The Feral Passion Of A Trump Hater And The Perils Of True Belief - The Saga Of The Madwoman Of Bethesda

'I hate him', said Vicki Carter to her closest friend, Hanna Blinker, referring to Donald Trump. 'He is vile, horrendous person, and I shudder whenever I think about him'. 

'Well, don't', replied the much more recondite and reserved friend; but she knew that any temperance, moderation, or objectivity on the part of Vicki was impossible.  The woman's hatred for Trump had become a part of her, an integral piece of her personality and character, as indivisible and strong as any. 

Vicki began to cry and hated herself for it. Just like a woman, she said to herself, fighting back the tears and choking sobs which wracked her.  'What's a person to do?'. 

There is a bell curve for political belief, just as there is for intelligence, height, and weight.  Some people are uninterested, others diffident, still others concerned, and finally those for whom politics is the be-all and end-all of their lives. 

 

For Vicki hating Donald Trump wasn't just political animus - a normal reaction when one watched the man's deliberate dismissal of the principles of democratic liberalism, international adventurism, and racist attempts to restore white privilege and consign the black man to yet another generation of segregation, isolation, and prejudice.  Vicki's hatred was a defining, existential element.  It was what made her bounce out of bed in the morning, pursue every possible avenue of legal sedition and insurrection during the day, and retire only when the clock struck midnight. 

Political belief so framed her perceptions that she could only live within a circle of equally passionate  believers.  One by one she cancelled her Vassar classmates for apostasy, having the temerity to sympathize with conservatism.  First went Wendy Barker, wife of a former chairman of the Republican Party and Ambassador to the Holy See.  She and Wendy had gone arm and arm down the Senior Path, loved each other like a couple, and had the same aspirations for life; but now, Wendy was of no value. 

Vicki had known Wendy long before Vassar.  They had grown up in the same neighborhood of Bryn Mawr, tony WASP redoubt on the Philadelphia Main Line.  They had gone to Miss Porter's, a finishing school-cum-college preparatory feed to the Seven Sisters, had roomed together, and were both frilly and girly and studious together. They were inseparable and thought that this was a lifetime friendship. 

But now the years of friendship were annulled.  It was as if Wendy had never existed.  Anyone who believed what she did, conservative to the core, could not be trusted.  Despite a natural affinity, she was the sworn enemy, the devil in disguise, an obstruction. 

So now Vicki lived only with her own - a safe space of commonality, an indissoluble group of true believers, women who had dedicated their lives to undoing evil and ridding the country of the scourge of Pennsylvania Avenue and would die trying. 

Everything about the President rankled Vicki - his hair, his voice, his slathered on fake tan, his cruel and dismissive retorts to responsible journalists, his mockery, and of course his politics.

Yet with all her Sturm und Drang and that of her colleagues, nothing seemed to budge the man.  He kept up his drumbeat of faux American patriotism to couch his capitalist greed and autocratic ambitions.  He had been successful in sending back tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, sent bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razed the government bureaucracy, the only stalwart against conservative intent.  He opened the oil fields, sent oil gushing through formerly closed pipelines, authorized new, polluting refineries, and restarted the nuclear energy program. 

His first year was a juggernaut of fulfilled promises, and loyal progressives had nothing in the wings, nothing to counter his counter-revolutionary agenda except howls of indignity. 

'We must never give up, never, never', she said, her voice trailing off in the summer breeze.  More and more she found herself talking to herself, sitting alone on her suburban patio watching the cardinals and the robins and smiling at the antics of the squirrels.  There was a strange new penumbra around familiar things - the Ficus took on a glow, a kind of angelic, beatific light; the hum of the refrigerator was in tune with the B-Minor fugue; and the sunlight coming in the bay window was celestial. 

Her friends noticed the changes in her - the faraway looks, the unhinged outbursts, and the animal look in her eyes.  When asked, she replied that all was good with her.  She never felt more complete, in control, and on the path destined for her. 

'Yes', she thought as she watched a Spring robin peck for worms ('I must reseed this year'), 'it is a question of destiny' by which she meant an anointed path.  It wasn't just by chance that she was put on earth at this time, maturing politically at just this moment of history.  Fate could be capricious, but at times there is a holy order to its choices, and she was the beneficiary of this particular turn of the screw. 

She jumped up quickly from her chaise longue, upsetting her gin-and-tonic, leaving the mess for the maid. 'I've things to do', and so she ran past the musical refrigerator, the glowing Ficus, and the luminescent bay window to the phone.  'Marge', she yelled into the old fashioned graphite receiver - land lines were less easily hacked - 'we must do something, we absolutely must'. 

'But sweetheart, what on earth do you mean?' said the lady on the other end of the line, Mrs. Helander, the florist whom Vicki in her confusion dialed by mistake. 'I sent you the zinnias last week'. 

Vicki stumbled over profuse apologies, angry at herself for such a blundering mistake, recovered quickly but forgot why she was on the telephone in the first place. 

'This happens', wrote Arnold Israel, Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology at Brandeis, 'in not a few cases.  Ironically the offhanded political swipe at the President's hectoring accusers - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is not too far off the mark.  The virulent, passionate hatred experienced by many in today's political climate can have far-reaching psychological effects'. 

The progression from concern, to extreme agitation, to downright, unsupported hatred in the political advocate parallels certain classic psychological disorders - a kind of early schizophrenic response triggered by exogenous, environmental forces but resonating from deep within the psyche of the disturbed individual. 

Was the professor implying that there was something of group hysteria in Trump hatred?  A certain psychotic personality that many progressives shared; and sensing this commonality grouped together in a kind of psycho-traumatic cabal?

'We have studied only individual cases', the professor went on, 'and while there might be an emergence of classic group hysteria, we have no hard evidence to date'. 

Meanwhile back in Bethesda, Vicki was going around a final bend. She began hallucinating, seeing Donald Trump in her bedroom, drinking her Pouilly Fume before the fireplace, peeing in the rose garden, and leaving muddy tracks on her Kashmiri dhurrie. 

Luckily her mental 'disruption' was caught before she did any harm to herself.  She was stopped by local police responding to a call about a woman walking down the center line of Montgomery Avenue, seen by a staff psychologist, and admitted to the psychiatric wing of Suburban Hospital. 

Now, God forbid that this should happen to anyone, regardless of political affiliation; but it also serves as good counsel if not warning.  'Eating too many donuts is not good for you', said Professor Israel, 'and neither is gorging on political belief'. 

 

A Man Who Imagines Himself A Poet Writes A Memoir - The Marvelous Art Of Self-Deception

Arnold Gray retired early from his job at an international bank.  Tired and discouraged after years of flogging African countries to do the right thing, he decided to settle in to a new life of renewal.  Foreign assistance was now in the rear view mirror, its ups and downs receding in the distance, and a new life of self-exploration and promise was before him. 

'I'm going to write a memoir', Arnold said, 'about my passion, the outdoors' and with that no sooner had he cleaned out his office at the bank, did he sit down at his desk at home, brewed a cup of chamomile tea, and set to work on his new enterprise.  Now, finally, he would be able to put his perspective down in black and white, tell of his years of  cycling, backpacking, and hiking.   

Most of his weekend excursions were on bikes - marvelous machines tuned to perfection, carrying above and beyond his expectations of grace, power, and agility.  'I rode a 21-speed', he wrote, 'and as I approached the first incline on my way through the Shenandoah, I clicked through the gears until I found a comfortable place. 

 

A decent start, but then Arnold, captivated by the sheer elegance of the bikes machinery, went on to tell of gear ratios, torque, wheelbases, incline calculus, braking distance, and the new gyroscopic stabilizer, a $1000 element which provided stability without compromising pull-ratios or cruising equilibrium. He didn't stop at an overview - a glimpse into cycling's advancements for the lay reader - but gave a disquisition on engineering. 

As he rounded steep turns, it wasn't the feeling of speed, the counterpoise of balance and inertia, the whizzing landscape of pines, firs, and oak; nor the sweet, floral scent of magnolias, the sunlit clouds over the Blue Ridge, the exhilaration of a physicality only felt in this one dynamic place - hurtling forward amidst the grandeur of the mountains. 

He didn't write about all this because he couldn't.  There wasn't a scintilla of poetry in the man, not one drop of spiritual drama, not an iota of princely beauty.  The woods, the forests, and the mountains were simply the context - the environment - within which he pedaled, made his way up and down back roads, and clocked his miles. 

The first chapter was indeed Arnold Gray - a treatise on what makes a bicycle go.  It was ponderous, tedious, and boring.  

 

'I have something to say'. Arnold told his friends at the bank when he announced his retirement; but when pressed he could only manage 'biking'.  Most imagined trips through the Western mountains, over the Donner Pass, by the Pacific in Carmel and Pebble Beach, sunsets over Biscayne Bay, Napa, Sonoma, and wine country - a travelogue, a personal account of wind in your hair travel. 

Arnold, however was no Shelley whose poem 'Mt. Blanc' told of his epiphany as the clouds obscuring the mountaintop cleared, and he felt overwhelming joy, surprise, and spiritual discovery

And when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantast,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness...

 

Travel writing is an old art.  Ibn Battuta, an Arab traveler wrote of his experiences in 1350, a travelogue of personal impressions, ethnography, and adventure.  Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote of his trek to Lake Tanganyika to find he source of the Nile and his penetration into Islam's holy of holies, the Kabbah in Mecca.  

Mungo Park wrote of his journeys up the Niger River to locate its source, and told tales of his repeated capture by African tribes, bartered and sold as a white slave, and somehow managing to escape. Paul Theroux wrote a series of travel books which were more reflections on his place on earth, his purpose, and the meaning of his ambitions and desires than simple descriptions. 

His The Book of Tao, is a collection of writing from the world's most famous travelers and their particular reflections on the spiritual nature of traveling alone. 

One of the best memoirs of recent years is Roald Dahl's Boy and Solo, the latter a recounting of his days as a RAF fighter pilot, the former about his childhood.  Both have little to do with the actual events of his life, but his often hilarious, ironic, and marvelously creative telling of how he saw them, what he felt, and the often ridiculousness of each situation. 

 

The two-volume memoir of Russell Baker, a journalist for the Washington Post and editorial writer is in the same deferential, modest, humorous mode.  Life is a circus, Baker often noted, but what a fun ride.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, wrote Locked in the Cabinet, a memoir of his time in Washington, and again done with the same self-deprecatory, humorous, sanguine view of life. 

Everyone thinks they have a memoir in them just waiting to be written, but when it comes time to write it, it often comes out sodden, trite, and punishingly boring.

A three-tour Vietnam War helicopter pilot, a man who loved the war, flying helicopters, and landing in hot LZs taking fire, began writing his memoir - one which many thought would be a best seller.  In an era of PTSD, the horrors of war, the misery of death and destruction, the pilot's expression of the joy of battle from above would be unique. 

Yet when he started to write, the results read like an inventory sheet.  Like Arnold and his bikes, he wrote about rotor torque, inclines, inertia, gravitational forces, cargo, maintenance, and logging time.  There was no sense of the sheer joy he had flying about enemy lines, laying down suppressive fire, avoiding the lines of tracer bullets rising from the jungle - just altimeters, compasses, and range finders. 

A doctor who ironically was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was only thirty-five, defied predictions and lived a long life, albeit with a variety of experimental drugs, radiation, immune therapy, and surgery.  He wrote a memoir about his journey but the book was an unremitting clinical spreadsheet.

He was more interested in telling about alternative clinics in the Alps, aromatherapy, radioactive implants and the techniques of the procedure than his reactions to the early death sentence.  Few people got through the first chapter. 

'I have a story to tell', he told his friends; but he had no idea of the nature of the genre - memoirs are not dutiful biographies, but stories of personal events, life, loves, danger, adventure, travails, and beauty. 

Both Arnold and the helicopter pilot thought that they had something important to say, something vital and human; and they were both surprised to see that they had nothing of the kind.  Even in the unimaginable scenes of combat, the pilot could only manage wind velocity and arcs-of-fire.  

Those who imagined life over the treetops in Vietnam had more creative juices than the pilot ever had.  Those who imagined bike rides up and down the Tetons, Denali, or the Rockies had more fantasy and communing with nature than Arnold could muster on his best days. 

Those who opened the doctor's book were expecting My Left Foot, a marvelous, humorous, delightful memoir of a severely disabled boy who became a world-renowned painter, all using only his left foot. Needless to say, they were disappointed. 

In many cases failed memoirs are because of inexperience.  The writer does have something to say, but cannot find the words to say it.  In most others, however, the writer has nothing to say but is laboring under the false impression that he does - the marvelous art of self-deception. 

'At least he tried', said Arnold's friends as each rewrite was as uninspired, intellectually lethargic, and frightfully boring as the previous one.  Arnold finally gave it up, never really sure why he couldn't manage something that people liked; but his friends never let on. 

Dreams Of A Political Arriviste - The Consort Of A Kingly Leader And Finding Him In Washington

Barbery Byfield was a typical girl of her generation - coquette, ingenue, but with that precocious sexuality that most girls affect but she had in abundance.  She was indeed a Lolita, a nymphet, a girl barely out of high socks and school uniforms, who had desires well beyond her age. 

When she read the Arabian Nights, or Rapunzel, Goldilocks, or The Fairy Princess, she did not let them float happily in her fantasy.  When she dressed up in sequins, crinoline, and glitter, she was not just pretending to be a prima ballerina, noticed by the Tsar of Russia and invited to the Winter Palace.  She was that ballerina. 

When she saw pictures of the palaces of Persepolis, Constantinople, and Babylon, she was not just an imagined princess of the pasha's harem, but was that lady of exotic charms. 

She spent her classes daydreaming, imagining a world far beyond Chillicothe, Ohio, the farm, the cornfields, and the Methodist church - a world of wonder, limitless possibilities; a life of sybaritic pleasure, sexual abandon, frankincense and myrrh.  

Her grades slipped, her teachers critical, and the principal dismissive.  'Unless your grades improve, Miss Byfield, I would be remiss if I didn't remind you of your responsibilities', said the principle, an old queen never satisfied; but Barbery knew that her future was not in conjugations, the Hundred Years War, or Jeffersonian expansionism. 

Where was it, then? she wondered.  'Dreams are misfortunes in disguise', her mother had warned her, a woman who had had her share of promising but ultimately disappointing love affairs.  In fact, Mrs. Byfield was never entirely sure that Barbery was the offspring of Mr. Byfield or the ravishing Viscount of Northumberland who had swept her off her feet, treated her like a queen, then left her for the Duchess of Kent.  

Such is the stuff dreams are made of, she recalled; and best warn her daughter off such fancies before it was too late. 

But too late it was, for whether a product of genetic destiny or environmental influence, her daughter Barbery followed in her footsteps, enamored of the princely life, the romantic, and the wellborn. 

'At least keep your knickers on

, her mother finally said to her precocious daughter, 'until Mr. Right comes along', but those were words of an older generation of women.  Hers, feminist, demanding, and impatient, was different.  If she wanted a trail of disappointed men behind her, so be it. 'Reputation' today was more a question of dominance and success than virginity. 

It was a fine line to walk, the one between the slatternly and informed choice.  There were the usual suitors from which she assessed like Portia - Bobby Parker, captain of this and that, a bit slow off the mark but zesty and confident; Alfonso Evans, eccentric artist with little talent but with an insouciance which appealed; Dickinson Putnam of the Putnams, the Putnams of the Davenport expedition, the Salem trials, and the founding of New Haven; and Ralph DiMarco, goomba, the first New Haven Italian to be admitted to Yale, a political foundling with all kinds of connections and good in bed. 

Women have made fame, fortune, and history thanks to their ineffable and irresistible sexual appeal.  Margaret, wife of the weak King Henry VI, tired of his shilly-shallying rule, took over the reigns of power, defeated the French and saved England from foreign rule.  Cleopatra made short work of her Ptolemaic adversaries, and ruled Egypt for decades, in the meantime bedding Julius Caesar and having two children by him before luring Marc Antony into her bed chamber.  Ibsen, Strindberg, Dreiser, and Lewis wrote of indomitable women who took what they wanted and left a trail of men behind them. 

The problem was this: there was no American royalty, no cultured legatees of a thousand years of history, not even a significant aristocracy to speak of.  Yes, there were the Cabots and Lodges, Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, and the Waldorf, but they couldn't hold a candle to the Bourbons or the Windsors. 

All that America had was this unwashed, hungry, bourgeois class of go-getters - the Zuckerbergs, Bezos, Buffets, Gates, and Jobs and their successors; so Barbery's fantasies of a palatial life were as fanciful as ever.  Times had changed. 

Or had they? Was an affair with an Ohio Congressman, an important member of the Ways and Means Committee of Congress, he heir to the wealth that only a few years in elected government can provide,  not the same as a rung on the ladder of viscounts, counts, and dukes but a reasonable aspiration?  Distasteful perhaps, but equivalent. 

So with a higher prize in mind, Barbery shared her bounty with others in Washington, moving her way up from interns to Congressional aides to inner circles. 

It is supposed that the political elite is a notch above the rest, more savvy, canny, and worldly wise; but the reverse is true.  These politicos, especially those with tenure, were particularly vulnerable to the blandishments and advances of young women like Barbery. 

As Shakespeare well knew, men are boobs and women can run rings around them.  Viola, Rosalind, and Portia were marvels of misandry, dismissing men like so much lint.  Lady Macbeth and especially Queen Margaret wife of the Danish regicide king and uncle to Hamlet, were the most well-known examples of native feminism.  Not to mention Tamora, Queen of the Goths or Dionyza harridan and murderous queen. 

 

So these fools in Washington would be easy pickings; but would bedtime with the nation's philanderers  be any satisfaction of Barbery's desires?   Would a liaison with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, or even Bill Clinton, duplicitous, craven, heartless idiots, be the apogee of her ambition?

Doubtful.  Washington has no aristocratic sophistication, no Old World cavalier culture, no royal entitlement, and worst of all, no class.  It is a barnyard, pigsty, rutting free-for-all. 

Yet there is value and honor in accepting the challenge and wearing the laurels of victory.  So what if Congressman X is a rube from the sticks? Having him prostrate, vulnerable and hers was worth something.  Perhaps not in the annals of Mme. de Maintenon or Marie Antoinette, but a statement nonetheless. 

And so it was that Barbery Byfield found her home - not the Palais de Versailles or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon exactly, but a fertile ground for dominance and sexual satisfaction, the very essence of woman. 

 

Was the President of the United States immune to feminine wiles?  No President in American history led a faithful, uxorious life.  Every single one of them had a mistress except perhaps for Jimmy Carter who admitted only to having 'lust in his heart' which of course counts for the same thing, almost. 

Donald Trump has a beautiful younger wife and during his long career has squired the most desirable women; and since all men even at an advanced age think of sex every waking moment, the President would certainly be fair game. 

Particularly now when he is at the top of his game he would be at his most susceptible. All powerful men reach an inviolate plateau, a no-fly zone, an untouchable position from which they feel they can do anything without prosecution.  Especially in a president's second term in office, his last by Constitutional injunction, he feels more empowered and immune than ever. 

Former President of France Nicolas Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Presidential Palace, the Elysees, at his beck and call.  President Mitterrand's lover and illegitimate child mourned at his grave alongside his wife and legitimate children. 

There would be no fuss - there could be no fuss - if Barbery moved into the presidential quarters, but that was  putting the cart before the horse, engaging in one of her romantic fantasies before political reality.

The old adage - men will always be men - has not changed in millennia. Men are and always will be suckers for sexual attention and will throw fidelity, trust, and honesty to the winds for sexual adventure. 

In fact the older a man gets, the more insistent he becomes about expressing his virility; and a May-December affair, if ever achieved, can be transformative for an older man.  

Now, Donald Trump might be a hard sexual nut to crack, but he's no different from John Q. Public, wanting that nubile, silken freshness that only the likes of Barbery Byfield can offer. 

At this moment Barbery is in wings, but soon will show herself in all her marvelously seductive allure,  Why Barbery, you might ask given the tarts, comers, and glamorous showgirls of the world? Because some women have it and some don't, and this President  among all before him knows what's what.