Last Tuesday evening my wife and I sat with friends, nauseated and appalled, as the catastrophe unfolded on TV. It is so easy to say in retrospect that everyone should have seen this coming. (Michael Moore, at least, called it accurately.) But that misses the enormity of this disastrous event. How, really, could the United States of America have elected a President who is so obviously unqualified and unworthy of that high office? George W. Bush was bad enough, but Trump? How could we have gone from Lincoln, the Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy, to this?
I could not help imagining a parody of the opening line of Kafka’s Metamorphosis: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that the President of the United States had been transformed into Donald Trump.”
But it is not so hard to understand if we take a big enough view. The United States of America is exhibiting many of the well-known clinical symptoms of a culture in decline. Grandeurs are succeeded by farce (as Marx put it), and farce segues seamlessly into tragedy. Aurelius is succeeded by Commodus, and sooner or later, mutant sheep graze in the ruins. One can enjoy the spectacle with detachment when it is merely in a history book, but when we are living through such a process it is, shall we say, rather frightening.
What comes next? Obviously, in detail, I cannot pretend to know. My guess (only a guess, since I’m not a clinician) is that Trump is mentally ill, and that this could end simply with Trump being taken away to a place where he is not allowed to handle sharp objects. Or he may burst an artery during some bacchanal. But for as long as he survives in office, we can expect Trump to distract his public with various grandiose gestures; it is probable, for instance, that he will indeed build some sort of wall or fence along the Mexican border, though I can’t see how he’ll conn or bully the Mexicans into paying for it. (Trump could surprise me about that point, though.) Behind the scenes, he and his cronies (and those they are beholden to) will systematically drain America of its resources, like a tapeworm in a man’s intestine. What a magnificent worm they will make, for a while. Many people hope that the world only has to put up with this for four years, but I am not so confident. There likely will still be an election in 2020, but by then the American electoral system may be so thoroughly co-opted and rigged that Trump or his successor could not possibly be defeated.
In the end, if this goes on, biophysics will trump Trumpian salesmanship. Fracked oil and gas will run out, the seas will keep rising, amped-up hurricanes and tornadoes will dance across the land, forests will burn, the agricultural heartlands of the country will either dry out or drown. I think it is quite possible that eventually the United States will Balkanize, break into pieces, much as Robert Heinlein imagined in his novel Friday. Some people in California are already talking of seceding. What will happen to my country, Canada? That is a topic for another post, but it can’t be good.
All of this is not necessarily inevitable. But railing against the injustice and stupidity of it all is not going to be good enough; what we have to do is patiently, persistently understand the mechanics of what is going on. Peter Sinclair (proprietor of one of my favourite blogs, Climate Denial Crock of the Week), has sagely observed that there is an unholy resonance between climate science denial and racism. It is no accident that Trump and many of his followers exhibit both of these destructive vices. The whole alt-right movement and many of the other reactionary movements (such as Brexit) that are springing up around the world are manifestations of angry denial—denial that their followers have to share this crowded planet with other people, denial that resources are running out, denial that they are being conned and robbed by the self-serving politicians and businessmen who pander to their anger and fear, denial that the future might not be brighter than the past, denial that they have to take advice from people with PhDs, denial of denial. When I was young and even more foolish than I am now, I would sometimes angrily knock over a chess board when it was clear that I was losing. Denial in its purest, stupidest form. I could not defeat my opponent’s logic, so I overturned the physical conditions that made the game possible. The cure? Grow the hell up, and then, if you still think it is worth your time to play chess, learn how to play it properly.
Of course, no one is compelled to play chess. But we don’t have much choice but to figure out how to live in this world without destroying it and ourselves in the process. Knocking the pieces off the board may produce a brief moment of satisfaction but it only makes the loss much worse because it guarantees that no recovery is possible.
We have to do what humans do best, which is figure out how to solve our problems. Despite everything I am optimistic by temperament, and I wish I could honestly say that someday the Trumpalypse will be just a bad memory. But in the next few years many innocent people will be hurt and much that is good will be destroyed because of Tuesday, November 8, 2016. A mistake of this magnitude should not have been allowed to happen.
Posted November 20, 2016