UPCOMING SHOWS
The Fray in the US
-Written by Luke Elliot
America has never really had a president like Donald Trump. He’s not a facist. Facists have fundamental beliefs and agendas. Even Hitler liked dogs. Trump doesn’t like anything. But to say that he’s a nihilist gives Nietzsche a bad name. He is a human vacuum, sucking the oxygen in from everything and everyone around him until all we see in his presence are vapid sacks of skin; J.D. Vances and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s. Eyeballs and ears, their lips pursed to kiss the brown between their master’s cheeks.
To that point:
I’ve just returned from a four-day trip in Florida. VG called me two weeks ago and asked me to put down some thoughts on what was happening in America. I started with one idea and then went to another and then another. Stumbling blocks.
I went to the states to get a better sense of what to write, to more fully understand what was happening at home. I stayed with my father, who lives in Palm Harbor, on the West Coast, about three and a half hours from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s East Coast Xanadu. The coasts are as different as can be. One is pastoral, with rural beaches on a Gulf that nobody calls America. The other is urban, manicured, elite. Palm Harbor is a perfect place for a retired English professor and dean of nursing who hike with their dog and fret about the loss of the justice and fairness initiatives they worked their lives to build. An April 23rd Executive Order banned the use of disparate impact, critical to my father’s work on equal admissions and college placement. Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, now advancing to the Senate, bars Medicaid from providing funding to Planned Parenthood as long as abortions are provided. My stepmother partnered with that organization for decades in joint educational programs.
Trump had hit my liberal, democratic family.
I’ve had this theory for a while about Democratic Negligence. I wanted to suggest that the liberal party helped in handing the election over to Agent Orange by, amongst many other things, mishandling the boundaries of Political Correctness.
It has seemed to me that the Democrats have done very little to combat the overly conservative talking points, or lack thereof, following the #MeToo movement in 2016. The Democrats nobly tried to further awareness of sexual assault and harassment but somewhere lost the point. Overcorrection triumphed, and Cancel Culture became rampant. Now, it seems almost impossible to speak with folks on the left, just as it is impossible to speak with folks on the right. Expressed views on hot-button issues—from the legalization of Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy (GAHT) for transgender youth to women’s bodily autonomy—are conversation stoppers.
And just off-stage prowls Trump, who says what he wants, when he wants. A fraud, swindling the American Public, he sells his snake oil to a sick and wounded crowd. The Rattlesnake King. A modern-day Clark Stanley. And as essential to the American Dream as the apple pie and the first amendment, fortunately or unfortunately, is showmanship. Trump’s Republican party welcomes the outsider. It creates a safe haven for him, as have many of history’s nationalistic or extreme governments and organizations.
I like the idea presented by psychologist Steven Pinker who wrote in The New York Times on May 23rd about Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As professor there for twenty-two years, he observes that “Harvard has always attracted outsized attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.” Surely that is what we are now experiencing when we talk about the United States.
America is a natural magnet for the best and worst of us all. We are a nation of universal high ideals and daily intentional cruelty. We offer education for all yet forbid consideration of those we have culturally and economically isolated. We promote women’s rights yet draw the line at their bodily agency. We promote freedom of speech yet cringe when it oversteps its boundaries.
We are a people of inherent contradictions.
Like theory-building, that is the point, isn’t it? We make stuff up in America. Sometimes the stuff works. Sometimes it doesn’t. American Derangement Syndrome is, perhaps, another name for democracy. It can create American Jazz and gumbo. It can create folklore and fantasy. Or it can create segregation and disenfranchisement. Desolation at its most profound. The ambiguity can be beautiful or tragic.
There are always consequences, and there’s always responsibility. The best antidote to the syndrome is to remember, first and always, to stand with the suffering. That, I suppose, is the main point here. We have forgotten to stand with those who need us most. Somehow, somewhere, the yarn got lost. How to find it again may very well be the next project for the United States.