Our president*.
I’ve never heard such gobbledygook as the answer he gave on the last question at today’s presser—it was the last question because he didn’t want to answer it and abruptly walked off as soon as he hadn’t—on global climate change.
He talked about American energy production instead–about fossil energy–and he talked about his dedication to the wealth it generates (wealth that will never reach the 98% of Americans who will pay for it instead) and then he had the audacity to call himself an “environmentalist.”
Gobsmacked as they must have been, the reporters’ gaggle couldn’t break the White House press corps honor code: Honor requires that they treat him with the respect due a leader.
And then you realize, as the passengers did on Flight 97, that this leader’s seized the flight controls and is determined to take all of you down with him. So you wake from your shock, find your courage, and rush the cockpit.
It’s too late.
The president is–even beyond Laurence Harvey’s Manchurian Candidate or Bill Haydon’s MI6 mole in the John LeCarre novels–the perfect traitor. He has no conscience. He has no principles. He has no empathy. He has no loyalty, except to himself and to his spymaster–LeCarre called Haydon’s “Karla.”
So if it means making profit for himself, he will take all of us down with him. We will die betrayed. He will die a rich man—for once. He will die. What he leaves behind means nothing to him.
Even knowing the wreckage he’ll leave, I pray daily for a massive stroke that will drop him in the early morning before his hair is gathered into its ludicrous combover—when he still looks like Gollum—when he’s on the toilet with his tiny thumbs in mid-Twitter.
I would never do harm to another human, but I’ve never, in my life, prayed for another human to die. This is a first.
There have been so many deaths—so many lives—that have made a better difference.
I’ve seen the grave of a young Marine from Arroyo Grande who died on Iwo Jima three days before he turned twenty-one.
I’ve seen the grave of a local farmworker, killed in Normandy, at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, above Omaha Beach.
I’ve seen the grave of a schoolteacher who gave over forty years of her life to local children and loved them in every moment of the giving.
I’ve seen the grave of an immigrant, a World War II internee, who grandmothered a dozen children–Sansei, third generation Japanese-Americans—who were among my best friends in high school She taught them to live lives without bitterness.
These are my heroes. Naive as it may be, Frank Capra’s James Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, is my hero. Barbara Jordan of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 is my hero. Jane Goodall, who taught me, from my first reading years, so much about the value of all life, is my hero.
Abraham Lincoln is my hero, and so it’s the ultimate obscenity, to me, that this man lives in the same home where Lincoln once lived.
Nothing will erase—not even the absence of Donald Trump—the hatred that empowers him so. It’s been with us since the nation’s beginning. It cost Lincoln 620,000 lives to crush it, and even that terrible resolution turned out to be transitory.
But defeating Trump might scatter that hatred again into the dark corners where it belongs.
If there is a closet in Lincoln’s Springfield home—the one that pre-dates his White House— with a spider-web spun in its corner, then the spider in its center would be the closest Trump could ever hope to come to the sixteenth president’s legacy.
It would mean nothing for a Lincoln curator to find the the web and obliterate it with the stiff bristles of a broom.
Maybe then we could hope to become clean again.
But it’s entirely possible that the aftermath of the cleansing may be nearly as painful as the war that caused Lincoln so much despair. It may take as may generations as have passed since the great man, our most lucid and our most faithful president, left Springfield in the late winter of 1861.
Or it may be that we will never be clean again.