Of all the denunciations of Donald Trump, UD finds most eloquent Senator Susan Collins’ set of reflections on his cruelty.

UD likes in particular one phrase Collins uses — his constant stream of cruel comments — because it is rather poetic and also quite simple. It assumes – correctly – that Collins does not need to define cruelty; it takes for granted the fact that all of us recognize cruelty when it occurs – in speech, in action – because we are all vulnerable human beings who have ourselves, in the course of our lives, suffered cruelty. We know intimately, deeply, historically, how it feels to be the object of someone else’s cruelty. That feeling never goes away.

(We have all inflicted cruelty too, and, if we are decent people, our recognition of our capacity to be cruel in the way of Donald Trump provokes things like shame, apology, and reflection on why we behaved that way.)

There is indeed something obscenely, intimately knowing in the way Trump stimulates Americans – even feeds them – with his cruelty, and makes his cruelty theirs. Commentators talk about the “nihilism” of Trump’s tea party followers, but don’t people really mean their cruelty? Trump leads them into a thrillingly disinhibited realm of communal disgust, horror, and violence – SHOOT THE BITCH – and the reason people attach “nihilism” to this is that, when you actually examine it, there’s nothing there. Nothing political. (This explains why his followers don’t mind that Trump also is a political black hole.) What’s there is inchoate inner rage, exteriorized into pleasurable cruelty by a charismatic sadist. (Pleasurable vindictive cruelty, as when Eliza Doolittle, having hurt Henry Higgins very badly, says triumphantly Ive got a little of my own back, anyhow.)

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In his poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” William E. Stafford notices how easy it is for human beings to give up the struggle to understand one another:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the
world
and following the wrong god home we may miss
our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break …

That nihilistic shrug says I’ve tried to understand you – really understand you – but it’s too difficult or threatening or something so I’m going to betray you and my better self by letting the fragile human intercourse between us, our tentative conversations in the direction of mutual comprehension, break. I’m going to retreat to “a pattern that others made,” to regress to whatever my parochial upbringing might have been in regard to people outside my circle.

Cruelty, the root of cruelty, says the poet, is willful blindness to the vulnerability and complexity of the human beings around you. It’s the decision to shrug off the moral imperative to be careful what you do and say with vulnerable and complex people:

… I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something
shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should
consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the
dark.

This makes me think of Trump’s “Second Amendment people’ dog whistle the other day, his knowing what was occurring but deciding not to “recognize” it as it got transmitted to a fragile and complicated social world. He shrugged and “fooled” people rather than considering the darkness into which, with his careless words, he led them.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to
sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.