In closing my last post, I referred to the current president as a “monster,” and, while the writer and lay philosopher in me stands by that term in a metaphorical, perhaps metaphysical, sense, the journalist in me failed to ascribe to him the visible and visceral qualities that reflect the worst of humanity—the worst of the here and now: immorality; faithlessness; brutality; hubris; thuggishness; fear-mongering; bigotry; violence against children and other innocents; willful, even wanton, ignorance of, or self-serving abuse of, any code of law either secular or religious; duplicity; hatred of the dissemination of information through a free press; fealty to, or at least admiration of, dictators; disrespect for the sacrifices and values of allies; and elevation of self above all others.
These are the most easily-assessed and quantifiable traits of a man whose concept of what it means to be a president of the United States is so skewed and perverted it is not even wrong; it is existentially dangerous. Donald Trump is toxic and corrosive to every moral, ethical, legal, and humane structure underpinning the fabric of the Republic.
He is toxic because he is poisoning honest discourse, polluting the once-free-flowing waters of public information, and contaminating any and all laws that might otherwise ensnare him.
He is corrosive because he is dissolving the trembling bonds that hold us together in the hope that by destabilizing, despoiling, and eventually destructing social and political norms as we know them, he and his deluded followers will rebuild the nation in his Trumpian image—tearing down the shining city on a hill and raising a gilded tower on the Stygian shore.
Now, because the president’s attorney general has opened his Bible to justify the tearing away of children from their mothers, I think it is fair for me to open my Bible to predict the outcome of the president’s plans for his Trump-in-Heaven Tower of Gold. Hmmmm, it seems I’ve selected Genesis 11, verses 1-9 (the King James version is what I have before me).
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
I find this selection far more interesting and appropriate to our current situation than the attorney general’s attempt at Biblical rationalization for dissolving families at the border. In the allegory of the Tower of Babel, we can see clearly the existential folly of builders who seek to raise up to heaven a structure—built of “brick and slime”—for the singular purpose of creating a pure community of one voice, one people, unrestrained from doing that “which they have imagined to do.”
And what is it the president imagines to do, once he has dissolved the bonds of justice, silenced his critics, and purified the nation in his image? He imagines he will reshape the presidency to suit his irrational whims of power and glory; he imagines he will be heralded by the world’s despots and feared by the world’s democracies. His gluttony for gold will be unbound, and, thus unrestrained by any irritating fetters of law or morality, he will embark on building a huge and beautiful tower dedicated to Trumpocracy fashioned by his workforce of purified acolytes using the bricks of his ego and the slime of his soul.
But take heart; this is not a Biblical lesson I am preaching. It is a lesson to encourage courage in the face of presidential folly and Congressional acquiescence. We have it in us to confound Trump’s language and to scatter his people like so much dust in the wind. We cannot let the staged drama and lie-filled misdirection of this White House distract us from our true capabilities and mission.
Jeopardized as we might seem to be by the corrosive and poisonous fumes emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we each have a special HazMat suit to counter those noxious clouds of presidential gas: we have the vote as our protection against the stain of tyranny, and we must put on that suit and wear it to the polls in 2018 and 2020.
Imagine what we can achieve when our nation of individuals—where the idea of “one out of many” still makes sense to most of us—rejects Trump’s egocentric yearnings of grandeur, and stands resolute and hand-in-hand in our mutual desire to work toward perfecting, not dissolving, the bonds of humanity, decency, dignity, and honest struggle that unite us.
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