There is something wrong about right things, or the way they get perceived or played; the way they are put away, either as things of ridicule and rejection or, worse, as stuff deserving of no more than indifference.
There is also something wrong, deeply and disturbingly wrong, about the electric currency of wrong things, about how they get played and perceived and embraced.
We are living the Age of Darkness Shining, an oxymoron age which is the celebration of the antonyms of all things right, or what used to be right and is now widely, and cheerily, tossed aside as wrong. But it will not do to merely state that and assume the job’s done, malfeasance identified and denounced. When the virtuous finger has stopped to wag, the demon’s still there, smiling scornfully. Why and how? Upon whose approval and applause? To what causes, seeking what effect? Such questions need pondering and introspection. It won’t come easy, but it may have become essential to move beyond scorning and slagging and seeking explanations, even disagreeable explanations.
On the morning after Donald Trump had bled the United States of America red — so red that it turned the opinion pollsters puce in the face from purple — I woke up to a chill morning in an avowedly blue, mid-western state and looked out the window to be told the meaning of what had happened overnight across the spanking geography of the free world. The front lawns of a neighbouring residence had been turned into a sudden outcrop of star-spangled banners and placards trumpeting Trump — more than a dozen of them clearly planted in the dewy grass as exhibition of belligerent, in-the-face celebration of a leader who, mildly put, is a flagrant cocktail of misdoing, misdemeanour and many things mala fide. But it was more than just that. It was also a swipe, a typically low and lying swipe, at Kamala Harris, as if the blanket bludgeoning of Trump’s Democrat challenger required any more. Clearly the bully wasn’t happy just winning, the bully needed to twist the taunt deeper. Most of those placards were simple endorsements, such as you’d see posted outside homes across the US — “TRUMP/VANCE”. But a couple gave out the spirit that Trump successfully evoked, and which has now come to preside that country. “TRUMP SECURE BORDER/KAMALA OPEN BORDER”, one said. “TRUMP SAFETY/KAMALA CRIME”, read another.
Close to the last lap of the campaign for the White House, The New York Times ran a capital-letter display on its opinion pages which read:
“DONALD TRUMP
SAYS HE WILL
PROSECUTE HIS
ENEMIES
ORDER MASS
DEPORTATIONS
USE SOLDIERS
AGAINST CITIZENS
ABANDON ALLIES
PLAY POLITICS
WITH DISASTERS
BELIEVE HIM.”
Clearly, the NYT meant the page to be a red flag to the citizenry, a warning that the omens of Trump’s swagger were not stump posturing but for real. The Trump voter — and more than just the conservative, Christian, White supremacist troupe that has rallied behind him for close to a decade — saw in the NYT alert not any peril but only promise.
Trump will deal with his enemies and prosecute them. Well, he should. Trump will shutter the US and smoke out those he thinks are unfit or a mote in the eye of the MAGA dreams. Well, he should, why not? Trump isn’t bothered with this internationalist mumbo-jumbo of America’s burdens abroad. NATO? Whatever’s that and who’s footing the bill and why? All of that was, in effect, their manifesto, or at least a good part of it. They also seemed to embrace Trump’s overt racism and Islamophobia. They champion the negation and the persecution of scientific method and temper, of Covid and climate change. They were, in good measure, tolerant of or indifferent to his misogyny, often they appeared to indulge and revel in it. Giving women the right over their own bodies and health? Well… maybe, maybe not, who cares as long as we trust in god and god’s on our side?
Never mind the ideas and pledges that Kamala Harris brought to her presidential bid, because for the moment at least they have all but been cast close to the street-side bin. Never mind what she may or may not have been as boss of the White House. But please mind what Donald Trump’s return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington DC in full MAGA regalia might mean. America has for the first time elected as the chief arbiter of its affairs — and, frighteningly, possibly also the world’s — a felon on multiple counts, from financial fraud to falsifying business records to mishandling and hoarding classified government documents to making under the table payoffs to adult movie stars for sexual dalliances. He inspired — and court proceedings on that count have just been withdrawn because of presidential immunities — the violent and dystopian assault by a crazed bunch of supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 while a joint session of the Congress was in progress. Now formally re-elected as US president, Trump evidently is of one mind with that mob which was moved to rage because it believed the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’; he has said, probably on multiple occasions, that he should never have left the White House four years ago. Such is the man the largest democracy on earth has elected, a man who embodies affront to the most fundamental values of what we understand when humanity and civilisation are mentioned. What should we make of folks who make such choices? What should we make of folks who are in raptures because they can shine upon us their darkness?
Any resemblance to what might have happened — or is happening — at home is purely not coincidental.
sankarshan.thakur@abp.in
