On one side of the splitscreen plays, some people say, one of the greatest stories ever told. A band of pilgrims wanders the desert wilderness of the American West, maybe the Mojave. The brilliant light of the afternoon sun–punishing, ecstatic, purifying– floods the ready metaphorics of the landscape.
His presentation was anchored by satellite and surveillance images, dark and blurry and indefinite, meant to illustrate a vast capacity for weapons production. Each image contained arrows and circles and thought bubbles, designating what each image was supposed to mean.
The message arrives in an old-fashioned way, through the horse-and-buggy mail, in an envelope swollen with extravagance and calligraphy.
From syntax to zeitgeist, it turns out that verbal passivity leads, indirectly, through wordy and circuitous paths, from grammar to the public sphere and there, in the town square, for everyone to see, fingers are pointed elsewhere.
Sychopancy and substance aside, a different kind of civil war has indeed been joined, however, by right-way-thinking strategists and wanna-be alphas. The sour, in-house, backstage squabble is not about policy. It is about finding a style that is irresistible to the increasingly paranoid base and will keep them watching.
Our first glimpses seemed carnivalesque, disorganized, spontaneous, a MAGA circus of sorts. A painted clown with satyr horns, howling not at the moon but at the ornate ceiling of the United States Capitol. The mute extras from Trump rallies, guileless, taking selfies with statues and each other, the dead and the living, leaving their digital footprints and corporal fingerprints everywhere
Such was the magic number Trump hoped to shake out of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, on January 2, 2021, during a now infamous, hour-long plus phone call. Although the conversation wandered very far and very, very wide, the President always came back to either that particular, peculiar figure or one quite like it.
Telling without telling, the cashout stays in the just beyond, in the future conditional. We never find out exactly what Lady Gaga did. That’s okay, actually. It’s better that way, even.
Someday soon, somebody will write the definitive history of Donald Trump’s perverse anti-science. How, during a global pandemic, he has undermined the very people with the knowledge that we the people, as a nation, depend upon to survive. How scientific guidelines appear and disappear and reappear again, revised and revised and revised again, with confused and contradictory messaging on how we might protect ourselves and others from viral transmission; how firm directives written one day are then released the next as softer, optional suggestions.
So up went those monuments to Confederate politicians, generals, and soldiers and the people rallied around their new stone martyrs and wept. The purpose of the hallowed statuary, of course, was never only about commemorating history. The purpose was specific, strategic and contemporary. The goal was to inspire a gut-level, rah-rah blessing for the new crimes of Jim Crow, for the whites-only and exclusionary voting laws that needed to be defended, yet again, against Yankee judgement and possible aggression. That wordless man on the plinth in the square, holding a rifle, standing there through day and night, through summer and winter? He died so that you may live free.
