Blown to Smithereens

 Earlier this week—as you may have already forgotten—Donald Trump threatened to resume U.S. nuclear testing after a thirty-year hiatus. The reason, he said, was that the other side had done it first. 

This, however, was simply not true. No one had broken, or even threatened to break, the testing ban but Trump. 

What appears to have happened is that Trump misinterpreted a news headline from days earlier. What had happened—as the news media widely reported—is that Russia had tested nuclear-powered weapons. 

These tests (escalatory and destabilizing as they doubtless were) did not involve actually detonating nuclear explosions. But they were described in some reports as "nuclear weapons," for the sake of brevity. I think this accounts for what followed. 

Trump appears to have seen these headlines, and immediately decided to reignite the race to armageddon. 

This is how our foreign policy is made now. By Trump misinterpreting cable news segments—seizing on a few trigger words that he has only half-comprehended, and ordering sweeping changes in U.S. positions, with worldwide geopolitical implications, off the cuff—without consulting even one policy expert or intelligence analyst or political advisor to see whether his understanding of the news item he just saw was even close to correct. 

We could not have asked for a better distillation, in a single anecdote, of the fact that our country is now run by a demented idiot—whom we have chosen to endow with the power to annihilate us all.

I've said before that Trump's psychology partakes in a strange way of the Dadaist, surrealist sensibility. With his obsession with excrement, with blasphemy, his threats to inflict explosions and pointless destruction on a whim, he is the avatar of the acte gratuit.

His latest threat to resume nuclear testing based on a single misinterpreted headline is merely the latest—but, it could yet be, perhaps the most dangerous example.  

I quoted in that earlier post André Breton's famous (or notorious) statement: "The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd."

I then paired this with Trump's comment years ago that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" without alienating voters. 

Of course—some of Trump's apologists will say that all of this madness on his part is deliberate. He embraces the "madman" theory of foreign diplomacy—they say; a theory sometimes attributed to Nixon, but which—as Thomas Schelling shows, in his Arms and Influence, in fact goes all the way back to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. 

The agent of Conrad's novel—the anarchist "Professor"— threatens to blow things up merely for the sake of destabilizing society—merely for the sake of subverting bourgeois morality—merely "because it would be fun to upset the apple-cart / And see which way the apples would go a-rolling" (to borrow a few lines from Lawrence). 

He does so because he sees such unpredictability as a strategic asset. It makes people fear him more, if they believe that merely rational influences cannot reach him. 

This character in Conrad in turn inspired Gide's theory of the "gratuitous act" in Lafcadio's Adventures. 

One can indeed see, then, just how closely Trump embodies the themes of modern literature. 

When he posts an AI-generated image of himself dropping excrement on the heads of the American people, say—or when he threatens to start blowing up nuclear weapons again based on a whim; based merely on something he just saw on TV just a moment before, and hasn't thought about for longer than five minutes—he is embodying Ubu Roi. He is acting just "for idleness," to quote a character in Chekhov. 

It's like he could have crawled out of the pages of Céline or Henry Miller. 

What's interesting about the nihilistic literature of the early twentieth century, after all—especially the period between the wars—is that authors seemed to have some prophetic intimation in their minds that just such a bomb-wielding madman would one day arrive—the "Professor" of our time. 

Perhaps it was something about the madness of the First World War that gave them this idea—the sheer pointlessness and futility of so much slaughter. When every "advanced" government in the world seemed to proceed by the principle of the acte gratuit—it seemed only natural that someone would eventually take this tendency a step further. 

Someone would eventually carry the principle of the war's mass death and butchery to its logical conclusion—the destruction of all humankind. 

And so, the literature of the interwar period seems haunted by the image of a bomb so big it could destroy the whole Earth—decades before humanity actually built such a monstrosity. 

Italo Svevo, in his Zeno's Conscience—that book Joyce so admired—ends with the following eerily accurate prophecy: 

When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness. (Weaver trans.)

Henry Miller says something similar, in his Tropic of Cancer—published in 1934, about a decade after Svevo's book. 

For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens. 

It's as if the authors knew the A-bomb and the H-bomb were on their way—years before the Trinity test was so much as a glimmer in Robert Oppenheimer's eye. 

Something about the First World War had demanded it. Having gone so far down the road to annihilation, there was no way humanity was going to turn back now. Someone was going to have to invent the ultimate weapon. (And, alas, they did.)

Now that same weapon intrigues Trump, with its potentialities for meaningless destruction, the same way it did Miller. 

Indeed, Miller's whole book—with its gruesome imagery of blood and excreta—its vision of the world as one big slaughterhouse-cum-"genito-urinary system"—its fantasies of world destruction and annihilation—seems like a glimpse into the interior of Trump's mind. 

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire—to borrow a line from a great poem by Isaac Rosenberg (another literary product of the First World War). 

The great difference between Trump and the surrealist poets, though—or the interwar memoirists of the sewer like Henry Miller—is that Trump is doing it for real, not through the means of artistic sublimation. 

He also has the actual power to do it—in addition to the will.

André Breton could only fantasize (and not entirely seriously) about massacring people in cold blood.

Trump, meanwhile, can actually bomb civilians off the face of the Earth, without charge or trial, and then boast about it to the news cameras: "I think we’re just gonna kill people [...] We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead"—as he recently put it. 

Henry Miller could only say—with allowance for literary license—that someone oughtta blow up this old world one of these days. 

Trump—because of the office we elected him to—actually has the technological means to do it. 

He has his eye on the nuclear codes. He has his finger on the red button. 

He just might be the one to give this world the "coup de grâce" Miller was seeking. 

A warning to poets, then: be careful what you wish for. It is by such signs as these, to quote Rossetti, that "the world falls asunder, being old."