlines and on screens across the planet. If he’s won by a landslide, the vast majority of people want whatever he wants, so that means that most people want the wealthiest Americans to receive enormous tax cuts.  If this election has taught us anything, it is that a majority of voters in 30 states aren’t all that discriminating. If some hear it was a landslide on Fox News, that’s good enough for them. Here’s a quote from today’s Washington Post: 

An editor at Breitbart, formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said that fear [of reprisal from Trump and his minions] is well-founded [among lawmakers].

“If any politician in either party veers from what the voters clearly voted for in a landslide election … we stand at the ready to call them out on it and hold them accountable,” the person said.

In fact, if those who attend Trump rallies hear him say  2+2=5, they very well might believe him, even without having to go through the torture that O’Brian puts poor Winston Smith through in Orwell’s 1984.

How chilling to read these passages from 1984 in light of Trump’s “historic electoral landslide”:

There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

[. . . ]

We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which (sic) will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside — irrelevant.’

Will I be teaching 1984 in the spring?[2] Yes. Will Trump’s name come up? You betcha!  Will I be teaching “Heart of Darkness” this spring?  Yes sir, of course.

599bd4e393673bf37d243e7cc32b614c

[1] The latter word in this case being a much more accurate descriptor of Trump, a known swindler and self-professed sexual assaulter.

[2] By the way, click here for an extensive Pre-Trumpian lesson plans for teaching 1984.

Recasting To Kill a Mockingbird

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ewell-atticus

The other day I put a poll on Twitter asking which character from To Kill a Mockingbird most resembles Donald Trump. Unbelievably, the results ended up tied, 50-50 between Bob Ewell and Mrs. Dubose.[1]

The other choices were Prosecutor Gilmer and Atticus himself.

Of course, Atticus is the throw-away, obviously-wrong answer, like letter D in the test on Macbeth I gave yesterday:

According to your Beloved Taskmaster,[2] who wrote Macbeth?

A. Christopher Marlowe B. The Earl of Oxford

C. William Shakespeare D. Ten million monkeys randomingly typing

Gilmore, the prosecutor of Tom Robinson, is like Trump a bigot and in the movie suffers a Trumpian oral fixation, but Gilmore is too mild mannered to be the Donald. When Robinson on the stand admits he didn’t charge white Mayella Ewell for doing her chores because he pitied her, Trump would have been all over that perversion of ‘60s Alabama race relations, dramatizing the incident minstrel-show-style mocking both Robinson’s speech patterns and his mangled arm.

giphy

That leaves two choices, Bob Ewell and Mrs. Dubose. If it were a multiple choice test instead of a poll, you’d have to go with Ewell. One, there’s the gender issue, and, of course, Ewell, unlike wheelchair bound Mrs. Dubose, actually destroys people’s lives.  Plus her poison-of-choice is morphine whereas Donald’s is Diet Coke.[3]

Nevertheless, in the poll, my vote would go to bitter, belligerent Mrs. Dubose, based entirely on this one scene.

Note the mollification after the buttering up.

[1] Sigh, the vote was 1 to 1.

[2] I.e., I-and-I, your beloved blogger.

[3] Imagine, if you dare, Trump drunk.

Trump’s First Year: Predictions

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cole_empire_0

 

Inauguration Day

A la Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, natural phenomena go haywire. The earth becomes feverous and shakes; lions are seen strolling up K Street. By clock it is day, but night has strangled the sun, casting darkness about the capital. When Trump places his hand upon the Bible, his palm and fingers are seared. Franklin Graham blames all of these unnatural events on the LBGTQ community.

Kid Rock recites an Inaugural poem.

O-Da-Lin in the USA

Yo,Yo,Yo, Yo Da Lin in the USA

A delicious break from socialists.

Yo Da Laheeeeoooooooo

Here we go, Prez; take it away!

Cash bars are set up at all of the Inaugural Balls. Trump pockets the profits.

The Rest of January

Led by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Congress scraps Medicare and replaces it with vouchers and tax credits entitling bearers deep discounts in burial/cremation services.

dscn1788

February

Lorne Michaels goes missing.

Trump signs an executive order making Moscow Washington’s “Sister City.”

President Trump nominates Roy Moore for the Supreme Court.

March 

Attorney General Jeff Sessions charges Hillary Clinton with treason.

President Trump signs an executive order replacing Arabic numerals with Roman Numerals.

NBC cancels SNL.

hillary-perp

April

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

May 

Jared Kushner successfully accomplishes a hostile takeover of the New York Times. The New York Times buys the New York Post. The New York Post buys the Washington Post. The Washington Post buys The Village Voice.

Celebrations break out in trailer parks across America as Congress abolishes the Estate Tax.

June

President Trump celebrates his LXXI birthday at the Eastern Whitehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia. He and Putin announce a new joint Trump/Putin resort in the Crimea.

July

Hillary Clinton begins a hunger strike.

August

Trump takes a month off. Congress recesses.

Card carrying communists Santa and Mrs. Claus drown in Arctic Ocean.

SNL replaced by comedy show starring Andrew Dice Clay.

santa-and-nrs

 

September

Trump awards Howard Stern a Presidential Medal of Freedom Award.

The Statue of Liberty takes her own life, and Trump replaces her with a statue of Melania.

melania-liberty

October

Evangelicals lobby Trump to ban Trick or Treating as a satanic communistic ritual that encourages the redistribution of candy among the masses.

Trump refuses in what the NY Times editorial board calls “the greatest act of personal heroics since Sir Thomas More was beheaded for his convictions.”

November   

Congress repeals the ACA and replaces it with free first aid kits to all uninsured families (while supplies last).

December

Hillary Clinton dies in captivity.

America is finally great again.

The Con: You Can Fool a Whole Lot of People a Lot of the Time

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snake-oil

Last Tuesday, lots of low information voters stood in the relatively short lines where white people vote and cast their ballots for Donald Trump because they’re sick of Washington DC and wanted to take a sledge-hammer to the status quo.

These people are unaware that not much got done in Washington under Obama (except for saving the economy and adding 20 million to the ranks of the insured) because the Republican Congress thwarted his every move. Mitch McConnell infamously announced right from the get-go, i.e. right after Obama’s first inauguration, that his goal was to make sure that Obama would be a one-term president.

Well, these low info whites are going to get their way now because things are about to get done in Washington – the Affordable Care Act will be repealed, massive tax cuts signed into law, environmental protections gutted, banks deregulated – sis-boom-bah!

Perhaps because Trump’s gruff plain speech echoed their thoughts and expressed their prejudices, they figured he would give a shit about them and get those factories humming again, but, of course, all Donald Trump cares about is Donald Trump, and certainly his polices aren’t going to help those disaffected Michiganders and Ohioans; indeed, they’ll make their lives even less lavish. No doubt, these pissed off citizens don’t know that Trump literally defecates in gold-plated toilets. They couldn’t see that he’s the great-great grandson of the charlatan who sold their great-great grandfathers that snake oil.

Trey Lott and the lobbyists, on the other hand, will do right well as deficits rise like volcanoes, necessitating drastic cuts in non-military spending in subsequent years. The real irony, though, is that after the election, it’s not Republican Party that is, to quote Matthew Yglesias, “a smoldering heap,” but the Democratic Party instead.

Although Abe Lincoln’s famous statement, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” might very well be true, it’s also true that you can “fool a whole lot of people a lot of the time — over and over again.”

Literary Prototypes for Trump

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joker

I’ve been rummaging through the dusty book-lined, cobweb-covered garret of my mind trying to find the literary character who most resembles Donald J Trump.

First, we need someone who is not particularly articulate.  Sure, Trump is quick-witted, capable of an occasional laser-guided zinger, but no one would ever mistake him for Macbeth (though the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor does share with the Emperor of Orange a lack of restraint and total unfitness for office).  What Angus said of Macbeth, Lindsey Graham could say of Trump, “Now does he feel his title/ Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief.” However, no way does Trump possess the depth and eloquence to mutter, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more.”  When Macbeth is out for revenge, he says, “I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”  Instead, with Trump we get, “If I win-I am going to instruct my AG to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation bc there’s never been anything like your lies.”

There’s perhaps a closer cousin to be found in Dickens, but the sad truth of the matter is that my moth-ridden mind only houses three volumes — Great Expectations, The Tale of Two Cities, and Hard Times — and I can’t think of anyone from those tomes who really reminds me of the Donald – though when it comes to holding grudges, Mr. Trump could give Mrs. Havisham a run for her pound sterling.

The best I can come up with his Michael Henchard from Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.

the-mayor-of-casterbridge

Henchard, in the likely case you haven’t read the novel, gets drunk and sells his wife and daughter to a sailor, awakens the next day, suffers remorse (a very un-Trumpian emotion), swears off hooch, builds a thriving business, goes into politics, and is elected mayor of Casterbridge.

Here’s Wikipedia’s patched together character analysis:

Henchard has a very impulsive temperament, although he also has a tendency to depression. He tends to take a sudden liking, or a sudden dislike, to other people and can be verbally aggressive even when sober. Henchard is respected in Casterbridge, having built up a strong business almost from nothing, but he is not well liked, and when he drinks, he can be abusive. Indeed, one of the reasons he does so well in business is because, after he sells his wife and child, he swears an oath not to touch alcohol for twenty-one years. When he decides Farfrae [a former business partner] is his enemy, he wages an economic war that, at first, is extremely one-sided. A risk-taker, Henchard eventually lets his personal grudge against Farfrae get in the way of his reasoning abilities. He takes too many risks, gambles too aggressively, and loses his credit, his business, and most of his fortune.

Nevertheless, although Henchard is exasperating, you somehow can identify with him.  You – or at least I – was terribly moved when I read Henchard’s last will and testament:

“That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.

“& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.

“& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.

“& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.

“& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.

“& that no flours be planted on my grave,

“& that no man remember me.

“To this I put my name.

MICHAEL HENCHARD

To cut to the chase, Trump lacks the stature to be tragic and is too dangerous and mean-spirited to be truly comic.  Perhaps if we’re looking for a literary doppelganger, we’re better off searching comic books.  In fact, with his outrageous hair, orange complexion, and out-sized ego, Trump would make a fairly cool Batman villain.  The terrifying thing, of course, is just how close this Joker has come to being elected President of the United States.

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