Trumponia

Trump?

“Trump supports gay,” was chanted at convention.

The suggestive thing about Trump is that history doesn’t seem to matter. What he says last week is often contradicts what he says now. Thus rules of critique don’t apply. There is only, with Trump, the ever present now, protean as the wind. In this he fashions his appeal. Some say he looks like Mussolini. Some say he looks like a tramp. 'Tramps for Trump' is only a heartbeat away from 'I love the poorly educated.' Yet not only does he survive, he flourishes.

But a lack of support among the black population and the dissidence of women bears down on his thin skin. With his desperate shrill - proof that he is losing, and bluster he attacks like a rabid dog sadly diseased and incurable. The quiet rage of migrants, who though it would be previous to say are more radical, but generally are, do at least know a fraud when they see one. Added then are the accretions of braggadocio. It may not matter so much his ban on Muslims, but when added to a wall to stop a stampede that doesn't exist, or the fiction of crime waves, or an imagined American getting raped at the hands of international sodomites, or the endless spasms of his old-chap prejudice, there comes a calculus of these spurts of machismo that does, and will, add. 

On the other hand it must be said it is churlish to compare him, as some do, to Hitler or Mussolini. No doubt he has fascist leanings, no doubt he plays the strong-man game, but he neither could be nor has the mind for dictatorship, in principle because given power he would not have a clue what to do with it. 

So too are the comparisons that Clinton and Trump are like Apollo and Dionysus, except in one detail. The teetotaler Trump is making people drunk with wish-thought, time-travel, fact-freedom, fancy-flight and empowerment of embarrassing stupidity, so much so that the revellers will mutter and stutterer out any nonsense, non-sequitur, incoherency and bigotry happy they have a champion who will dance with all the satyrs of chauvinist yesteryear. He brings all the bones long buried back to life with his applause lines of hysteria, his narrow vision of the future based on a narrow vision of the past. The small lanes of victory are surely Clinton’s yet… ah these febrile years, this topsy-turvy world, these poll-failed times… perhaps the criticisms of her being Apollonian are unjust, but surely, surely the world needs wise heads, surely common-sense…surely...surely...Hillary.

So never in recent times has the Whitehouse race been so antonymic. Trump: 50’s man, nativist, isolationist, über-menshen. Clinton: 60’s woman, globalist, inclusive, boring to the point of faded tapestry. The victor this November is not just R or D. Victorious shall be also which vision of America will live and which will die. Will it be the progressive young future that celebrates, or the revanchist old white man spluttering into the sunset who suddenly gets given the reins of power and can’t believe his luck, buck-wild with his jumping horse and jumpy gun? Will the black have his rights and expectations renewed, or removed? Will the Mexican have his path to citizenship acceded to or will the flash lights wake him up? Will divisions cleave deeper or will society grow with far-sight and large heart?

Alas, the tea leaves this year have been of a poor crop. We shall wait until November and hold our breath. We should be prepared for the outré Trump, as we have had to adjust to the unthinkable, senseless, stupid and backward Brexit. Should the confidence machine he is win, we must remember the sky shall not fall nor shall the Universe reach that point of absurdity where it implodes on itself. No indeed, we, in Churchillian whistle, would ‘keep buggering on’.

  ~ “And this too shall pass.” ~