Trump's Madness: Mar-a-Logos

Liberty's light has dimmed as the Trump cloud descends upon us, a tweeting frenzy of racist bombast, atavistic authoritarianism, bellicose posturing, and xenophobic nationalism as the madness at the core becomes our own.

Anxious and uncertain about not only the future, but about being trapped in an eternal present as we witness—protesting, phoning, and letter writing—continued political and diplomatic disasters in a ceaseless current of catastrophes, anxious about our daily safety and freedoms, Americans “sleep no more,” worried sick about the “sea incarnadine” resulting from Trump's having his hand in it, as it turns far “redder” than we could have imagined. We live in a knot of impotence, anxiety, and fatigue, in what one articulate journalist has called “the new criminogenic culture.”

Indeed, the marked decline in civility, the increase in public displays of aggression, and the disappearance of metaphor have migrated directly from the body of the president to the social and political body of the people. You may recall that Trump talked about his penis directly. He had “no problem down there,” he repeatedly claimed. Contrarily, the female “down there” has “blood coming out of it!” Wounded, “less than,” the female clearly has a “problem.” But even if that is something of the psychoanalytic gist of it, that is also the very least of it. The wall, the immigrant ban, indeed, almost all the flurry of frenzied “executive orders” concern a failure of metaphor. One does need a wall when one does not have a word.

The Twitter Principle dictates that there is no “yes” because there is no “no.” The only “no” that is encountered—indeed, that must ceaselessly be encountered—is the other's “no” that is met, at each and every instance, with a full-on assault. The assault on reality is incessant insofar as reality is limited. Let's face it: reality is not “great” and it can't be “great again,” since it was never that great in the first place. This helps us fathom something of the fun