§ ♣ 11-9-16, The Day After Election Day

Donald Trump is president of the United States today. While for winners most elections offer hope and celebration, they are seldom cause for worse response than pique from those who lose. The case of Trump is outside the norm however. Republicans seem elated with their triumph here and there and yet the choice of Trump is fraught with apprehension and dismay by a multitude on either side of the aisle.

After all, Trump’s a very temperamental man with narcissistic tendencies and irrepressible egocentric urges, boasting no obvious moral guide, no discernable code of ethics, no resolve that manifests remotely like principles which intrude on his little bag of tricks. He’s got no clear and cogent political philosophy and airs little savvy, little character, little grace, little restraint, little grasp of the chair to which he accedes.

Trump’s a veritable wild card. He’s totally unpredictable. He’s just as prone to fiendishness as good, just as predisposed to harm as help, just as apt to break things as make reparation. It’s been said Trump’s a bull who packs his own china shop given our new leader’s weird knack for self-sabotage. He’s his own worst enemy. I worry, is he ours?

On that score, it seems about fifty percent of the US voting public yesterday threw all caution to the wind, thwarted principle, shunned fine American values and frightfully, impetuously, undermined the dignity and integrity of a nation by electing Donald Trump, key dignity and integrity which, not unlike freedom put wrong, we’ll be hard-pressed to ever put right again.

In an arbitrary bid to put any low, two-bit authoritarian punk in our command just as long as that goon guaranteed to be their own goon and even though the greatness of our venerable democracy languish, Trump’s people  took a giant leap of chance. They jeopardized the safety and security of a nation, this warm, brilliant, awe-inspiring  lodestar of liberty, font of hope for social justice and equality, America and for what, another empty vow of broad political change, a vow purported to be kept but if needed, kept only under the volatile and vitriolic agency of lies, slander, racism, hatred and division?

Donald Trump has shown the world exactly who he is by his impudent behavior of the last eighteen months or so. Nonetheless, the American working middle class has brought to highest office this demonstrably cold, brash, ignorant old codger, this cheap cad of faint and dubious principles, this scoundrel of excruciatingly weak moral fiber.

Trump fans have compromised the Oval with a boldfaced slanderer, philanderer, panderer to racists and to bigots, loyal partner to misogynists and xenophobes, shameless source of transparent lies, ad hominem, conspiracy theories, sophistry and mud-slinging rhetoric.

They’ve designated undisputed leader of the free world a great preening narcissist, a raging western chauvinist, inveterate snob, bloating braggart, arch authoritarian, a dogma-drooling demagogue, divisive rabble-rouser, a devout fear-monger, hater-elite and contemptuous advocate for the deeply personal, supra-professional savaging of friend, enemy, rival and detractor alike, brutal predator, great white breast-thumping stalker of the frail, ubiquitous, ever-amenable doe-eyed scapegoat.

Where is honor? Where is reason? Where is insight? Where is any odd feature that resembles common sense? Where’s our erstwhile loyalty to righteousness and truth? Where’s our vanishing respect what’s noble, just, refined? Are there any of these disappearing virtues worth having, worth reviving, reinstating, reclaiming in this frivolous new epoch of disposable resolve?

Are they all just the outmoded, cornball, silly putty values of a pencil-necked geek like me and all the other neuro-typical mediocrities abroad. Are we nuts to want abstracted  things like safety and security, like truth, justice, freedom and equality? Are we mad to want the glue of strong conviction that can hold these wisps together, lend them worth, show them love, keep them alive?

Truth, virtue, freedom, justice, conscience, nobility. All of these originate in nebulous array. In the mind all are mute, sheer, remote, intangible. Are any less essential for their stealth? Are the fruits of the amorphous just words, meager terms with which we designate or broach the unreal or do they constitute prototypes we scrutinize, understand, flesh out, fabricate, refine and protect. Humans entertain the most ingenious thoughts, then convert them into mighty institutions. We appreciate glorious ideas and their progeny. We know too that none are etched in stone.

They’re hazy things we render concrete, mere thoughts wrought tangible, 3D, real, extant by the miracle of human ingenuity. They’re hooey come to life, the fondest hopes, wishes, dreams and falderal with which we plot and undertake our most fabulous structures, our most intricate machinery, our government, our businesses, economy, technology, our streamlined electronic marvels. They’re that with which we speak our language, plan our days, cook our meals, show our love and bear our true intentions. They’re that with which we guarantee human rights and social justice, that with which the genuine, the provident, the Un-Trump strive on regularly and arduously to govern.

I wonder, do the Trumpers understand ingenuity or the knack we share for making real the unreal, for breathing precious life into our most incredible thoughts, into our highest aspirations, transcendent ideals which for more than two centuries have elevated, strengthened and protected us, that mystical and quintessential fusion of thought, faith, action, resolution and pragmatism curiously catalyzed by courage, poise, vision and integrity?

Thoughts, ideas, truths and ideals are born of mere fuzz within the boundaries of our quick and fertile brains. They demand an iron will to make them whole and keep them real. It’s ironic then that we whom somewhat dense and too pragmatic Donald Trump sees as dreamers, suckers, losers now urge that all these grand abstractions keep a place of permanence in our lives, be preserved, fostered, backed and guaranteed against the odds of being hijacked, garbled, co-opted or manipulated, claimed for use in power plays, partisanship or political gain, dragged around and chafed until they’re unfit for service.

So we cling to our ideals and aspirations, hopes and dreams of some locale where basic egalitarian principles can thrive, each reified and reinforced by our noblest institutions, first plans for which were spun in the potent mist of the human mind. We cleave to these crazy, idealistic things we can’t see or feel but think we might strive to make more real, might distill and then bequeath to our descendants and to theirs exponentially and on and anon. Are we dreamers? Are  we suckers? Are we losers? Donald Trump would tell the world we are and then chortle.

Yea, right, we freedom-lovers, helpless fools that we are, all agog in some stultifying fantasy world, expend our every waking hour in false hope, hauling along through hill and dale this ostentatious wishing well, stopping once in a while only to search our pockets, squint our eyes, chant impassioned supplications, toss our tiny silver coins aloft and clenching whitened fists await reprieve from some delusory social injustice or trumped up Republican imprudence?

Not quite but in the jaded minds of cynical conservatives we’ve done some other things considered equally absurd as on the other hand, Trump consumes his time in the service of practical things like honoring truth, uniting citizens, aiding American institutions, easing the plight of the marginalized and disinherited, buttressing all but the most adverse of democrats, news media, egalitarians, blacks, Latinos, women, those who tangle or disagree with him, those who buck lies and conspiracy theories and the huge contingent of lazy, shiftless losers who exist outside the insular realm of affluence.

We lovers of freedom believe in the special merits which tend to support and sustain democracy like honor, respect, commitment, grace and integrity. We believe in the priceless benefits of a government leaving no one behind. Such credences are based upon some pretty abstruse ideas but then ideas just as real and utterly viable as we choose to make them. Sad that Trump and our other detractors no longer make them so. Sadder they’ve given up and sold them out.

Do we freedom-lovers scheme and plot mischief in order to flout a broken system whereby no appeal to decency is heard? No, not us, though throngs took the streets in a licit, disconcerted grievance against our new commander’s injudicious win. The bulk of us, dogged by the dubious choice of  Trump, are quite distraught and disappointed midst the sobering realization that for four years we’re stuck with Donald Duck behind the wheel however we merely sigh a whimper of dissention and regret, fall to grief and as we loll about lamenting our egregious loss, dread the downright orgy of decadence to come.

Where’s America? Where’s that caring, generous land I thought I knew? Where’s the heart, the warmth, the usual compassion? Where’s the comity? Where’s the consummate benevolence ? Where’d they go? Where’s our long-established good will, our natural inclination toward the welcoming of strangers, that good old-fashioned Yankee hospitality at work once, carving out the legend of a nation? Are these weaknesses, the over-indulgence autocrats scorn? More likely they’re the strength, growth, humanity and empowerment only vigilant Americans employ. Where’d they go and where’s that even scarcer vigilant American? 

Have they perished, after all, under that contumelious overload of pre-conceived notions, rife suspicion, grave mistrust, rank prejudice and rabid indignation heating fast since the Great Immigration of the early Twentieth Century and finally boiling over now as Donald Trump stokes the furious flames underneath with stunts like slurring very publicly the bulk of Mexican immigrants this way: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

In his coy condemnation of a whole race of people, Donald Trump pretends he’s certain most Mexicans who move across our border bring illicit drugs and crime including rape but then makes as if he’s venturing some educated guess that just a few of these immigrants might be seen as good people. These are venomous hyperbole, legionnaire sophistry, tricks, intricate artifice and gimmickry. They’re sanguinary lies that just begin to scratch the surface of our president’s duplicitous speech and  behavior.      

So where’s American pride these days, our strong collective consciousness, our facile understanding of the things this country stands for, its values, standards, excellence, ideals, all the stuff of inspiration, of advancement and aplomb?

Am I dreaming right now? Has perception left me dry? Could it be that we have always been a cold, bigoted, avaricious, self-serving culture underneath, that we’ve never proven warm, close or caring, never gallant or refined, never genial, never virtuous, principled or kind. It’s hard to say. I don’t know. I only know I find it very hard to shake the nauseating sense that having put Trump in office some half of US voters might well have made a deal with the devil and I hope that if they’ve done so indeed, that grace is in the mixture and there won’t be hell to pay.

I can’t quell the agonizing vibe attesting fifty percent of the US voting public have relinquished all commitment to the sacred, founding, time-honored principles of democracy, human rights, freedom and justice, those impermeable makings for a paste that’s bound Americans together more than two rare, pioneering centuries and this in trade for hollow guarantee of some less elitist government from a disingenuous billionaire, himself an elite.    

No, I can’t help feeling some obscure cross-section of the country has surrendered our great American heritage to the echoes of cacophony arising from an empty little shell strewn idle on the beach. Such compromise happens at a staggering cost.

It’s disconcerting too that in the shadow of the bellicose Donald Trump campaign, a travesty that played to the very worst in human instinct, those many votes for Trump belied votes for xenophobia and misogyny just as much as for bigotry, racism and cruelty. Those votes for Trump were votes upholding lies, bullying, enmity, incivility, deep division and fierce violence which today imbue chaos, various hate crimes, sexual assault on women and random fits of grave instability, devastating wrong seldom seen in times of true and viable leadership .

Minority groups nationwide woke with dread today to harsh rekindlings of ire and resentment, to jitters of unrest, of confusion and uncertainty. Their dawn brought injustice, condescension, hostility, trepidation and a vast, new loathing for unnecessary scrutiny. For them the break of morning brought attacks both verbal and physical in the land of human rights, in the land where every human being is guaranteed asylum and safety, where all are pledged acceptance, opportunity and peace of mind, all promised life, freedom, happiness, equality, a land in which minorities were well upon the road to gaining miniscule fragments of this yet elusive covenant when trouble-making Donald Trump so rudely interrupted.

Does Trump glean this little slice of irony? Is Trump himself the little slice of irony at hand? Isn’t Donald Trump himself the very un-American cause of all this sad ironic strife, all this cheap, nasty, hate-filled, undue fray not heretofore given rise by any late president?

What a sad pass is this. What a fall from grace to play upon the world stage, untoward tribute to our imminent decline, stern witness to the rupture of a great civilization, grim accounting which only that high-minded voter might witness, acknowledge and abhor.

What’s done is done. We have a new president. We ought to try and bond behind our newly named leader and with fairness as a free, just and pluralistic culture, back The Donald when he’s right, duly buck him when he’s wrong and where necessary hold the man accountable in fond hopes that some small vestige of true American values may survive the next four to eight years. In the meantime, buckle up, hold tight and get yourselves pumped for a long and bumpy ride.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com