Cherish

 In his bizarre, meandering interview with NBC over the weekend (the same one in which he said openly he "wasn't sure" he would uphold the U.S. Constitution—despite his oath of office), Trump also went off on a characteristically creepy tangent about annexing Greenland. He wouldn't "rule out" an act of unilateral unprovoked military aggression in order to seize the island, he said; "We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security." 

I'm sure the Greenlanders are very relieved to hear that Trump proposes to "cherish" them. One is reminded of the similar promise William McKinley (one of Trump's avowed models for his neo-imperialism) once made to the people of the Philippines: to "uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace to do the very best best by them[.]" To which Mark Twain, in essays like "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," gave the only possible riposte: namely, that this "civilizing" mission seemed to take the form strangely often of firing on villages, murdering innocents, and starving children. 

If you doubt that this is the trajectory of Trump's plans—just look at what is happening in that other distant land that he recently proposed to conquer and "cherish." We will "take Gaza, hold it, and cherish it," as Trump said in an interview earlier this year—sounding like a sort of bandit king proposing a forced marriage to a captured princess. And what is happening in Gaza, now that it is held in Trump's and Netanyahu's benevolent palms? The people are starving. The New York Times reports: "Every morning, Gazans brace for a daylong struggle to obtain life’s necessities." 

Mark Twain had something to say about this feature of imperialism as well—namely, the slow death by starvation. In his blistering pamphlet, King Leopold's Soliloquy, Twain inhabits the persona of the Belgian monarch who turned the Congo into his personal slave colony. The Leopold of Twain's imagination is a Trump-like figure: paranoid, obsessed with "leaks" to the press, convinced of his own ability to spin a completely alternative reality simply by proclaiming it loudly enough. And, like Trump, he doesn't seem to mind starving people in the places he claims to "cherish."

Death from hunger [he reflects at one point in the monologue]. A lingering, long misery that must be. Days and days, and still days and days, the forces of the body failing, dribbling way, little by little—yes, it must be the hardest death of all. And to see food carried by, every day, and you can have none of it! Of course the little children cry for it, and that wrings the mother's heart.... [A sigh] Ah, well, it cannot be helped; circumstances make this discipline necessary. 

That is what is happening right now in Gaza—and that is Trump's own blasé attitude to it. A total collapse of the food supply, due to the deliberate siege that Netanyahu's government has imposed—using starvation as a weapon of war. Children going to bed every night hungry and malnourished. And Trump of course has no objection—despite his claims to "cherish" the enclave he proposed to invade and annex to the United States. Although of course—in fairness to Trump—he was always forthright that by "cherishing" Gaza, he didn't mean the people who live there—whom he proposed to expel en masse.

Twain's version of King Leopold, like Trump, does not understand why the world is not more appreciative of the human-made inferno he creates around him. Don't they realize that he did it all to help the Congolese?—that he sought only, as he puts it, to "lift them up and dry their tears and fill their bruised hearts with gratitude"? One is reminded here again of Trump proposing to "cherish" the people of Greenland after he invades and conquers their country in a blatant act of lawless aggression. Or of William McKinley—Trump's hero—with his cant of "uplifting" the Filipinos. 

What the U.S. actually did in its occupation and annexation of the Philippines, of course, was clear enough to Twain. It was clear enough to Edgar Lee Masters too. As he writes in a 1904 collection of essays: the United States's real policy in the Philippines was one of "pillage, murder and rapine [...] in the great work of destroying an Asiatic republic." That was what "uplifting, civilizing, and Christianizing" the Philippine republic meant in practice: "Everyone knows the Filipinos were our allies [in the war with Spain]," as Masters puts it, "and we betrayed them."

That seems to be Trump's plans for the places he claims to "cherish" as well. "Uplift, Christianize, civilize" the legend reads; but the letters shift and rearrange themselves, as in a sort of magic mirror, to read: "Pillage, murder, rapine." That is what the Greenlanders have to look forward to, once they are in the palm of Trump's doting hand. That is what Trump has done to the people of Gaza. That is what he is doing to the people of Yemen. That is what the letters of Trump's form of "cherishing" rearrange themselves to spell: "Uplift, Christianize, civilize" becomes Starvation, Bombing, Death.