Saturday Morning Essay: The Donald Rises

It was fun writing about Vladimir & Estragon, absurdist literature and the general conundrum of the meaning of life. It seems appropriate to my age, increasingly so actually, and as I said a while back, I don't see much point anymore in the day-to-day analysis of political flotsam & jetsam. 

I confess, however, that I do have something of a soft spot for Donald Trump's opera bouffe approach to his Presidential campaign.  His campaign is really about his weird ego, and nothing else.  His insecurities are so overwhelming, his insincerity so palpable, and his disingenuousness so on-the-surface that a thoughtful person might wonder how he could be taken seriously for even a moment. Yet his poll numbers, as of now, are twice those of his nearest competitor, the erstwhile front-runner Jeb Bush.

My guess is that The Donald has tumbled to something that is a kind of open secret in American society: Americans are so fed up with their government, with the insular preoccupations of the Washington Village, that a candidate who does nothing but criticize the government and make outrageous fun of the political careerists running against him, taps into a deep and pervasive nihilism in the American electorate.  Americans don't really feel like voting for anybody anymore. So why not support a candidate who feels the same way?

That's Mr. Trump's secret.  I don't know if he thought it up, or just started in with gags like saying John McCain's war record was unimpressive because he mostly sat the Vietnam War out as a POW and found they worked. It's not so much that Americans really agree with the gist of the sentiment. What they're tired of is a politician who doesn't really have anything to contribute other than his identity as a former POW.  In the Chickenhawk Village such a war record is, of course, a subject of great reverence. The professional pols all know their lines.  Very few of them, from the President on down, ever served in the military, but they always thank everybody else "for their service," although many of them, at the same time and out of the other sides of their mouths, wonder aloud whether fighting all these wars does anything other than expose America to greater danger.  The military is "keeping America safe" by creating blowback in the Muslim world which makes America a more dangerous place.

The Village is not required to make sense.  The apparatchiks there just repeat the slogans.  Which is it? Are all these wars a colossal waste of time and money and a source of deep insecurity, or essential to "our freedom?"  We live in a timeless epoch where we seem to be thanking the veterans of World War II and the vets of the Iraq, Afghanistan, Syrian, Yemen, Libyan etc. wars (the "War on Terror") all in the same breath and for all the same reasons even though those two conflicts really have nothing to do with each other. I remember a veteran of World War II telling me a number of years back that the appropriate response to 9/11 was "to do nothing."  This only sounds strange until you reflect that it is much better to do nothing than to do something stupid.  The Chickenhawks running the U.S. government at the time felt a need to vindicate the bloodlust and vengeful ambitions of American football fans, which is to say, Bush & Five Deferments Cheney needed to project a macho image of virility and attack someone.  Chickenhawk columnists such as Tom Friedman piled on.  The Muslim world, in general, must pay, said Mr. Friedman.  Was Osama bin Laden actually behind the attacks? Who the hell knows, and who cares? He'll do, plus he lives in Afghanistan which seems like a good country to attack.

By the time Mr. Obama ordered bin Laden's assassination Americans were tired of the whole terrorist soap opera, and Obama got almost no bounce from Seal Team Six's intervention in bin Laden's house arrest by the Pakistani military.  Were we any safer now?  So far this year there have been 400 random mass murders in the United States.  The number of Americans actually killed by Muslim terrorists here in the "Homeland" are fewer than Americans killed by televisions and bookcases falling over on them at home.

I think we all kind of know these things.  We know, as The Donald says, that Rick Perry of Texas wears horn rim glasses because he looked so stupid in the Presidential debates of 2012.  American permissiveness toward illegal immigrants is ridiculous, as the Donald also says. We're just suckers for our own oft-repeated bullshit: We're A Nation of Immigrants.  Yeah, sure. Tell that to the Native Americans, who will surely believe you.

Trump called Jeb Bush "weak" (he looks the part) and Lindsey Graham an "idiot" and a "lightweight," the latter comment probably a code word for "light in the loafers."  The cable commentariat, such as Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, are apoplectic.  Joan Walsh, the uber-liberal, used the word "nihilistic" to describe Trump's style, and lamented this "descent" of American political discourse into such juvenalia. Where have you been, Joan?  One can appreciate the consternation of the TV shows who begin talking about the next presidential election about halfway into the incumbent's second term.  This is all Chris Matthews of MSNBC is going to talk about until November, 2016, and if there is a candidate who is making a joke out of the election, doesn't that mean that Chris & Co.'s coverage is also something of a joke?  Lindsey Graham calls Trump a "jackass" and Trump calls Graham an "idiot."  What august commentary can you bring to bear on that exchange?

For now Americans on the Republican side are eating it up.  What will The Donald say next?

Is Trump actually trying to vindicate the sentiments of Fed Up America?  As I said at the beginning, I don't think that's what the deranged campaign of Donald Trump is really all about.  He's not serious, he's just weirdly needy.  His shtick has a sell-by date stamped on it, and this approach won't work too much longer.  Not that his nihilism is off-base, but because at some point, maybe during the first debate, he's going to start sounding like another candidate who's actually running and then Americans are going to lose interest in Trump as well.  Until then, it will be fun while it lasts.

Happy Birthday Essay

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether you believe it or not."  Slogan on a black tee shirt.

I recently read "Waiting for Godot" on my Kindle.  It didn't quite feel right to read Samuel Beckett's 1953 Absurdist masterpiece on a Kindle.  A beer-stained, dog-eared old Vintage paperback would be much better.  Paper yellowed with age, the glue dried out, pages slipping loose. Authentic, in other words.

I've read the play before, have seen it performed two or three times.  The plot is easy to follow, since it doesn't have one.  Vladimir and Estragon are standing by a tree on a country road in some unspecified place.  It may be France.  They're often described as "tramps," and that seems possible. You gather they've known each other a long time; a reference is made to picking grapes together in Macon 50 years before the scene in the play.  They might be in their sixties or seventies now.

We never find out who or what Godot is.  Naturally, there is much speculation about the symbolic suggestion of the first three letters of this name.  Are they waiting for Death? While they're standing there, waiting for Godot, an obnoxious character named Pozzo comes along with his servant/slave Lucky.  All in all, Pozzo and Lucky are around for about half the play, and there's a lot of interaction, most of it irritating and uninformative.  You wish that Pozzo and Lucky would leave, so the dialogue could return simply to Vladimir and Estragon's desultory exchanges about nothing in particular. Pozzo keeps saying he's going to leave, then doesn't.  Estragon expresses his desire to leave often, but Vladimir asks him to tarry, so they can wait for Godot.  They contemplate suicide by hanging themselves in the tree.  They lament that they were not among the first to jump from the Eiffel Tower when they had the chance.

Vladimir holds forth early in the play about the Crucifixion.  He's curious why only one of the Gospels relates that Jesus saved one of two thieves being crucified along with him.  He first notes that one out of two thieves "is a reasonable percentage."  But he notes that the other three Gospels do not have this detail.  Either they don't mention thieves at all, or both thieves are damned.  Why, then, Vladimir wants to know, is this the version passed on as the authentic account, since it's a minority report? Estragon doesn't care, but feigns exaggerated interest. 

Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) aren't even sure they're in the right place.  They're not sure it's the right day.  They can't remember if they were waiting in the same place the day before.  In a haunting exchange, Estragon points out they have no way of knowing any of these things:

Estragon:  You're sure it was this evening?
Vladimir:  What?
Estragon:  That we were to wait.
Vladimir:  He said Saturday. I think.
Estragon:  You think.
Vladimir:  I may have made a note of it.
Estragon:  But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? Or Monday? Or Friday?
Vladimir:  It's not possible!
Estragon:  Or Thursday?
Vladimir:  What'll we do?
Estragon:  If he came yesterday and we weren't here you may be sure he won't come again today.
Vladimir:  But you say we were here yesterday.
Estragon:  I may be mistaken.

Interwoven in the dialogue are bits and pieces of physical comedy.  You might picture Laurel and Hardy as the tramps and get a sense of how they carry on.  A funny scene is made of Didi and Gogo trying on three different hats in a circular motion, so that a hat is always on their heads while the third is passed between their hands, as if they were juggling.  I've seen it done on stage and it's mesmerizing when done right.

Also, it's completely pointless and has nothing to do with the play.  But then nothing in "Waiting for Godot" seems to have anything to do with anything.  There is a flow, but no development, and at the end of the play they're standing on a country road by a tree waiting for Godot.

A great deal of ink has been spilled in academic and critical efforts to figure out what "Godot" means. I think that's Beckett's slyest joke.  An extraordinarily brilliant and erudite writer (like his mentor James Joyce before him), Beckett's play is about that very thing: Waiting for Meaning.  Vladimir and Estragon lived a long time, they've been friends for 50 years, and Meaning never showed up.  "Nothing to be done," says Vladimir as the first line of the play.  All that was left them was to pass the time, and they do so together, these aging tramps. They don't hang themselves on the tree because Estragon, who only plays at being the lesser thinker, cautions Vladimir that Didi's greater girth means the spindly bough will probably break under his weight. So that if Gogo goes first, Vladimir will be left without him but without a way to join his friend in death.

So they resume their vigil on a country road by a tree, with no memory of how they got there, nor how long they have been there, nor any idea how much longer they will wait.