Donald J. Trumped-up haunts my dreams. I see his bared teeth about to bite into and devour American democracy… Goodbye to all that!
Donald J. Trumped-up haunts my dreams. I see his bared teeth about to bite into and devour American democracy as if it were a canape at a Mara-a-Logo fundraiser for the Proud Boys, and I wake up on the verge of dialing 911!
In order to increase the possibility of pleasant dreams, I then try to imagine how the Former might be encouraged to exeunt our lives in a way that he would find acceptable, however “fake” my suggestions might seem at first.
If nothing else, my fantasies serve as a kind of calmant that lulls me into sleep as I count sheeplike images of MTG and Santos jumping over a CAUTION tape and landing on a remote island with enough fruit trees to survive (a kind of natural Welfare system for which they may have to be grateful).
Enough daydreaming! Let me get down to substantive and persuasive proposals that the Former may find as digestible as the fast food he likes to consume just as he would like to devour and eliminate (remember the Golden Toilet Bowl), for starters, the Bill of Rights.
Like the recently crowned King Charles — who escapes now and then to a modest farmhouse in the Carpathians Mountains of Transylvania to lead a simple life and discover the pleasures of being a private person — the Former might buy one of the lesser-known Adirondack peaks.
There, on a promontory all his own, he might discover what Emerson calls “the infinitude of the private man” and renounce the need to imitate Vlad the Impaler.
Alone, save for a M.A.S.H. version of a MacDonald’s and a few defeated GOP candidates as servants, he might (key word) feel so on top of the world, so lordly in sole possession of something like Keats’ “peak in Darien” (not CT), that he needn’t, because of his gripes, trample on the grapes of our lives.
If this reinvention of his life seems improbable, I have another equal, but antithetical, suggestion for him: to set out, even at his advanced age and obesity, for empirical conquests.
Bequeathing Trump Tower to one of his children, wannabe conquistadors, he might set out on a neo-medieval quest for an updated version of the Holy Grail – yet undiscovered oil fields off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
I think I might be able to persuade him to strike out for this as yet untaken road by encouraging him to read (or have someone read to him) some lines from Tennyson’s stirring “Ulysses”: “Old age hath yet his honor and his toil…’tis not too late to seek a newer world….”
Living as he does near Port Everglades, it will be easy for him to commandeer a yacht (after all, he can take whatever he wants) and “smite the furrows.”
Okay, I admit this is far-fetched, and I need to come up with a more realistic exit-strategy for him, an off-ramp to a place where he won’t be savaged nightly by Rachel and Lawrence O’Donnell and where he will feel ennobled at the same time.
Voila! The island of Elba off the Tuscany Coast where Napoleon spent 1814-15 in exile. The Former will be able to sun-bathe and regale his entourage with tales of all his legal evasions in response to which they all can belt down some vino and cheer, “There will be more, Il Duce, there will be more!”
He will be able in luxurious exile (the DNC will provide him with a 5-star RV) to contemplate world conquest), and if Melania is not with him (her choice), he will be able to hook up with a local…well, modesty forbids. Napoleon’s last word was “Josephine.” Trump would have time to contemplate his – “Stormy…”
Okay, again, I’m fooling myself, but fantasy can be restorative and enable us to have a good night’s rest, so we wake up with enough energy to campaign against Trumped-up and Trumped-upism at all levels and to vote in every election for every candidate who believes in e pluribus unam, not Après moi, le deluge!
Howard R. Wolf struggled to get a B- in French courses at Horace Mann School & Amherst College, so he tries to use a few semi-chic mots whenever possible. He has a scene in his recent novella, Distant Love, where his protagonist has a conversation with Hemingway in Paris. Howard’s first book (a memoir), Forgive the Father: A Memoir of Changing Generations, was displayed in the window of Shakespeare & Company.
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