Waiting For Trump: How Bad Will It Be?

Again and again during cable’s endless emotional voyeurism of people who have lost their homes in the LA conflagration, you heard some version of the same refrain, “Our precious memories were in that home.”

“Me and my memories” have the highest value in America. And since the ‘me’ is just a bundle of memories, and memory is a dead thing, “numbed out” Americans have become voyeurs of personal tragedy and crime just to feel something. But nostalgia and sentiment are the counterfeits of actual feeling.

The most compelling clips are of grown men crying over the rubble of their incinerated homes. Not to be macho about it, but the last thing I would want at such a moment is to be a poster boy for provoking some affect in the dead sea of American culture.

Even as it takes more and more to make people feel something, the insatiable maw of mainstream media sucks every bit of life it can out of victim and viewer alike. As we wait to see if “all hell is going to break out,” in the words of His Malevolence, it’s worth asking how we came to be in this socio-political pickle.

There are many miniature black holes threatening to merge into one all-consuming black hole. Before they do, let’s connect the dots of our dotage as a nation and species. The main ones are the “me,” memory and nostalgia. They form a vortex in American, and increasingly global consciousness.

The ‘me’ is the most sacrosanct thing in American life. It’s the unseen source of the hallowed personal dimension, and it has led to the privatisation of everything.

Consider the repetitive scourge of school shootings -- the mass murder of children in the one place where they should feel most safe other than home.

At the core level, there’s the sickness of a society that breeds young people so alienated and hate-filled that they’re driven to annihilate the innocence that was destroyed in them.

At the political level, there is the inability to limit, much less deny the rampant sale of weapons of war to ordinary citizens, much less to the mentally ill and possessed. So what does American culture and economy do? It turns the threat to every school into the opportunities for a new industry.

Thus we have a booming business in security systems, safe rooms and armed guards, not to mention consultants and counselors after the exploded, bullet-ridden, bodies of children have been scrubbed from their classroom floors.

At the other end of the bloody spectrum, President Biden, in his farewell address, feigns outrage that the richest men in the world are brazenly turning an implicit oligarchy into an explicit oligarchy. But Trump’s promise to “drill, drill, drill on day one,” and buy or invade the vast mineral real estate of Greenland, are the logical ends of America’s totally personalised and privatised culture.

MAGA is nostalgia (the perversion of memory) for a greatness that never existed, except in American mythology. Now our soldiers are heroes; our firefighters are heroes; and the guy who pulled a dog out of an icy pond is a hero. In truth, only zeroes need heroes.

And Donald Trump is the biggest zero. In recent weeks he’s added a new dimension to Make America Great Again. He means going back to the great oil barons, the great monopolists and the great expansionists before and after Teddy Roosevelt’s American Empire emerged at the turn of the 20th century.

Just as narcissism is self-centeredness without bottom (the inevitable result of worshipping the ‘me’ and giving the personal dimension the highest value), MAGA is nostalgia for a mythologised “indispensable nation” that has its roots in economic domination backed by military force.

Metaphysically, it’s no coincidence that the one president who tried to give some substance to America’s exceptionalism by actually making human rights the lodestar of his presidency, Jimmy Carter, died just before the worst president in American history is about to take power, again.

Two women have been nominated for president out of the last three US elections. Last week, in the wake of a futile political autopsy the Democrats have been conducting, a leading woman of the donkey party said of American voters, “We knew men hated women. We didn’t know so many women hated women.”

Such a statement feeds into the toxic masculinity of the right. It not only smears all men, but extends misogyny to women who voted for Trump. Misandry is no answer to misogyny.

Did you see heartthrob Barack Obama yukking it up with The Donald at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, as the seat for Michelle remained empty next to him? By refusing to sit in the same church as Trump, or on the same podium during his second inauguration, Michelle is demonstrating real principle and strength, though her exhortation to “Do Something” is part of the problem.

The Democrats did something; they anointed someone who couldn’t even break with Biden over Gaza, whose political strategy consisted of cozying up to the Cheneys and extolling the “lethality” of America’s monstrously bloated military. Misogyny played a part in her defeat, but Kamala and the Democrats were out of their depth.

The question on every decent-minded, minimally aware person in America and around the world is, how bad will things get?

Most people are hoping against hope that the status quo of the world’s economic and political (dis)order will prevail. People in the so-called developed world just want to go about their lives without economic collapse and/or world war.

We’ve gotten to the point where the vast majority of people just carry on unless they’re directly impacted by wars or human-catalyzed natural disasters. An hour up the coast from the conflagration in Los Angeles, people were drinking their lattes and going about their business as usual.

There aren’t two America’s anymore than there are two political parties. There’s just one, and it’s Trump’s America. He will do his worst.

Hope is foolish and resistance is futile. First do nothing. Go within, without navel staring or falling into the trap of solipsism.

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