Year Zero

 Eight years ago, I posted a far-from ebullient "Toast for Inauguration Day 2017." It featured a quote from the poems of Anna Akhmatova that I thought was particularly apropos for the occasion of Trump's first installation as president. I drink to our demolished house,/ the poem reads, To all this wickedness/ The coarse, brutal world, the fact/ That God has not saved us. (D.M. Thomas trans.)

At the time, I hoped there would never be an occasion to quote the poem a second time—at least not on the day of a second Trump inauguration. And when Trump went on to lose the next election, it seemed we would indeed be spared that fate. Yet, eight years later, here we are. Trump Inauguration 2.0. So, I offer the same toast again—to the wickedness, the brutality, and the repeat failure of divine intervention. 

In some ways, it feels even more appropriate today than it did in January 2017. The world seems only coarser and more brutal now than eight years ago. What's worse is that any kind of moral opposition to Trump has collapsed. Yesterday, Trump got up before a rally and did his usual shtick of demonizing immigrants. It doesn't appear to have ruffled a single tech oligarch who plans to attend today's big event.

Nor are the young people dismayed and outraged this time around, the way they (we) were in 2017. If anything, the reporters tell us, Trump is seen as cool now. Gen Z is suddenly reposting MAGA memes with abandon. I have no doubt they experience this shift as organic—and don't even notice how closely it tracks with the red-pilling of the leadership of the social media platforms they frequent. 

Trump takes office this time, that is to say, with a much tighter grip on the business and cultural scene than he had the first time around—which makes him infinitely more dangerous. He has only gotten worse and more unhinged in his politics over the last eight years—yet people seem more complacent or even enthusiastic as his second presidency begins; a not uncommon human perversity. 

As Bertolt Brecht once put it in a poem (I've quoted the lines before, but they still capture this dynamic better than anything else ever penned): "The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread." (Willett trans.) 

That seems to be what's happening here. When Trump was first getting launched on his career of iniquity, there was a "cry of horror" on all sides. People marched in the streets. CEOs and elected officials rushed to distance themselves from him. They refused to attend the Inauguration. But now that he has gone on to do even worse, nobody seems to care or object. "A blanket of silence" has descended. 

I have often had occasion over the past years to think of Auden's poem "Refugee Blues," about the feelings of wartime refugees in the 1930s who were forced to listen to demagogues scapegoat them on all sides. When Trump got up on stage last night and rehearsed his usual lines about asylum-seekers, calling them "criminals," "invaders," "occupiers," and so on, it came back to mind yet again. 

But perhaps what resonated most in that moment was this stanza: "Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;/ They had no politicians and sang at their ease:/ They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race." Indeed, listening to Trump prate in this vein, one experiences an intense desire to leave the species that invented politicians, and go and live among the birds. 

"I long for scenes where man has never trod [...]," as the peasant-poet John Clare once sang. "There to abide with my creator, God/ [...] Untroubling and untroubled where I lie/ The grass below—above the vaulted sky." Would that it were so, and we could live as the animals do—far from man and his politicians. But alas—we are human beings, my dear/ We are human beings.

And so we have no choice but to raise our glasses once again. So I propose: a toast. For Inauguration Day 2025. To all this wickedness. All these lies. All this bitterness. The harsh, cruel world. And the fact that our creator, God—has once again not saved us.