Remembrances of Chants Past

   There is something particularly pathetic about the specter of president-elect Donald J. Trump’s recent “Thank  You” rallies, including the one he gave in Orlando, Fla., Dec. 16.

   With vanity unbound, Trump seems to prefer the adrenalin jolt of appearing before charged-up crowds to the dull day-to-day details of preparatory governance. 

   It is hardly surprising that a man with a hummingbird attention span and a bottomless need for adoration should want to appear before worshipping throngs. What's especially troubling is the nature of his free-form asides in his otherwise prepared speeches. The man simply cannot seem to let go of the campaign and election. He revisits them incessantly, suggesting a twisted nostalgia for glories past. 

   In Orlando, he spent fifteen minutes of his fifty-minute speech criticizing the “dishonest” media’s campaign coverage. Then, like all small men, he gloated about his victory. 

   Underneath Trump's braggadocio, however, one detects the stench of fear. Trump loved the rough and tumble of the campaign: the crowds, the “movement,” the energy, the constant attention (including from the “dishonest” media). He now seems desperate to capture the glories of his crusade and his conquest, but there’s no sense of joy in the work ahead.

   He’s like the half-drunk guy at the end of the bar, retailing the same tired story about some now-fading moment of distinction. “That last week was magic,” he said in Orlando, referring to the days before the Nov. 8 election. “Everywhere we went, we had crowds like this.” The only thing more important to Trump than the size of his hands is that of his crowds. He suggested that the Orlando gathering numbered “twenty-two thousand,” with more waiting outside. (Trump has proved himself bereft of fealty to truth, fact, and evidence, so one takes his estimate with a pillar of salt.)

   He also seems incapable of praising his supporters without applauding himself. In Orlando, he referred to recently being named Time’s “Person of the Year.” To the crowd, he said, “They should give it to you, because this is a movement, folks." He quickly added, "Although I have been a very good messenger, do we agree?” Classic Trump: flatter the flock, then pull focus back to yourself and take credit. (Earlier, he’d said that “the movement… is not about me.” Uh huh.)

   Trump’s supporters, of course, play their symbiotic part in fanning his peculiar nostalgia. It doesn’t take much for them to chant, “Lock her up!,” evidently unmindful that Hillary Clinton has long since conceded defeat and found her way to (mostly) private life. It’s as if tens of thousands of Chicago Cubs fans gathered at Wrigley Field a month and a half after the World Series to cheer, one last time, as the team replayed key moments from all seven games.

   The president-elect does seem to sense a change in the tenor of his post-election crowds, and in Orlando, this drew from him something of a rebuke: “Here’s what I noticed. Four weeks ago, just prior to—and always prior to—[the election], you people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ Screaming, ‘Prison! Prison! Lock her up!’ I mean, you were going crazy. I mean, you were nasty and mean and vicious, and you wanted to win, right?” He meant these things, alas, as compliments. “But now,” he went on, “you’re mellow, and you’re cool, and you’re not nearly as vicious or violent. Because we won.” Under the bluster, one detected a hint of melancholy. He who feeds off violent energy dies a little when violent energy abates.

   Trump is not conflicted only about about the multitudes from whom he seeks worship. He also decries the “dishonest” media at the very same moment that he craves, demands, and crows about their attention. After pointing to the crush of cameras in Orlando, and denouncing them, he added, “That is a lot of [camera] people. Man! I’ll tell you—that is a lot of people back there!” In other words: we hate the media—but look how many are covering me!

   And yet, typical of a petty tyrant’s squabbling dissatisfaction with those whom he thinks should fawn, even the putatively elevating media coverage Trump receives is never quite to his liking.

   In Orlando, he offered a bizarre disquisition on the “Person of the Year” honor: “Time magazine, and the Financial Times, a very big deal, just gave me ‘Person of the Year’.” He purports to hate the media—until he's offered plaudits by outlets that, in his view, rate. Then, they’re “a very big deal.”

   He went on: “So, in the past it was called ‘Man of the Year.’ Now it’s called ‘Person of the Year.’ What do you like better? Do you like ‘Person of the Year’?” Boos. “Do you like ‘Man of the Year’?” Cheers. “Well, they wanna be politically correct. But I had an idea… If it’s a man, you go, ‘Man of the Year’—Trump. If it’s a woman…, maybe you go, ‘Woman of the Year,’ or ‘Person of the Year.’ Right? … Shall we speak to the people at Time magazine and say, ‘We want it again next year, but we want “Man of the Year”?’”

   Thus the president-elect of the United States of America, still the most powerful nation on Earth, is peppering his public speeches with corrections to media outlets who insufficiently aggrandize his endlessly needy ego. 

   The true pathos of Trump's post-election rallies lies in the mutually dependent and deluding relationship he and his supporters inhabit. Rally attendees wanted an authoritarian, and they got one. Yet they seem to reanimate good-old-days chants (“Lock her up!”) as though brandishing a crucifix against the looming vampire of Trump’s inevitable betrayal of them, even as he pines for fast-vanishing days of simple, violent rallies.

   Trump has filled his Cabinet with Wall Streeters, oil executives, anti-labor crusaders, and billionaires. These people do not represent nor care about the interests of Trump's core supporters.

   In Orlando, Trump said, “The American worker is finally going to have a champion in the White House.” The crowd howled. But it was possible that behind the throaty cheers lurked an as yet unspoken sense that those ordinary Americans will be let down, once again, by those who run the show behind Trump's deflect-and-distract "reality" show.
   Those supporters elected Trump believing they were in on the con. Soon enough, it will dawn on them that they’re the ones being conned, after all.

Game of Thrones

   My partner, Tim, and I drove to San Francisco this morning to get haircuts by a stylist who works in the Kabuki Center, in Japantown.

   Once we arrived I was seized, as one occasionally is, with a pressing need to use the gentlemen’s facilities, so I peeled off into a men’s room. 

   Inside, a man occupied one of the three stalls; another  washed his hands at the sink. I found my way to the end stall, locked myself in, and sat down to rid myself of unnecessary waste. (Fittingly, I did so while reading news stories, on my phone, about Donald Trump.)

   Some time passed. People came and went. My attention was suddenly gripped by the sound of a loud voice, speaking as if making an important announcement to the assembled masses.

   “A white boy, a Chinese guy and a black dude walk into a bathroom,” the voice said, as its owner locked himself into the stall next to mine.

   I was given pause. Was he talking to me? To the other assembled men? Were there still other men in the bathroom? The voice sounded like it belonged to an African-American man, which would account for one-third of the joke setup’s population. Had he passed an Asian man on his way in? Did he know I’m a “white boy,” and if so, how?

   I had little time to muse. The joke, retailed for an audience of no one, continued.
   “The white guy says, ‘Look at that plane, up there in the sky,’” the voice boomed.

   You know that thing where you’re in public—on the bus or the subway, at a movie theater or, indeed, in a men’s room--and someone starts talking to no one in particular, in a voice too loud to be a self-involved mumble, and you do that thing where you don’t make eye contact, and you shrink your body so as to disappear from the vista of the talker’s perspective? Let me put it this way: I was grateful for the stall wall separating the jokester and me. (To be clear: I am not a “white boy” who fears “black dudes.” I am a reasonably sane person who goes on alert when crazy might have walked into the room.)

   “The black dude,” my neighbor continued, “goes, ‘Yeah—look at that plane.’ And the Chinese dude goes…”

   Here I flashed that perhaps the man was indeed telling this story for the dubious benefit of Asian men still occupying themselves in the men’s room. Uh oh, I thought.

   “And the Chinese dude goes, ‘Look at that plane—way up there in the sky.”

   What followed was silence.

   It was not the silence of no applause; one wouldn’t expect clapping in a men’s room. Rather, it was, at least on my part, the silence of utter bewilderment. Was that the punch line? If so, just what did it mean? Was it a slight based on the perception that Asian men are shorter than others? Was the “Chinese dude” in the joke so tiny that the plane appeared especially far away to him?

   Again my ruminations were short-circuited, this time when my neighbor made what was to be his final declaration.

   “It’s kind of a shit joke,” he said.

   Well, I thought but did not say, better a shit joke than a shitty joke.

   And with shitty jokes on my mind, I returned to my reading about Donald Trump.

Total "Cuck"heads

   Voters and members of the American white supremacist right, otherwise known as the Republican party, have two vivid terms of derision for those they perceive as being soft 'n squishy liberals: we are "snowflakes" and "cucks." The former slight ridicules hyper-sensitivity; the latter one mocks a (symbolically) castrated man.
   As a soft 'n squishy liberal, I hereby happily adopt the terms as my own. I am proud to be a snowflake. (I am unique!)
   In return, I offer this term for the white supremacist right, in all its arrogant ignorance: "Dumb Fucks."  
   I'm having a T-shirt made up: "Better a Hot Cuck Than a Dumb Fuck."
   Look--I'm a gay man, and I've lived a long time. (I turned sixty this week. Gifts gladly welcomed.) Since puberty, I've studied the "straight" American male--especially of the Dumb Fuck variety--in all his glory and folly. Early on I studied them for signs of danger: they are an unpredictable and violent sort, especially when it comes to those they perceive as weak. (To the Dumb Fucks, gay males are ipso facto weak, a confusion of "gay" and "effeminate"--and "effeminate" and "weak"--that has no basis in reality, not that reality matters a whit to those imbeciles.) Later I studied them because... well, because I just couldn't believe how fucking dumb they were. (I am excepting and exempting, here, all non-Dumb-Fuck heterosexual men, many of whom comprise a swath of my friends 'n family circle.)
   After a teeny-tiny majority of Americans elected the Dumb-Fuck-in-Chief on Nov. 8, some of the country's Dumb Fucks cheerily made their presence known. They spray-painted swastikas about the place, screamed racially charged epithets from truck windows, and generally comported themselves like ill-behaved morons. (Hate-watch groups tracked nearly a thousand instances of hate speech and hate crimes in the fortnight after the election.) No sportsmanship, here; gloating is the order of the day, and attack is the new black. (Attacking blacks is the new new black.)
   Of course, Dumb Fucks that they are, some got caught and prosecuted, the fucking Dumb Fucks. Poor things: they saw the Dumb-Fuck-in-Chief livin' large during the campaign, breaking rules with impunity. (Taxes? What taxes?) So they tried the same--and quickly learned that the long arm of the law applies itself more liberally to non-billionaire rebels.
   But this is of little surprise. American Dumb Fucks proudly parade their ignorance. Autodidactic self-betterment? Courageous self-examination and amended behavior when necessary? That's for the snowflake "elites." Better to be unlettered, unlearned, superciliously stupid. Dumb Fucks wear cluelessness as a badge of honor, and a sorry badge it is. Unable to parse the simplest concepts, incapable of applying even rudimentary critical thinking, they're dupes for phony news, snake-oil conspiracy peddlers, and long cons like the Dumb-Fuck-in-Chief-elect. (If the Dumb Fucks think he has their back--oh, the pain they're gonna feel.)
      The great secret of the American Dumb-Fuck "straight" male is the terrible shame he harbors about what how little he is. I'm talking not about appendage size (though he is, often), but about his presence in the world. He beats his chest and shouts vulgarities, all the while knowing he is nothing. The more the bluster, the smaller the man.
   During the campaign, a videotape from twelve years ago showed the Republican Dumb Fuck candidate bragging about grabbing women's hoo-has. In doing so, he appeared breathtakingly puny. That he made this gloat to a man two decades his junior just made the whole seamy thing seem that much more pathetic.
   And this is the man the Dumb Fucks elevate as their role model.
   Hey--wanna make a Dumb Fuck mad? If he flips you off on the road--laugh. It drive 'em insane. I had to stop doing it years ago. It so enraged the raging men that they became truly dangerous. Flip 'em off? Sure. That's just chest-beating across the lanes. But laugh? It pokes the raw spot of their terrible secret shame. Laugh at a Dumb Fuck, he's liable to kill you. (Dumb Fucks, of course, carry guns, because why have a fair fight? Powerless men need powerful weapons.)
   So, yeah. Call me a "snowflake." Whatever. Call me a "cuck." It's water off this duck's back.
   Because here's the thing. The Dumb Fucks will have a moment when they'll feel they're in the driver's seat: Jan. 20, 2017, when the Dumb-Fuck-elect is sworn in. Soon enough, however, it will penetrate the fog of their thick brains that, like the rest of us, they've been taken for a good, long ride.
   Who's the fuckin' cuck then?