Years from now someone will write a book about how a self aggrandizing, unhinged, businessman with a long history of unmoored amorality comes to believe that the money isn't enough.
There will be a whirl of Gatsby-worthy parties, overflowing with men and women of hollow privilege. There will be overflowing, pristine, banquet tables with perfect crystal reflecting shimmering worlds of banal conversation.
We'll see how this man, familiar with the sanctuary halls of real power, came to believe that his wealth was an inadequate substitute for the exercise of the will. Seeking the penultimate recognition, the satiation of his id, he grasps for transformation. He is no failed painter, nor black-shirted Il Duce, but the rise of fascism in the middle years of the 20th is in the DNA of his aspiration.
In a society that has come to value celebrity and wealth as superior in all ways to science, discovery, and innovation he has gained some measure of celebrity. He discharges a catchphrase on TV which enters the vernacular in a way that supercharges his renown. Larger and larger than life, he becomes a cartoon characterization of what he has aspired to be. He has defined the meaning of an ALL CAPS name and it has been splattered across dozens of buildings. When seen in HD his image is replete with odd facial tics and self aggrandizing mannerisms. Only Mike Judge could have imagined the trademark hairstyle.
He has money and fame, and despite a crude narrative of a personal life, a new trophy adorns his arm, roughly in cadence to the presidential election cycle. Is it four years already?
He has nurtured a cult of personality. He has everything. And nothing. It's time for something else.
He starts out slowly, having weathered many storms, training his eyes on a far-off horizon is a familiar strategy. He repeats zero sum, zero sum, zero sum, like the mantra of a crazed gunman. He doesn't just want to win, he wants his opponent to feel the pain of losing. Like his experience in business he lights on one idea after another until something sticks. He lost a fortune trying to build things before he realized the unimaginable wealth that could be generated by building a brand and letting others take all the risk.
So this birther thing had been kicking around for a while. There was a new President with Kenyan ancestry. People were freaking out. Well, not all people, but there were a lot of whites being saturated with news reports about their shrinking portion of the electorate. They were freaked out. AND, there was a lot of economic uncertainty. Everyone was freaked out by the crash.
The challenge was coming up with a way to drain some of the ugliness and some of the cheapness out of that birther commentary. Luckily for this man, celebrity, though a mile wide is only an inch deep. He was going to have to sling some manure, specks of which would land on him, but people would move on quickly. Did you hear what Kanye said? Even mass shootings of six year olds didn't seem to last in anyone's memory. If he was cynical, it was more in ways that reflected a society than in ways that created some new benchmark.
Using the skills that made his catch phrase his celebrity identification he waded into the fields of media jackals and just repeated the words over and over and over and over and over. Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate. No one paid attention, but celebrity is a relentless bitch and no one looked away either. Establishment politicians condemned the obvious racism, but the country has a long history of tolerance for the most heinous acts. George Wallace should have delegitimized Nixon's Southern Strategy, but he actually created it.
Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate.
And then the birth certificate was produced. Embarrassed? No, lesson learned. More fame. More celebrity. A new catch phrase, but now in another arena, one where something real is traded. Not celebrity, well, at least something more than celebrity, POWER. He had launched a campaign to delegitimize a President based on a racist ideology and gained power.
Time to move on.
He rode down the escalator, his Slovenian wife following closely behind. Idi Amin had a chest full of medals. The Marcos' family had gold plated sanctuaries for their shoes. Mao had the Little Red Book of his sayings published in dozens of languages. He had the escalator of his tower which looked like nothing so much as another garish mall, in another faceless, nameless, upscale American City. Stores in West Palm, Short Hills, and Beverly Hills, places were wealth washes up on the curb and poor people only show up to clean.
Since then it has been a litany of the obscene. The media has focused, obsessively, on the Teflon nature of his campaign. Words that would've sunk normal candidates on a same day basis only seen to strengthen him. The extent of what can't be or is not said by the talking heads cannot be measured and may take decades to unwind. Their ratings, read greed, driven obsession with his boorish celebrity further catapulted what heretofore seemed so implausible. We ought to ask what happened, but in some little corner we try not think about it most of us know.
Fear sells. Love may be all we need, but fear, or rather an answer to it is what we really, really want.
Racism is not out of fashion, but it needed a facelift. Nixon cribbed Wallace. Reagan spoke of a shining city on the hill, but announced his campaign for the Presidency a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Civil Rights workers Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were killed by white supremacists and dumped into shallow graves. In his speech Reagan spoke of smaller government, cloaking his argument in the warm blanket of State's Rights. George Bush Sr. showed us grainy footage of Willie Horton walking out of prison, and Little George and his little troll, Rasputin Rove, conceived of a campaign built on statewide ballot initiatives against gay marriage.
What we've heard since summer is hardly new. Mobilizing bias has been an effective method for cobbling together voting coalitions. What is a little new is the shameless, unconscionable, nearly maniacal way the us against them bias has been promulgated. The candidate has repeatedly admitted in interviews that he throws the red meat of building a wall or banning Muslims to the crowd whenever he senses passiveness. His candidacy is not a Teflon phenomenon, it is a black hole. It subsumes light in a way that makes you doubt the existence of it, or the value of lessons learned. The words spoken are neither moral or immoral. He has not put enough thought into them to achieve that level of daunting analysis. The goal of having spoken them is only the accumulation of power and the engine is the mobilization of fear. Instead of birth certificate, Muslims, Mexicans, illegals, immigrants, women, blacks.
In Orwellian fashion he speaks of uniting people, but the coalition he seeks is white, dazzling, day after two feet of February snow, white. Skin color may be the unifying power that draws voters into his coalition, but more is required. His voters must be willing to suspend connections to logic. You've got to believe that all evidence to the contrary, the Bible is his favorite book, and then even when you know he's lying to you, even when you know that he's shamelessly manipulating you and your biases, you have to say it doesn't matter. It's a symbiotic relationship not dissimilar to going to a theatre. You know the ax isn't real, and the blood is made with food coloring, but something primal is released when you scream, and you need that.
This started off about him, and his neurotic hunger for legitimacy and acceptance, but it has turned out to be about us. The awful power that was unleashed at Nuremberg rallies from 1923 to 1938 wasn't the charisma of the hateful little Austrian. It was the millions of people who screamed for revenge, a national cleansing of their dishonor.
Time will tell if his story becomes our story. There is much fear in the land, and Americans despite the optimism of our history and our founding documents is more comfortable with mean than we'll ever admit. Then there's the anger. The mother fuckers that created the disastrous collapse of 2007 and 2008 are still running their firms, richer, and fatter and happier than ever. Meanwhile millions have lost their homes, while millions more on the edge of retirement went back to work at McDonalds or Wal-Mart, the years of quiet they envisioned decimated by the greed of others. The homes they hoped to sell for smaller places near sunny beaches devalued by grifters.
I don't know how it ends. I remain hopeful, all evidence to the contrary optimistic even, but I just don't know.
