I forget to write and barely read the New York Times since becoming distracted by Trumpmania. I watch what appears to be history rolling in from a black horizon. My eyes glued to CNN and MSNBC as to a telescope turning my focus toward Fox News to avoid the shoals. The puddle of time since Drumpf became president is like crossing the Pacific Ocean through a confluence of three massive storms colliding.
Who is deceiving whom? Is the media running out the story for ratings? Is Donald Drumpf as ignorant and off the wall as he appears? Are his tweets media candy or a distraction from his devious attempts at authoritarian rule? He and the Republican Congress are working in the cloak of chaos to dismantle personal liberty, reverse advances in human and environmental reform. America was greater under a cloud of pollution and contaminated waterways. No? NO!
And where are the patriotic Republicans who have historically voted their conscience to impeach and impede Democratic presidents?
I have overdosed on Drumpf-a-drama. He has been president for 121 days, 5 hours, 34 minutes. The coup bores with banality, a capitulation, and normalization of constant banal iterations simulating historical tropes. The petty repetition of a divided country and the forgotten worker. We have watched this movie sequel after sequel. The narrative ingrained like the pledge of allegiance to the flag in the morning and bedtime prayers to keep us safe while we slept.
Remember the quaint very distant jingle of global harmony simple as sharing a poisonous beverage laced with magical thinking when this country was on the brink of a second civil war? In retrospect, the presidency looked then as it does now, corrupt and impenetrable. Journalism saved democracy then and is working hard to preserve what remains of democracy after 911.
The harmony of the white centralized empire came crashing down by another Republican president and America’s reaction to hijacked planes crashing into symbols of the “old” capitalist and militarist order followed by “supply side capitalism” decimation of equality. Donald Drumpf is the end-product. A crazy megalomaniacal “low information voter” pulled from reality TV. The Republicans are greedy eunuchs sacrificing tongue and testicles to nostalgia for the Dickensian age of child labor and workhouses.
History is a narrative of “great societies peaking while simultaneously dropping off the cliff. Are the cycles of destruction inevitable? It seems an appropriate question for a new literary magazine. In any case, it seems the only way to keep my sanity as well as a productive exercise in literary citizenship. Two days after the election and my birthday I came to the same conclusion as the rest of the literary world. The only way to survive is to resist. We are participants in the narrative of art when our voices, bodies, pens, brushes, computers weaponized to remind ourselves and the world of constructive creative forms of dissent against inhumane destructive power.
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