Since the moment when first Like a rocket you burst In our hitherto tranquil skies, We’ve been startled to find You are firmly aligned With evil and treason and lies. Therefore please do not take me to task If the following favor I ask:
Allez-vous-en, allez-vous-en, monsieur, Allez-vous-en, go away. Allez-vous-en, allez-vous-en, monsieur, I have no time for you today. Do be a dear, just disappear, monsieur, Bid me goodbye, do, do, do. Allez-vous-en, please go away, monsieur, We all are disgusted with you.
Thousands of people are dying every day now from the pandemic. What is Donald doing? He’s giving rallies with people crammed in together, not wearing masks. It’s almost like Donald is saying, “See. Fuck you. You rejected me. Fine, I’m going to kill all of you.” What is weird is that he is killing his own supporters. It is almost a type of performative omnipotence.
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I’ve already, on this blog, cited Ubu the King, Trump’s closest precursor, who announces that as monarch his aim is to make his fortune, after which “I’ll kill everybody and go away.”
Where’s my state? Raffensperger where’s my state? Love me: Georgia was supposed to love me.
[Chorus: You’ve been nuts you’ve been mean And gettin’ fatter all the time We put up with you for much too long We have put up with selfish
And all your screaming too You’re always thinking of you All you can do is rant and rave Now we’re telling you it’s all over]
And I am telling you I’m not going
I’m staying I’m staying AND YOU’RE GONNA FIND MY VOTES
ARIA
The people of Georgia are angry The people in the country are angry.
And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um That you’ve recalculated.
So look. All I want to do is this.
I just want to find 11,780 votes
One more than we have!
Because we won the state.
There’s no way I lost Georgia.
There’s no way.
We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.
And I am telling you I ain’t leaving!
Look what you’ve done to the president —
Look what you’ve done to the president
People hate what you did to the president.
So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do?
We won the election, and it’s not fair And I am telling you I’m not going I’m the best man I’ll ever know There’s no way I can ever go No, no, there’s no way No, no, no, no way I’m leaving the White House I wanna be president I don’t wanna be free I’m staying, I’m staying And you, and you You’re all gonna love me
And I am telling you I’m not going Even though the rough times are showing There’s just no way, there’s no way
You can cut the condescension. I’m not going anywhere near Mar-A-Lago. I’m moving to Molena, Georgia, a convenient drive away from Jimmy Carter, with whom I plan to build Habitat for Humanity houses; and the location of Sahaj Marg Ashram, where I will live.
Meditation, Cleaning (“imagining the day’s accumulated impressions [going] out one’s back and being replaced with divine light”), and Prayer will occupy my days when I am not working with Jimmy.
A duly constituted state of these United States appoints to a position of responsibility for health-related measures during a pandemic a person who dismisses what he calls “the so-called pandemic” as a vast communist plot AND IF ANYONE AGREES TO BE VACCINATED FOR SO-CALLED COVID THEIR DNA WILL BE REPROGRAMMED TO MAKE THEM A ROBOT OF THEIR CHINESE AND RUSSIAN MASTERS.
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Is Igor Shepherd a doctor? No evidence of that online. He says he picked up something he’s calling a medical degree during his young dark evil days in the Russki military but did anyone in Wyoming check on that? Did anyone in Wyoming check on whether Igor is insane?
Igor is Donald Trump’s Little Edie Beale, a strumpette on the psycho circuit who barks about global conspiracies to debrain your immune system. And someone in our sickest state (in 2016: second highest suicide rate; first in gun deaths; worst traffic fatality rate; highest divorce rate) decided to appoint Igor to an important covid-related committee. They decided to put Typhoid Mary in charge of typhoid-relief activities.
Wyoming has hurriedly shoved Igor under the buffalo chips and won’t talk about it. The End.
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Which makes Igor a very small story amid the much larger story of Big Edie, currently spraying territorial urine all over the faces of our Supreme Court Justices.
But UD thinks Little Edie is a sort of wedge into the Big Edie story. UD thinks the restless mental emptiness of America’s wide open spaces, the rageful giveashittery of portions of our hinterlands, takes you in one of two directions, both utterly captured by Trump. One we know from the Sybil, via TS Eliot’s epigraph to The Waste Land: apothanein thelo. I want to die. Suicide, guns, alcohol amid snowdrifts late at night, helmetless motorcycling… There’s no easier place to off yourself than the heart of the heart of Trump country, and they like it that way because quite a few of them want to die. Donald Trump’s maskless droplets-languishing is fuck yeah.
The other direction? Instead of killing yourself, you kill other people. Like Wyoming’s Igor, you’re a rock-hard paranoid who knows that sooner or later the communists led by Kamala Harris (Trump: “She’s a monster.”) are going to attach your negative posilator to your positive negalator and deactivate your synaptic narcoscopies and all hell will break loose. Get them before they get you.
America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. No number from Trump’s years in power will be more lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens of millions of people. Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the atmosphere like radioactive dust…
[His lies] belonged to the postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that fact, but reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private life, clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air, dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the public...
Trump spoke them openly, not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but intentionally, even systematically, in order to demolish the norms that would otherwise have constrained his power...
Trump’s purpose [was] to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy...
Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists…
He leaves behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends…
The election didn’t end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump.
As Trump mentally deteriorates, this 1999 article prepares us for what to expect. For Trump, it’s pardons; for John Paul II it was blessings.
“We are, of course, very concerned for His Holiness’ mental condition,” said chief papal physician Giuseppe Clementi, standing by the pope’s bedside, surrounded by dozens of newly consecrated pill bottles, urine-specimen cups and orthopedic slippers. “Pretty much anything you hold up in front of his face these days, he blesses.” [At an airport recently,] the pope broke free of his handlers and blessed a luggage cart, a podium, a Life photographer’s camera, the plane’s left-side landing gear, three TWA flight attendants, and two of the Swiss Guard who were attempting to release his grip on the landing struts and subdue him. Upon realizing that he was being physically restrained, the pope worked his papal-signet-ring-bearing right hand free and blessed the entire aircraft, which now resides in its own special five-story grotto under St. Peter’s Basilica.
The pope’s blessing rampage also necessitated the construction of a 40,000-square-foot reliquary for the storage of thousands of now-holy items. Housed in the structure are such hallowed objects as the Blessed Vacuum Cleaner Of St. Matthew, the Consecrated Ball Of Crumpled-Up Paper, and the Sacred Zagnut Bar Of Christ, which the pope discovered and blessed during his recent U.S. visit.
Along with handing out pardons to everyone he encounters, Trump can be expected to offer to grab the pussy of any woman he meets, and to ask random Americans if they will let him spray hydroxychloroquine into their ass.
Moody and by accounts of his advisers sometimes depressed, the president barely shows up to work… “If there are these analogies between classic literature and society as it’s operating right now, then that should give us some big cause for concern this December,” said [a literature] scholar. “We’re approaching the end of the play here and that’s where catastrophe always comes.”
Okay, so what’s the catastrophe? Certainly we’ve all allowed ourselves to think of geopolitical disaster as a paranoid depressive conjuring revenge pads about the White House … But – to alter one of George’s famous remarks to Martha – “In reality it usually works out that the nature of the calamity is more private.”
Which is to say, we’re back at UD‘s Trump-may-commit-suicide theory.
I mean, if you want to talk about Shakespeare as a Trump template, which the NYT writer does, suicide is all over the place, ain’t it? There’s a serious effort at suicide in Lear; Hamlet famously goes on and on about whether he should bother existing, and of course Ophelia does the deed; Lady Macbeth apparently offs herself. Ditto Othello…. Go here for the full, long, list. Why offer an analysis of the Last Days of Trump featuring Shakespearean tragedy and unnamed “catastrophe” and not go there? THE Shakespearean catastrophe is suicide.
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Yes, UD still puts the likelihood of Trump doing (or attempting) it at maybe ten percent.
But if he does do it, it will be – in line with his whole life as a showman – a lollapalooza.
Rumor has it he plans to “leave the White House on January 20 in Marine One, then take Air Force One to Florida, where he would address supporters at a rally timed to coincide with Biden’s socially distanced inauguration outside the US Capitol.“
At this rally, he will ascend a massive golden escalator — larger and more glittering than the one he descended on the day he announced his presidential run. As he gradually rises, flames will begin to shoot out from the sides of the moving stairway, and the crowd will go wild as screaming fireworks also appear. But instead of the national anthem they expect to hear, it’s… the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde?
And here at the very top of the escalator appears La Pasionaria, Trump’s true spiritual mate all along, Lara Trump, halo’d in gold. She sings:
He wanders, pale, sleepless, delusional, into a room, and performs a surrealistic piece that more and more people are calling, simply, “46 minutes.”
Soon the title of Trump’s unprecedented performance last Wednesday will shorten to 46, a nod to its obvious precursor, John Cage’s silent, genre-busting,4’33. Recall the shock, amusement, anger, discomfort, and fascination when, in a New York concert hall in 1952, a pianist walked onstage with a flourish, sat grandly at a grand piano, and for four minutes and thirty-three seconds proceeded to do absolutely nothing. In a grand room of the White House, Trump’s appearance – vacuous, arrogant, hallucinatory – generated similar emotions.
Yet because of its basically unendurable sickness, the president’s performance was above all ignored by almost every American media outlet. It appeared only on Facebook.
Susan Glasser argues that we avert our eyes at our peril.
… This might have been a holy-shit speech, but it came in the “yeah, whatever” phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency. The courts have thrown out his legal team’s cases. The battleground states have all certified their election results affirming Biden’s win. The Electoral College will meet on December 14th, and the outcome does not appear to be in doubt.
And yet there are nearly fifty days until Biden’s Inauguration. This is far, far beyond the craziness of the past four years. Is this the kind of speech from their leader that Americans should just ignore?
… [Not] a single Republican senator had a word to say about Trump’s insane remarks from the White House on Wednesday …
The presidency of Donald Trump is not mere performance art. In its degenerate stage it looks like Cage; it looks like Jarry. It looks like Mary Tyrone wandering in, pale, sleepless, and delusional at the end of Long Day’s Journey. But it is real. It is actually happening. A fourth Christ of Ypsilanti has entered Milton Rokeach’s hospital, this one with presidential powers.
