If Life’s A Circus, Why Not Enjoy It? Trump Wins And Fun Is Back

The past year of American electoral politics and the year and a half of the Trump presidency have been the most fun ever.  Nothing like the Donald Trump Show with its beautiful women, braggadocio, outsized personalities, glitz, glamour, wealth, and hucksterism has ever come to town, and now it is here to stay.

The Left sees nothing funny in Trump’s fast and loose way with the facts, his shameless promises and his big tent revivalist hoopla.  The issues facing America – civil injustice, a warming climate, the unequal distribution of wealth, and the concentration of power in the hands of the few – are too many to spare a a laugh or two.  Jesus never laughed, progressives often comment, because his mission was too important and too sacred for humor.  There is nothing at all funny about the desperation of the inner city, the abuse of women, or the destruction of the environment.



Trump supporters, on the other hand, laugh all the time.  Trump’s one-liners, caricatures, imitations, and zingers are better than those of Milton Berle, Sid  Caesar, Rodney Dangerfield, Joey Bishop, and Jackie Mason all put together.  Trump is a one-man vaudeville show, a three-ring circus, Borscht Belt comic, and evangelical revivalist all rolled into one. 

True, sanctimony, righteousness, and moral rectitude are easy targets.  The most talented Hollywood comedy writers could never have come up with the scripts written on college campuses.  Safe spaces, verboten Halloween costumes, politically pure speech, conservative disinvites, re-segregated dorms and cafeterias; and LGBT trannies teaching Milton would provide enough comic material for a hundred sitcom episodes.

Images of nuclear Armageddon, burnt lands turned to desert, cascades of polluted water, and the mass extermination of birds and bees are perfect for campy B-movie posters.

Caricatures of Trump supporters – toothless, flag-waving Bible-thumping, gun-toting, bass-fishing redneck ignoramuses – are funny too, and not far off-target.  Nor are images of sweet young gay couples at the altar with no idea what they have in store after ten years of marriage; tired Mexican field hands, faces burned by the California sun turned upward in longsuffering patience and dignity; children of multiple intelligences expressing their diversity. 

The ghoulish portraits of Wall Street investors are no different from the Nazi and Jap caricatures of World War II – demonic, bloodthirsty, rapists.

Let’s face it.  America is one big circus.  How can anyone take Black Friday seriously?  The most hysterical expression of American materialism ever conjured up. Or Las Vegas, an entire city of bad taste?  Or bum culture in San Francisco; bling, spinners, and pimp-walks; cowboy hats and hand-tooled boots; debutante ball revivals, Barbie, and cheap $100k weddings?  Muscle beaches, muscle cars, conventions, Bible study, and locavores? Or even Nantucket topsider chic, Vineyard faux intellectual chic, McMansions and the Mar-el-Lagos of Palm Beach. 

No one is exempt.  Everyone is a caricature to someone else.  Rickety old people, bubbly girly-girl teenagers, real estate agents, Latino leaf-blowers.  Our enterprise, ambition, and unparalleled individuality are serious enough; but it is the greed of Enron, Bernie Madoff, the Seven Dwarves of Phillip Morris, Lorillard, et. al.; the barefaced lies of philandering John Edwards, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, and Mark Sanford that keep us glued to the television. 

We are all sexual infidels of one kind or another; greedy in some way; unethically competitive in others.  We all share the American ethos; and if looked at from Skylab, we are not just eager, determined, and purposeful; but circus performers playing out the same, predictable, outrageously exaggerated roles.

One should have sympathy for the seriously mentally ill; but the antics of the partially deranged are something else entirely. Betty Parsons was the head of the Hospital Auxiliary and the reference librarian at the New Brighton Public Library.  She was quiet and proper, but anyone who paid attention could see the hinges on her tightly-closed emotional doors start to come loose.  Jimmy, the smoke shop oracle, said that in November she started to look at the girly magazines in the back of his store, usually the redoubt of the town’s old men.  She always politely thanked him, Jimmy said, and paid for her copy of Cunt! in exact change. 

“I wasted a lot of good paper bags on that lady”, Jimmy complained.  Most of the men who came into his shop couldn’t care less who saw their copies of Slut and Come, but Mrs. Parsons insisted on brown paper bags.  She carefully place her magazine deep into the well of her handbag and covered it with her sweater, scarf, and hanky.

Mrs. Prentice Lee, a distant but recognized relative of the great Southern general, who shoved her husband down three flights of stairs in their elegant antebellum home because of what we would now recognize as a chemical disorder, but in those days was the result of a fevered, jealous mind.  Prentice Lee was a known philanderer and abusive husband, but for some unknown reason his wife loved him desperately and despaired when he went tomcatting in Jackson.  When she found him buggering the downstairs maid in the pantry, something in her snapped.  She calmly picked up a slice of pound cake, quietly shut the door, and the next day sent poor Prentice tumbling down the elegant staircase to his death. 


Everyone in Drake, Alabama, it seems, has some kind of chemical imbalance. No one simply gets married, has children, and goes quietly and serenely into old age.  There has to be a ruckus.  Lois Ames, for example, tossed her drunken husband onto South Street at midnight and he ended up by getting doused by the street cleaners at 6 AM. Logan Roper, an Assistant Manager at the Wells Fargo bank, stockpiled more guns than the State armory and liked shooting squirrels from his porch swing with one of his prized possessions, an AK-47 used in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. 


The neighbors were not at all surprised at Roper shooting squirrels, for they all did it, but thanks to his big-caliber gun he was obliterating them in a bloody spray, and the bits and pieces of squirrel that were scattered on the sidewalk made it difficult to walk.  Even the old-time police chief who thought he had seen everything, was surprised at the cache in Roper’s basement.  The man had everything from .22 plinkers to grenade launchers, bazookas, and 50mm cannons.


The  moral of the story is that there is far more craziness around than any of us are willing to admit.  Wheels get wobbly and come off at an alarming rate regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or demography.

Whenever I walk down the street, I am reminded that each of us is twitchy, hangdog, perky, purposeful, down-at-the-heels, or morose. Our eyes flutter or squint.  We grimace, hard smile for the camera, bouncing along or drag our feet.

So, recognize your loose screws, get them tightened, talk proudly about your survival, and continue to have a good laugh at the craziness of others.

American Glitz And Glamour And The Coming Of The Trumps

There is something very gratifying about the promise of a Trump White House and the obsequies for the old, liberal, intellectual, Eastern Establishment which has held sway in Washington for so long.

The Congressional representatives of Iowa, Wyoming, Mississippi, and North Dakota make no claim on JFK’s legacy of European sophistication, Roosevelt’s patrician tastes, or George H.W.Walker Bush’s Anglo-Saxon cultural parsimony; and are proud of their homespun roots. No academic or coastal pretensions.  They are the sons and daughters of farmers, factory workers, field hands, and shopkeepers and as such have no culture to offer Washington other than plain talk, faith, family, and enterprise.



These political hirelings provide the cultural inertia of Washington.  Whatever happens in the White House, whether the high culture of the Kennedys, the middle-brow years of Richard Nixon, or the high-professional black upper middle class reaches of the Obamas, Congressmen plod on with little notice other than for their votes.  They are in substance, background, culture, and class no different from their bureaucratic brothers and sisters down the Mall from the Capitol.  They have neither sophistication, class, or elegance; nor any showgirl tinsel and sequins.  They are simple, unleavened émigrés from the heartland with few pretenses and no cultural ambitions.

So what to do with the Trumps?  They are not Main Line, Nantucket, Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square old Anglo-Saxon Park Avenue privileged wealth.  No Society of the Cincinnati, Cosmos Club.  No sailing off Block Island.  No winters in Gstaad.  No Pablo Casals, Robert Frost, or Chippendale appointments of the West Wing.  No history of tweeds, paisleys, and the Yale Fence.



Nor are they from pig farming or cattle-ranching stock; nor from the rag trade, whiskey, or construction.  

They are a new breed of high lowbrow Americans.  Bourgeois to the core, children of Hollywood, Seventh Avenue, and Las Vegas.   Nary a Gilbert Stuart on the walls, nor a Cotton Mather on the bookshelf, nor a Bruckner among the CDs.  Nothing by Eugene Victor Debs or Samuel Gompers. No Faulkner, Joyce, or O’Neill.  There has been no time for intellectual dalliances.  True to form, they have trusted only their instincts, their personal tastes, and their ambitions.

Most importantly Donald Trump has no elitist associations.   He dismisses the Rittenhouse Square crowd as antediluvian and impossibly hidebound.  He has no use for Bill Clinton, Arkansas trailer trash and intellectual wannabee flirting with high culture and intellect at Renaissance Weekends.  He, despite his populism, wants nothing to do with Walmart greeters, Target checkers, McDonald’s warming trays, digging asparagus, or handling a lathe.

He and his family are unique One Percenters – not the Wall Street financiers or corporate magnates of multinationals; but among America’s few glitterati – celebrities, People Magazine favorites, E! cover personalities for whom image, allure, and attractiveness are the only currency.



Washington has never seen a family like this.  Ronald Reagan was a product of Hollywood, but he was a B-actor, never a celebrity, always a campy joke, and a Los Angeles nothing until he got into politics as head of the Scree Actors Guild.  LBJ had bombast, personality, and Lonesome Dove Western grit and determination, but never set any agendas other than the failed Great Society and the even worse failure, the war in Vietnam.   Carter was an octoroon – a mélange of farmer, politician, and religious evangelist.  George W. Bush was a quadroon – an equally mixed stew of patrician Ivy League New Englander and Texas arriviste wannabe.

The Trumps not only are Hollywood, Las Vegas, Times Square, and the fashion runways of Milan, Paris, and Rome; but the most American of families Washington has ever seen.

Why? Not because they are like most American families but because they reflect the aspirations of middle Americans.  They are our fantasy.  We don’t want to be Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, or the Presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.   We want to be like the Trumps and have gorgeous children, penthouses in New York, hotel-resort-homes in Palm Beach, cabanas in St. Tropez, chalets in St. Moritz, yachts harbored in Rimini, St. Bart’s, and Eleuthera.   Men want his arm candy and his power.  Women want his bangles, stewards, and money.

Much has been made of the divisions in American society and how Trump and Hillary Clinton have characterized them.  Yet the focus has been misplaced.  Yes, Donald Trump represents the white disaffected and Hillary the marginalized minorities; and yes, Trump reflects an uber-Republicanism which even more than Ronald Reagan champions nationalism, patriotism, and civic duty.  And yes, he is the resonating board for the anger, resentment, and frustration of the working class. 

Hillary Clinton is the Woman of the Year, finally breaking through The glass ceiling; heroine in the fight for LGBT rights, supporter of Black Lives Matter and soldier in the continuing war for civil justice; and tireless fighter for the rights of the Earth.



Yet this characterization is simplistic and too eager.  While these political differences should not be minimized, the cultural differences are even more pronounced.  The Left in America is academic, idealistic, and bound to the idea that progress is possible.  War, famine, civil strife, income inequality, social injustice can all be eliminated if only the desire and commitment is there.  Political investment is not simply electoral but philosophical and personal. 

The campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was not so much a debate of ideas but a conflict of purpose and meaning.  The Left, given its absolute belief in the perfectibility of man and our collective responsibility to attain it, cannot be frivolous or nonsensical.  The election of Donald Trump was far more than an electoral defeat; nor even just a defeat of political principles.  It was an existential defeat.

Trumpists on the other hand have never bought into the idea of human perfectibility. Life is Hobbesian – short, brutal, etc. etc. – and there is no need to fret.  Yes, we would all wish for a better life; but there is more to existence than that.  God, for one thing; and enjoying what we have, another.



Nietzsche would have delighted in the Trump presidency.  Not because he is Superman, nor even because of his indomitable will; but because of his dismissal of the serious, the mundane, and the herd.   Donald Trump has not only rejected received liberal wisdom– arrogant, self-serving media; Leftist Castro, Indian, Black Lives Matter sympathizers; gender-race-ethnicity bowdlerizers – but he has unabashedly revived and revitalized classic lowbrow American culture.

What could be more of an anathema to the liberal Left than the the gorgeous, runway-trim, confident, white, wealthy, and impossibly glitzy Trumps?  And what could be more appealing to the 60 million plus disaffected, disheartened, and angry Trump supporters?

Trump’s election is truly revolutionary.  Forget the politics, the radical populism and all that.  His ascendancy marks the final vindication of the essential America – lowbrow, anti-intellectual, People and E! magazine-fixated, reality-TV addicted; glitz, glamour, and show personified. 

The Trump White House years will be like none other.  We all wish him well and hope that he can consolidate our economic gains, restore respect from our international allies, defeat our enemies, and return American society to that envisaged by the Founding Fathers; but whatever his successes, we will be with him in every fashionista, celebrity, Hollywood, braggadocio moment.

Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’ And The Myth Of Uniqueness

Most of us are convinced that we are unique.  The most religious of us believe that we are God’s special creations, each endowed with a personally exclusive soul and each striving for perfection and salvation in our own ways.  The most secular see human beings as a random collection of genes and experiences which, while unique, have no particular purpose except for the continuation of the species.

It is hard not to buy into the culture of uniqueness.  After all, except for identical twins we share little enough genetic material to make us very much like our siblings.  Yes, there is the Blakely nose or the Sider eyes, but if one were to track the trajectories of those members of even the closest families, the lines would be incoherent tangles.  Once one leaves the genetic nest, general humanity is a diverse hodge-podge of behavior, culture, color, and preference.  Moreover very individual within these circles is as unique and different as any other.  The permutations of possibility are infinite.  

Yet despite these significant personal differences are we really that unique?  For one thing we are all endowed with human nature which, for better or worse, is aggressive, territorial, self-protective and self-interested and has been for the million or so years of human history.   Every human being through every stage of his life exhibits the same, predictable, and apparently ineluctable traits.  Toddlers compete for attention and their fair share.  Adolescents fight for respect and identity.  Adults contest everything. 

Every bit of human history and every significant piece of drama or fiction repeat the same story over and over again.  Shakespeare’s Histories, laid out in chronological order from end to end chronicle the familiar, predictable and repetitive lives of kings.  John, Henry IV, Richard II, and Henry VIII might all have been unique in their particular wars, wives, and court intrigues; but war, arranged marriages, and palace plots are common to all. 



Albee, O’Neill, Williams, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Lillian Hellman’s dramatic families are all very different, live in different ages and countries, and are conditioned by culture, tradition, and economics.  Yet they all are beset by internal competition for wealth, power, and influence.  The characters  most expressive of this very aggressive human nature – Goneril, Regan, Volumnia, Tamora, Cleopatra, Hedda Gabler, Laura, Richard II, and Miss Julie – are really no different from anyone else except for their absolute willful amorality.

For another thing we are all products of family and long before Freud dissected it and its powerful formative nature, Sophocles wrote about Oedipus and the tragic consequences of maternal love and paternal jealousy.  Hamlet is nothing if not a play about psychologically incestuous jealousy.  The Prince does not so much despises his uncle but hates his mother for sharing his bed.   Edward Albee called marriage the crucible of maturity.  There is no escape from the confines of family and the jealousies, suspicions, and hatreds that they encourage.  Yet without the experience of family, one would be ill-prepared to face the outside world.


                           www.nsavides.blogspot.com

In other words since families are the same biological and social units throughout the world and throughout human history, they necessarily must act in the same ways upon us all.   We, if Freud and Oedipus are right,  all want to sleep with our mothers and kill our fathers.  Women are Daddy’s girls until they die; and men fight with their fathers until their own end.

Families are at the center of the concentric circles of society, and their patterns of behavior are repeated throughout the system.  Offices, churches, and voluntary associations are all similar in their organizational structure and all operate on the same principles which have held families together – authority, respect, obedience, structure, and well-defined roles.  Countries necessarily follow the rules of human nature, society, and organization.

The concept of free will has been debated for millennia.  Either we have it or we don’t, but except for the most committed determinist, we all believe we do.  Only I can choose to pick up the pencil or not; eat or not eat; cross at the crosswalk or through traffic.  Whatever confected me – God or randomness – I am still the composite product of an infinite number of gene pairings and past experiences. 

A young friend of mine travelled to a rarely-visited quarter of Washington, DC to a restaurant that was recently opened and known only through a few, not necessarily reliable sources.  It was small, out-of-the-way, and edgy.  It was still a local restaurant featuring soul food, some Salvadoran entrees, but with the arrival of a new chef had introduced some California items.

My friend would be one of the first to discover it.  He would be unique in his choice and that choice would validate his personal image as an urban risk-taker, on the leading edge of social trends.
Everyone seated at the restaurant looked exactly like him.  The same clothes, hair style, demeanor, tone of voice, choice of partner, and look of indifferent interest.  Not only was he not unique, he was part of a herd.

As people age, they follow their demographics.  Diners at the restaurants they prefer all tend to be older, white-haired, and subdued.   The same retired professionals whom they knew in their pre-retirement years attend the very same adult education classes.  Their preferences in literature, art, and economics parallel if not mirror theirs.

Most of us come to the inevitable conclusion that far from being unique, we are indeed part of a herd.   Others refuse to accept this ignominy and hang on like terriers to their particular political or social causes.  They admit that in their passionate commitment to the environment, progressivism, or world peace they are part of a movement, but it is this collectivity of individual, unique passions which gives it energy.

The Secret Sharer is a short novella by Joseph Conrad about the captain of small ship who rescues a naked swimmer whom he finds clinging to a ladder inadvertently left hanging aft.  The swimmer tells his story.  He has murdered a man out of rage at his ignorance and insolence which have put his ship, foundering in a gale, at risk of death.   After weeks in an onboard brig, the swimmer escapes and tries to make for the nearest island; but instead, near exhaustion but fortuitously comes upon the captain’s ship.

The captain develops an immediate bond with the swimmer, considers him his double and hides him from the ship’s crew until he can land him on a nearby island.   The swimmer looks nothing like the captain, nor acts like him; but nevertheless he senses an unexplainable kinship.  He always refers to him as ‘my double’.

He was not a bit like me, really; yet, as we stood leaning
over my bed place, whispering side by side, with our dark heads
together and our backs to the door, anybody bold enough to open
it stealthily would have been treated to the uncanny sight
of a double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self.

The captain cannot explain the kinship, but suggests it might have to do with strangeness and unease.

I didn't know either the ship or the people. Hadn't had the time in port to look about me or size anybody up. And as to the crew, all they knew was that I was appointed to take the ship home. For the rest, I was almost as much of a stranger on board as himself, I said. And at the moment I felt it most acutely. I felt that it would take very little to make me a suspect person in the eyes of the ship's company.
He had turned about meantime; and we, the two strangers in the ship,
faced each other in identical attitudes.

None of this was disconcerting to the captain, but consoling.  There was something important about discovering a double perhaps only because circumstance was far more important than simple similarity.

Yet there was far more to the kinship than the captain had realized.

I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret
sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I, personally, were being
given to understand that I, too, was not the sort that would
have done for the chief mate of a ship like the Sephora.
I had no doubt of it in my mind.

Inexplicably he and the swimmer were so much the same that they shared not only circumstance and nature but morality, justice, and right.  No greater bond or similarity could there be.
The sense of existential kinship increases as the ship nears the island where the swimmer is to be dropped; but the sense is not one of harmony but emotional dislocation.

This is not the place to enlarge upon the sensations of a man
who feels for the first time a ship move under his feet to his
own independent word. In my case they were not unalloyed.
I was not wholly alone with my command; for there was that stranger
in my cabin. Or rather, I was not completely and wholly with her.
Part of me was absent. That mental feeling of being in two
places at once affected me physically as if the mood of secrecy
had penetrated my very soul.

It get’s worse.  The captain begins to doubt the reality of the double and of himself.

For some time longer I sat in the cuddy. Had my double vanished
as he had come? But of his coming there was an explanation,
whereas his disappearance would be inexplicable. . . . I went
slowly into my dark room, shut the door, lighted the lamp,
and for a time dared not turn round. When at last I did I
saw him standing bolt-upright in the narrow recessed part.
It would not be true to say I had a shock, but an irresistible
doubt of his bodily existence flitted through my mind.
Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes
than mine? It was like being haunted.

Finally the swimmer is let overboard to swim to shore; but in his escape from the ship, he loses his hat.  At the very moment the captain is desperately looking for anything floating thing to help him gauge headway, the hat appears.  The captain’s double, inadvertently, but meaningfully has saved him and the ship.

Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge
of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway
of Erebus--yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my
white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer
of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self,
had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment:
a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.

The fate of the swimmer, a free man, is not the destiny of the captain, for the first time alone with his ship again, and bonded with it.

The foreyards ran round with a great noise, amidst cheery cries.
And now the frightful whiskers made themselves heard giving various orders. Already the ship was drawing ahead. And I was alone with her.
Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command.

The discovery of a double, far from challenging  the captain’s sense of personal identity and worth, helps him to discover something about ineffability – circumstantial, temporal kinship which should have no lasting value but does.  The captain’s feeling of isolation from the ship and the crew – a stranger on board – disappears with the swimmer.  The short, happy, unexplained friendship has attuned him to other relationships – even to the ship – which to Conrad are more important than individuality or individual enterprise.