We have witnessed nothing less than the triumph of evil on a scale we never imagined.
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I wake in the morning curled up like a spider too near a flame — knee to chest, shoulders up, jaw muscles clenched, fingers in a fist, stuck in a “fight or flight” pattern, bordering on rictus, before the day has even begun — driven there by subconscious processes over which I have no control. Fear. Fury. Grief.
Some would call it Trump Derangement Syndrome, and I have no quarrel with that. I had it more or less under control until November 5. Since then, I have the full constellation of florid symptoms — mental, emotional, and physical.
We have witnessed nothing less than the triumph of evil on a scale we never imagined — or rather, one we might have imagined, and even predicted, but somewhere deep down believed would never come to pass. Now we’re immured in it.
Every day brings a fresh gust of the stench. And every day a new can of Febreze, as The New York Times or CNN or John Fetterman or Richard Blumenthal or James Clyburn, or a host of other “realistic” pols and substackers, rush to sanewash the latest insanity.
So Donald Trump — a monster who should be shriveled to his tiny, rotten, empty core, roasting like a chestnut over an open fire for the evil he has already done and harm he has already caused — is strutting and preening and thrusting his chest and chin out past the Mussolini line, scheming how to do yet more, far more, while his once-scathing critics make the calculated pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and get in line to bend their knee and kiss the ring.
The spectacle of all this, in and of itself, is revolting. His appointments are (one suspects deliberately) alarming. The writing on the wall is terrifying. The grand triumph of evil goes against everything I’ve ever been taught to believe.
Trump should be happier than a pig in shit. But no one with a black hole at their center is ever satiated, so he casts his eye on the Lebensraum of Greenland, Mexico, and Canada — for all the world like Adolf Hitler casting his on the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and Vladimir Putin his on Ukraine.
What a waste Greenland is — all that ice! Breaks your heart! But I hear it’s melting fast, which will make room for some casinos, golf courses, highrises… and did somebody say oil?
CNN lost no time in getting with the program. Their headline and teaser, a masterpiece of sanewashing cum cheerleading for Herr Kunst des Deal:
Trump teases US expansion
The president-elect has suggested a territorial extension into Panama, Greenland, and Canada. If he’s serious, it would rival the Louisiana Purchase.
Sounds good! The only question is, do we actually buy Greenland (gonna have to raise that debt ceiling!) or do we just go in and annex it? Probably the latter, because I hear it’s not for sale — nor apparently are Panama and Canada. Though Trump is rarely happy unless he can “overpay” for a property — you know, for the tax write-off.
But really, where is it written that the world has to stay the same? Perhaps the global order, never quite perfected, has outlived its utility and it’s time for another world war, or a new empire, or, heck, a trip back to the world of Beowulf and the Dorian invasions — with nuclear! Stability and territorial integrity are surely overrated and what’s the point of amassing all this power if you can’t even take it out for a spin?
Maybe Trump is here not as a uniquely damaged soul spewing the pus of his disease onto the world stage but as the incidental vehicle of inevitable change, a mindless avatar of entropy, a force of nature itself, the instrument of some vast dialectic of destruction and renewal.
Of course I don’t believe a word of that. But for a few slender margins in a few states in an election I continue to regard (pending more complete forensic analysis) as dubious, Trump would be caned off that world stage and very likely on his way to jail.
He is here, fucking us up, because, one way or another, he beat democracy at its own game. And I’m sorry but I just don’t see democracy punching back — not with the electoral and political processes now in place; not with faith-based computerized vote-counting, fulminant voter suppression schemes, unlimited dark and Musk money, free-flowing disinformation, a failing educational system, the triumph of social media, the ascent of artificial intelligence, a broken opposition, and the sane tuning out in droves.
If the sane could not win this election — with Trump proudly displaying the full, lurid spectrum of his evil for all to see — why in god’s name would we expect them to win the next, or the one after?
I suppose, intellectually regarded, one might hope for some sort of buyer’s remorse to set in, for Trump to fail beyond his superhuman abilities to deflect blame and escape. But that is not what my gut tells me — nor whatever subconscious mechanism leaves me curled up with fists clenched by the dawn’s early light.
And, pacifist though I am, I may haul off and sock the next person who tells me, generally without providing much in the way of reason, that I must not lose hope.
You either hope or you don’t hope — there’s no “must” about it; it’s not something you can will into being.
Hope would feel like Inigo Montoya, of Princess Bride fame, who spent his life learning to fence — indeed becoming the world’s greatest fencer — and searching for the six-fingered swordsman who, when Inigo was a boy, murdered his father, so that one day he could go up to the bastard and say “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
I am searching for my inner Inigo, and that search is a daily struggle, though I guess maybe in the search itself there’s still some residue of hope.
‘Tis the season, and the Christmas songs are inescapable — fa la la la la, pa rum pum pum pum. What are all these songs about if not hope? And redemption through suffering. Specifically Christ’s suffering. The songs are good songs, beautiful, and hard to resist. The tears roll down my cheeks — and roll again. But I don’t understand.
I’m no religious scholar but at best it seems that humanity pays for its redemptions with its own suffering, and that an awful lot of suffering is without redemption.
I wonder whether this is what Christ was first realizing when, dying on the cross, he cried “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Why else would Jesus — human but also one with God (at least in the trinitarian conception) — address God so, as a separate being? If it was all ordained, part of the plan, why would he feel “forsaken”?
I didn’t understand this in my 10th grade comparative religions class, and I kept asking about it, insisting on some answer that made sense, until my exasperated teacher blew up at me and dismissed the class. I’m not sure I understand it now. But I think Jesus spoke these words as a human first grasping that humanity itself was forsaken, that his mission and death were in vain.
His question was rhetorical — he did not expect an answer. It was a cry of hope lost. It was valid then and is valid in this moment, not to be scorned.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
— Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
