Reflections On The End of The American Era
The First Lady.— I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be the kind of person who would be interested in watching a documentary about Melania Trump — or “Sweet pea,” as her friend Ghislaine Maxwell affectionately called her, though this cute friendship, I suspect, is not mentioned in the documentary. Unaccomplished, vain, apolitical, amoral, a non-entity who, like everyone who has chosen to live compliantly or complicitly in the grotesque orbit of Donald Trump (not to mention of Ms. Maxwell and her well-known paramour, aka Trump’s longtime best friend), has branded herself inconsequential and vacuous (at best) by so choosing — or consequential only in that she was willing to do for Trump literally what most of the rest of his profiteering toadies have, one assumes, only offered metaphorically.
What are you giving up for Lent?— Watching the MAGA minions squirm, deliquesce, and drain themselves awkwardly into the murky gutters of their own being in a laughable attempt to evade the largest elephant in the history of rooms, regarding the god to which they have sold their minds and lives for an entire decade, is a temptation to the guilty pleasure of schadenfreude almost equal to anything Satan offered to Jesus during His forty days in the wilderness. God, during this holy season of Lent, please grant me the strength of the Messiah to resist the terrible temptation to revel in the pathetic efforts of millions of people who, having set fire to their once-great country out of sheer cowardice and moral surrender, now crawl into the cracks to hide from the inevitable reckoning that is coming to them.
High and Low.— During Trump’s first term, when he demanded that his millions of followers jump for him, they all shouted in enthusiastic unison, “How high?” During his second term, the conditions and expectations have changed, as all the old excuses and obfuscations have fallen away. Now, he demands that they slither and skulk for him, and they, in increasingly shamefaced and uncomfortable unison, squeak, “How low?” Meanwhile we, the unbelievers, who used to gape in wonder at how high they were willing to jump on command, now squint in disgust at the sight of how low they are indeed willing to slither. Unlike their master, who is pure id and therefore without a conscience, they, the obedient millions, have egos that must be fed an ever more extreme diet of rationalizations for their compromises and willful blindnesses. In every man who has sold his soul to a corrupt regime — the alcoholic, the drug addict, the promiscuous pleasure-seeker, the idolater and cult member — the ego is the great barrier to salvation. For with each passing day, it becomes more painful to face up to the years one has all too publicly declared one’s support for madness and folly, and thereby to face up to the public embarrassment of what you have believed, said, and done. With each passing day, then, the inclination to deny the obvious about oneself and one’s choices grows stronger. Saving face gradually becomes the main mission, the whole point. The rhetoric in support of one’s choices becomes more desperate and lame, the hatred for critics and unbelievers noisier and more violent.
The United States of America recently observed a holiday they now generically call Presidents’ Day, although it was originally instituted as Washington’s Birthday, back when the country still believed in the meaning of its founding, and specifically in the world-historical principles of representative republicanism and limited government. George Washington believed in the idea of America, which he personally risked his life and security to promote and defend at the nation’s most vulnerable moment, against the most existential of all threats. One need only compare what one used to think of President Barack Obama dwarfed under the long shadow of Washington, to what one now thinks of Obama next to the bleak image of the two-bit peddler man currently vulgarizing the Oval Office, to see how far a nation can fall, and how, after hanging on so bravely for so long, the final stages of the descent can accelerate so startlingly.
I recently paid a visit to the United Nations cemetery in Busan, Korea. It was peaceful and thought-provoking to see the graves of soldiers from many nations, including my native Canada, who died here between 1950 and 1953, fighting to resist the advance of totalitarianism in this distant land. It was understood in those days that in our modern age there is nowhere to hide from technological tyranny, and therefore vigilance and mutual support against the behemoths is absolutely a matter of national security for every country hoping to maintain its own freedom. By chance, we arrived at the tastefully maintained cemetery at 4pm, at which time the flags are ceremonially lowered each day accompanied by a lone horn over the loudspeakers, the only amplified sound allowed to interrupt the serenity of the place. Some distance in front of us, an older Korean man, visiting with his wife, stopped in his place on the walking path and, removing his cap and facing the wide swath of headstones, held his hand over his heart until the horn finished its tune. Upon reflection, I cannot help wondering, given that the Republican Party had been the main repository of old-fashioned patriotism in recent generations, and considering how that party has now been utterly overrun with national-populist and isolationist-conspiratorial disdain for the rest of the world, how many Americans will be left alive in ten years who would be capable of remembering, let alone giving a damn about, the days when the rest of the world used to look at America with hope, admiration, and gratitude — not the kind of “gratitude” that the mobster-grifter Donald Trump and his lackeys continually demand, but the kind that used to be earned by America’s exhibition of virtue, leadership, principle, and decency, and was paid for in good faith alliance and respect, rather than in cash gifts and performative ring-kissing for a performative king.
