That all changed for me, though, on listening to the recent rounds of reporting on Trump's indictments. Of course, there was little in any of them to catch one wholly by surprise. But a few choice details made it all real to me again in a way that was fresh and living: Pence's testimony, for instance, that Trump had described him as "too honest" for his unwillingness to violate the Constitution; the fact that Trump insiders were openly discussing the Insurrection Act as something that might empower them to deploy the military to suppress opposition, in the event that their scheme to overturn the election provoked widespread unrest. In other words, it was borne in all over again to me-- something I should never have forgotten: this man tried to undo democracy! He tried to stage a coup and unlawfully retain power! He must never again be trusted anywhere close to the reins of authority!
And so, at the moment one admits all this to oneself--and allows oneself to feel the menace of it, really feel it, and not just acknowledge it intellectually-- then one is confronted by the same sensation that all one's cynical distance had been designed to hold at bay-- the realization that the torment of the previous administration was not yet over; that the last few years with Biden had been a reprieve, but not a commutation--a stay of execution, but not a pardon-- that, as a character says to himself in John Dos Passos's novel Three Soldiers, after he is arrested again following a previous narrow escape from the military police, who had formerly confined him to a miserable labor gang, "God, could things repeat themselves like that? Would everything be repeated?" In short, one feels the very worse kind of déjà vu--the repetation of the intolerable. It's all happening again, just as bad as before-- or maybe worse!
This primary, after all, has more than a few echoes of the one that first elevated Trump to power. There is the same sense of ghastly inevitability; the same slow-motion-car-wreck sensation of seeing one far more plausible and deserving candidate after another fall by the wayside, as Trump keeps lurching inexplicably to victory. There is the same spectacle of one outrage and scandal after another-- any one of which would have annihilated the political career of any other figure, but which only seem to make Trump's polling numbers stronger. And there is the same dangerous temptation in me to take the whole thing as a joke--to laugh at Trump's obscenities (one cannot deny his gift, intentional or otherwise, for comic timing) and his lack of self-awareness-- if one were not aware that this laughter might turn to choking ashes in one's throat one day, if he gains power yet again.
I don't have much succor to provide, other than to turn abstract and philosophical. The only thing that has brought me a small bit of comfort these past weeks was reading Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution-- a work of little scientific interest, by today's standards, but of some philosophical merit still. Bergson is much concerned in this work as elsewhere with the problem of time, and he makes the reassuring point that, appearances to the contrary, nothing ever does happen twice, at least not exactly as before. As much as we fear recurrence, that is-- the Dos Passos "God, could things repeat themselves like that?" feeling-- nothing in history ever does perfectly recur. His theory on this subject may therefore be taken to be the opposite of Nietzsche's. Bergson's view is that a true repetition of events would be incompatible with time's unidirectional arrow.
What makes him so sure? His argument is eminently logical. The passage of time is marked by change. If there were no change, no motion, then time would have stood still. To endure is to alter, if only by accumulating a past behind one--the impression of memories. This, incidentally, is why the promises of eternal beatitude and the threats of eternal damnation, which some religious systems hold out as the carrot and stick to compel belief and submission, are contradictions in terms. What endures is ever-changing, and therefore cannot exist in eternity, which is understood to be fixed and outside of time. A pain that persists without altering itself is as impossible to conceive as a blessedness of the same quality. There is no human feeling without time.
What we really fear, when we contemplate the Trump administration returning, is a kind of vision of eternal hell. What we thought was behind us is to be brought back to us endlessly, in ever-renewing and unvarying pain. But we should take to heart Bergson's reminder that there can be no true recurrence--no real déjà vu corresponding to outward events, as opposed to an inward fleeting sensation--because we will ourselves always be different by the time the event arrives to repeat itself. "[C]onsciousness cannot go through the same state twice," writes Bergson (Mitchell trans.). "The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history. Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing [....] We could not live over again a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing the memory of all that followed."
And so if we must face Trump rampant once again, let us remember that he does not meet us unchanged. As much as he threatens to plunge us back into a nightmare we had only just escaped, we are not the same people we were when last we fell into his hands. We know him better now; we know ourselves better. And we might use this knowledge not to repeat the same mistakes twice.
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