The Enormous Doom

In the renewed scrutiny last week of Trump's previous comments on the military, one older, on-the-record remark of his kept coming up: a 1998 conversation with Howard Stern in which Trump—riffing on his deferment from the military draft—said the struggle to avoid sexually-transmitted infections in the dating scene was his "personal Vietnam." It's the kind of comment that, coming from a comedian, might be funny in a grotesquely poor-taste kind of way. Coming from someone who claims national leadership, it is repellant (though what else is new?)—but we will come to that a bit later.

What I want to point out first is that Trump is not the first to make this "joke" (or whatever it is) upon the vaunted glories of military service. Reading E.E. Cummings' memoir of his war-time internment in France, The Enormous Room, I discover the following observation: "This Great War For Humanity, etc., did not agree with some people's ideas, and [...] some people's ideas made them prefer to the glories of the front line the torments [...] attendant on venereal diseases." 

He goes on to describe the case of a French soldier who had hit upon a strategy for evading the dangers of front-line service by making sure he got newly infected just before every return to the trenches. 

"It all comes down to syphilis in the end," Joris-Karl Huysmans observes in his À rebours (Baldick trans.)—a judgment upon life that will perhaps not immediately strike everyone as self-evident (we are not here in the realm of Alexander Pope's "what oft was thought..."), but which perhaps made a great deal more intuitive sense in the age before penicillin. At the time Cummings was writing, this crucial medical discovery was still a few years away, and it thus packs a real sardonic punch to emphasize that men were willing to take their chances with this affliction to avoid the worse fate of the machine gun. 

Of course, in all this Cummings was not trying to mock the ordinary soldiers who were being mown down in droves; his Enormous Room would hardly have the immortality it does if it were such a colossal performance of mean-spirited "punching down." Rather, it is a satire upon the contrast between the high-flown rhetoric that is used to justify wars and the brutal and murderous reality of fighting them. 

There is a long history of satirical writing on war that subverts the cruelty and falseness of official war-makers and jingoistic politicians by holding up poltroonery as a positive virtue: think Yossarian, the Good Soldier Svejk, etc. There is a long tradition as well of coopting the lofty phrases of military rhetoric, and juxtaposing them to the ugly human reality of the front lines for mordant effect: think Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est." The point is not that the soldiers are "losers" or "suckers," to use Trump's reported terminology, but that the men blithely sending them to the slaughter are hypocrites and liars.

It is striking to me in this context that Trump was at a military cemetery in France when he made these comments, and that he was speaking apropos of the First World War. As he put it in one line attributed to him in the original Atlantic article that broke the story: "Who were the good guys in this war?" This was picked up later as one of the more self-evidently odious of his comments, but I think it actually stands the best chance of being defensible, amidst an otherwise indefensible stream of behavior. Questioning the rationality of the First World War was at one point a commonplace of modern thought. 

Trump's question is roughly the same one Cummings is asking in his book. He joined up with a war-time ambulance corps in France presumably thinking he had the answer to that question; and Cummings' father—a staid Unitarian minister in Boston—still takes it as a given in his original introduction to the memoir—despite all his son has gone through—that "France['s...] cause was our cause and the cause of civilization." 

For Cummings fils, however, matters have become considerably less clear from a moral standpoint. He has been detained in a military internment camp where everyone from alleged spies, traitors, petty thieves, prostitutes and simply people picked up for looking "suspicious," "foreign," etc. are held without charge in a state of limbo. Because they are not truly truly in "prison," they need not have been convicted. The only semblance of a legal process that awaits them—every three months—comes in the form of a three-man military Commission that asks them a few questions then boldly decrees their fate—detention in a different concentration camp for the duration of the war, or transfer to house arrest as a mere "suspect."

In the course of his stay in the detention camp, Cummings witnesses women nearly suffocated in solitary confinement; a man falsely accused because he is black; a loving family separated from one another for heartless legalistic reasons. After seeing these things, he decides to take his internment as an unintentional compliment on himself, since it means he was judged incapable of contributing to the French cause of "civilization" and "progress" that entails these things. One Belgian conscript describes to Cummings—in an unforgettable scene— his duties on the front line, where a French machine gun was kept trained on him from behind throughout the fighting. 

This does not compute at first with Cummings's ideas—he reminds us that the noble quest to rescue suffering Belgium was the purported cause and ultimate moral justification of the war. He contrasts this with the Belgian's account of how his fellow soldiers—if they bolted without orders in the midst of fighting—would be gunned down by the machine guns of their purported allies—which had been positioned behind them for precisely this purpose. Perhaps "who were the good guys in this war?" is not such a morally wrong-headed question to pose.

Well, alright then—are we to say that Trump was simply saying what Cummings might, and that if we are to allow his doubts and questions to a satirist and artist, there is no reason to deny them to Trump? 

No—for the simple reason that Trump is not a writer satirizing the government: he is the government. 

Obviously, he shouldn't be. He is, in real life, an over-the-top TV personality whom we know from his catch phrase—"You're fired!"—which was considered an amusing pop culture reference to pull out when I was in high school. It is only in the bizarre and dreadfully unfunny alternative history timeline we entered that he became President of the United States. But, here we are, and that is what his job title says. As a result, he is not just a jokester shooting the breeze with Howard Stern; he is responsible for the fates of millions of his fellow citizens—as well as people around the globe. 

Cummings could write as a satirist because he was in a position to do little else to seek justice. He was a recently-interned artist (albeit one with Boston Brahmin connections), with only a pen to wield against his oppressors. Trump, au contraire, is the one making the policy decisions right now that are detaining a thousand other Cummingses, separating a thousand other families, dragging at least forty people in Guantanamo Bay through an Enormous Room-esque legal labyrinth with no way out. He is not the outside observer condemning Cummings' "gouvernment français"—which he memorably describes as a tentacled "sly and beaming polyp"—he is that polyp. 

If Trump has such satirical feeling toward the U.S. government, therefore, he might do more about it than merely satirize. If Trump actually thinks that war is a monstrous absurdity, he might, for a start, stop conducting several around the globe, in which he has rolled back safeguards against civilian casualties. 

If he were on the side of the Cummingses of the world, rather than the sly and beaming polyps, he would reverse his administration's policies of detaining and expelling unaccompanied children and asylum-seekers without due process, under the CDC's "Title 42" policy; he would release prisoners from Guantanamo Bay who—like Cummings' fellow inmates—have endured years of confinement without a formal legal process and full Constitutional rights; he would end the nightmare of administrative immigration detention where people are held in effective prisons without ever being tried and convicted of a crime (all too reminiscent of the prison-that-isn't-a-prison limbo in which Cummings finds himself); he would stop separating families—a practice that Cummings memorably describes, when he witnesses it in the detention center, as the "perfect negat[ion] of mercy."

A writer on the outskirts of power, lobbing sardonic missiles, can be a champion for the powerless. Even raillery and mockery can serve a higher purpose—that of defeating the pompous falsehoods of officialdom. But a person who gladly claims for himself all the power of high office, but accepts none of the responsibility; a person who willingly sends soldiers to die and kills soldiers and civilians overseas, but who views their death and sacrifice as a preposterous absurdity—that person has subverted the intention of satire. He has made of himself a monstrous joke—a killing joke. 

A greater threat to our institutions can scarcely be imagined. As my friend Seanan recently remarked, riffing on Eliot: "This is how the world ends; not with a bang, or even a whimper—but with a giggle."