Wake Me When It's Over

 Like millions of other Americans, I cannot get Donald Trump out of my brain. Not this weekend, at any rate. I sit down with family. We chat. We watch a show. As soon as it is paused, my look glazes over. My consciousness is instantly invaded once more by the man in the White House. I am wracked over again with loathing. Every second I do not keep up the stream of intentional distraction—the instant I turn off the spigot—the orange goblin comes stomping back in. What's going to happen on Tuesday? I think. What tricks is he going to pull? I am like Brecht in his incongruous California exile, wishing he could write of trees, but finding instead that his mind is full at every turn of "horror at the housepainter's speeches." (Kuhn/Constantine trans.)

All of this is made much worse, of course, by the fact that I know I ought to be thinking about nothing else. A society with two hundred plus years of democratic elections and peaceful transfers of power experiencing one of its most perilous, hair-raising moments—what exactly should a citizen be thinking about every second of the day, a few days before an election, apart from this? Thus, this particular obsession and rumination is harder to dismiss than the average debilitating panic. One cannot so easily write it off as unhealthy. It might very well be unhealthy: indeed, I'm sure it is. But it seems nonetheless obligatory. 

Lost Leader II

And so it appears that just as the Trump administration may be grinding at last to its operatic conclusion, the eerily parallel trajectory of Glenn Greenwald is experiencing its own Götterdämerung. Greenwald has now completed his transformation—begun during the Trump candidacy four years ago—from crusading civil liberties advocate into craven mouthpiece for Trump and Putin's propaganda. 

We watched him appear as a regular guest on Tucker Carlson. We saw him cited with approval by Russian state-owned media. It made our stomachs turn. We didn't want to believe it. Was this really the man who broke the Edward Snowden story? 

The Whole Animal

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I'm not one to always personally seek out the latest Ross Douthat column, but a friend yesterday put one directly in my path in a way that proved unavoidable. In this piece, Douthat explains his reasoning behind why he has decided (thank God) not to vote for Trump in 2020, but he wrestles as he does so (in a joking way) with the voice of what he calls his "right-wing id," which tries and ultimately fails to convince him that Trump's administration has fulfilled many of Douthat's own policy aspirations. 

There is much I disagree with in the piece, per usual. As thoroughly critical of Trump as Douthat is in this column, I still think he manages to significantly understate the threat the man poses to democracy and the rule of law, particularly if he were to serve a second term. There are also places where Douthat flirts with a kind of moral equivalence-hunting that is tiresome. It's no longer a sign of moral independence, amidst the mountain of Trump's criminality, to make a point of saying that the media should also devote some attention to Hunter Biden. No, the media should not. 

When Crimes Pile Up...

I had driven down to Florida to see my parents only a few short weeks ago, and now was making my way back to my home in Massachusetts. In the time between these two multi-day road trips, however, my attitude toward how best to make use of the time behind the wheel had done a complete 180. On the drive down, in mid-September, I had been desperate to avoid thinking about anything related to the election, if I could possibly avoid it. We had two months still to go, and if I could have put myself into a deep space-style cryo-sleep, the way they presumably will for future trips to Mars, I would gladly have done so. "Wake me when it's over!" was my philosophy. 

Now, we had less than two full weeks left, and it felt as if the grains of precious time were slipping through my fingers. A few days from now, either the curse might be lifted at last, or an even longer and darker night would settle over America. Either way, it was plainly my patriotic duty to understand the moment of history we were passing through fully while it lasted—whether that was for the sake of chronicling for posterity an episode of temporary madness our country had endured (a "parenthesis" in history as some optimistic intellectuals later wished to dub Europe's fascist period after the war had ended)—or in order to say I did not walk into the new even more hideous era with my eyes shut. 

Conformists

Time and again over the past four years—weekly, daily, it seems—we have watched as the president said or did something vile, obscene, offensive, scandalous, vicious, cruel, and altogether odious. And then we have headed over to FiveThirtyEight to check the man's approval rating. And, once again, we see it hover at a steady, immovable, 40% of the population. Who are these loyal foot soldiers? we ask. What could possibly undergird such stubborn apathy? 

What makes it all particularly strange is that Trump's brand of awfulness takes such myriad forms. If it were as simple a matter as only offending one value system, or of always attacking the same stigmatized groups, then the craven partisanship that some people feel toward him would be easier to explain. But in the course of his time in office, Trump has separately transgressed the ethical framework of every constituency one might expect to back him. 

Robert Coover's "A Political Fable" (1980/1968)

 Eureka! If there's one work of fiction about American politics crying out for rediscovery in the age of Trump—to help explain our present mess to us (and I use the term advisedly)—I believe I may have just found it. It comes from the oeuvre of Robert Coover—a postmodern novelist known for his rather surrealistic takes on 20th century public figures, making full-throated use of some typical postmodern techniques of pastiche and juxtaposition along the way—all of which appear in the present "novel." 

This, however, is not among his best-known works, and thus it was a new name to me when I spotted it on the high shelf in a used book store in Providence, Rhode Island (the city where Coover made his career). I am referring to his A Political Fable—published in book form 40 years ago, after first appearing as a 1968 short story, "The Cat in the Hat for President."