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WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THE GRAND OLD PARTY HAD SO MUCH BLOOD IN IT?



To paraphrase Lady Macbeth.
American political rhetoric on the right is gushing blood.  Katie Britt’s excited smile when she described the country as “steeped in the blood of patriots” has weirded out lots of commentators, as has candidate Trump’s recent enthusiastic prediction, at a rally, that if he loses, “there’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”   
Trump is always going on about blood – not, like Britt, that of patriots, but of the streets.

Yet who would have thought the Grand Old Party had so much blood in it?  Republican red flows literally now; the MAGA GOP is the party of plasma, with vampirish Trump vamping about the crimson hellscape the USA already is, and certainly will be, should he fall short of victory.  
Politicians almost always invoke blood in the context of fallen patriots, although in MAGA world, as in the case of Britt, there’s often a heavy blood of the lamb overlay.  Britt and much of her Evangelical audience is used to singing lyrics like these every Sunday:


There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.

Evangelical music directors draw on a … flood of this redeeming gore in their programming, and no one in church says boo about it.  
But Trump’s arterial oratory is something else again.  His audiences are perfectly prepared to hear God and country, and even Revelation/Armageddon, in his thundering; but some seem taken aback by the angry sense of meaninglessness coursing through his veins.  They’re not being washed in Trump’s bloodiness; they’re choking to death on it.  


***********************


In fact they are watching, in real time, as a lifelong nihilist reckons with old age and death, not to mention likely electoral defeat, and it ain’t pretty.  And it certainly ain’t religious.
Trump’s evangelicals long ago made their peace with his stark godlessness; he represents their flawed but elected transformer of the Supreme Court and other heathen elements.   What they hadn’t reckoned with is what people like Donald Trump – see Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism – turn into toward the end.  
One of my acquaintances – a high-profile architect/artist – told me on his deathbed that he was convinced the world was coming to an end along with him.  He took bitter pleasure in the thought that if he had to endure the insult of death, at least all other living beings did too, in one big wipeout.  Trump’s delectation of the bloody death of America is exactly this cold comfort – if he has to go, he’s going to take everything down with him.  Death is for losers.
As is age and debility.  Already he paints himself, an aging coquette, like Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice”; already he insists his aphasic moments are intentional satire.  But no cover story, no makeup, can hide his predicament:  He is a human being like the rest of us, which means he gets the same tragic life we do.  Most of us grapple with that – philosophically, spiritually – in an effort to come to terms with it.  But people like Trump do not do this, and his audiences have the dubious privilege of observing his gaping existential wound as he is forced to glimpse the reality of the end of life.
At its best, nihilism produces Samuel Beckett.  It produces Charles Baudelaire (‘Nothing in nature now remains unblooded. / I used to hope that wine could bring me ease, /  Could lull asleep my deeply gnawing mind. / I was a fool: the senses clear with wine. / I looked to Love to cure my old disease. / Love led me to a thicket of IVs / Where bristling needles thirsted for each vein.’); it produces Sylvia Plath (‘The world is blood-hot and personal / Dawn says, with its blood-flush.’).  At its worst, in the current Republican presidential candidate, it brings to mind the earth-killing fantasies of Trump’s predecessor, the French reactionary Joseph De Maistre: “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things … until the death of death.”

Margaret Soltan, March 24, 2024 10:24AM
Posted in: ADA DOOM

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