The Affluenza Candidate: Trumpelstiltskin

“Donald Trump is an ugly, ugly man. He has a face which expresses, to perfection, his inner monster. He wears a bloated body which, like Jabba the Hutt’s (down to the near-naked trophy wife handcuffed to his ego), expresses his secret lack of all discipline. His shambles of a hair-do—that Trumpelstiltskin comb-over—mirrors his bone-deep artificiality and stellar denial. And his hateful, invective-filled discourse, utilizing some 150 vocabulary words (mostly superlatives and the first person pronoun), reflects the pisiform intellect of an uneducated, uncultivated, un-lettered lout.”—By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

By Way of Being

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest—and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure. It’s not your fault.”—Donald Trump

“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” —Donald Trump

“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” —Donald Trump

PETIT TRIANON Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—1/11/2016—Donald Trump is an ugly, ugly man. He has a face which expresses, to perfection, his inner monster. He wears a bloated body which, like Jabba the Hutt’s (down to the near-naked trophy wife handcuffed to his ego), expresses his secret lack of all discipline. His shambles of a hair-do—that Trumpelstiltskin comb-over—mirrors his bone-deep artificiality and stellar denial. And his hateful, invective-filled discourse, utilizing some 150 vocabulary words (mostly superlatives and the first person pronoun), reflects the pisiform intellect of an uneducated, uncultivated, un-lettered lout.

Ugly. Gluttonous. Artificial. False. Cretinous. And anything but affluent, as his “wealth,” like his hair, depends on the smoke and mirrors of multiple bankruptcies and sham, failed “businesses.”

But, in a real and chilling way, Trump is all of us in America. He is our Affluenza Candidate for the highest  position in the land, the product of an American upbringing that failed to teach him, and so many of the rest of us, right from wrong.

Whenever I am compelled to observe him speak (and that is too often, due to the 20-somethings of the US media’s obsession with “celebrity” over all other criteria of news value), I note, again and again, that the man has a mouth resembling nothing so much as an anus . . . and for good reason.

If Dante were writing “The Inferno” right here and right now, no character on the modern stage would so readily fulfill all the requirements for the creature at the very bottom of the divine food chain; through whose fundament Dante, and we all, must pass. 

He embodies so, so much that is abhorrent in contemporary Western culture that it is difficult for even a thoughtful intellectual to unpack him. Like Berlusconi, like Sarah Palin, like Rush Limbaugh—and a few others—Donald Trump is, I believe, evil. Knowingly, consciously evil.

Were he a sociopath—and I believe he falls just short—he’d be less culpable, and we’d be less culpable, as he would have been born wholly without empathy, and we would have been conned (to a certain extent) into permitting his rise and fostering the attention paid him.

As things stand, though, I believe the man has agency, and must be held accountable for what he says and does. Eventually. Just as his “base”—the pathetic, underclass whites afraid of utterly everything, trembling in their cheap shoes and Chinese polyester, working three jobs to keep themselves in junk food, porn DVDs, guns, and meth—will receive a bill for their inhumanity.

And the rest of us, once another Democrat is safely elected, despite the best efforts of the Sheldon Adelmans of America, will have to take a long, long and thoughtful bath.

Still, I was expecting a Trump. The times demanded him.

Build it—a post-apocalyptic world—and Trump will come.

In essence, this dyed-blond behemoth of rage is the pendulum swing away from Obama that I knew was coming: the veritable anti-Obama.

Trump is a certain descent into hell; change none can believe in.

If I were a believer, I could well believe he’s the antichrist, that rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born that William Butler Yeats wrote about in “The Second Coming.”

Jabba the Antichrist . . . with a comb-over. God help us.

He is the shadow self of America: the black hole adjacent the suns of Sanders, Warren, and the very, very few others who imperfectly represent what passes for light in the United States, in 2016.

I still believe he will not (even) be the sad, comic Republican Party’s candidate, though I may be wildly underestimating the depths to which America has fallen, and we may still witness a Trump vs. Hillary or Bernie election.

And since, as H.L. Mencken stated, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” and since Obama’s elections, while not a fluke, did represent the electorate, twice, standing on the tippy toes of its better nature, well, anything is possible now . . . .

Meanwhile, join me on the road to Bethlehem, please, where I will be standing with my pen, praying it is as mighty as the sword when it comes to heading off Trumpelstiltskin.

“The Second Coming”

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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