No Joy

One part of the faulty indoctrination we've received in the American myth is to expect polarity and simplicity--that good and evil won't be intertwined, for example, and that we are good and that evil will arise looking like Charles Manson and that we will see it instantly and kick its ass. But deceit is inherent in evil and, though there's been an evolution, Donald Trump is as close as we will probably get to a vision of evil arising fully-formed and easily-recognizable.

Trump is the evil arising from us, the embodiment of all of our innate American weaknesses in heroic aspect, meaning out-sized and exaggerated. If Trump's life is one big avoidance of facing the reality of himself, that he is pathetic, the same is true of us and if we can continue to deny the truth about ourselves we are to the world what Trump is to America, an enormous, offensive, unsustainable celebration of the joys of selfishness and irresponsible living. 

He may represent the last opportunity we have to confront our failings before we succumb to them, though I thought this about Bush and we came out on the other side of that, nominally intact, an indication of the resiliency of our system. It may also be that we are already doomed no matter what we do, that it is a national identity crisis coming to fruition and that we have to get right down in the ditch and then be reborn as something entirely different.

If that's the case then it's reassuring that "entirely different" may look more like the best of what we were and less like Trump but it's sad that there's so little joy in our carelessness. If an orgy of consumption really made us happy it would redeem some of the waste, but our puritanical roots keep us always from either owning our shit or enjoying the debauch. I don't see any joy in Trump or us but only compulsion and an insatiable need and unfillable void.