Donald Trump, A Man Of The People - The Rightful Legatee Of American Tomfoolery

The rise of Donald Trump is nothing but amazing.  How could this braggart, this inflated Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York mean streets hustler ever have been President, and how after years of law-gating him, branding him as Beelzebub and the spawn of the Devil, accusing him of insurrection, treachery, and racism could he possibly be a few weeks shy of the Presidency?

Easy.  America is not the England of Churchill nor the France of Louis XIV, the Sun King and never will be.  It is a lowbrow country of political rubes and a credulous electorate.  P.T. Barnum, circus king was right - 'A sucker is born every minute' - and so was Lincoln - 'You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time' and so are the carny barkers, street hustlers, con men, shell game artists, Ponzi scheme architects, megachurch preachers, and advertisers. 

The meme, the ethos, the permanent zeitgeist of America is tomfoolery. Although it is surprising, given the principle and moral rectitude of the Founding Fathers, America in a few short years turned populism on its head and into a Wild West grand guignol - a shoot-'em-up, cowboys-and-Indians circus of the plains.

It never returned to the prudence and patience of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams.  The country under Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, the Robber Barons,  get-rich-quick shysters and con men who figured every angle and took everyone for a ride, selling remedies and salvation until the whole country was awash in cheap, throwaway, irrelevant, and unnecessary junk. 

 

Nothing has changed.  The same shysters, crooks, and easy money panderers are still at it, hawking climate change, gender reassignment, systemic racism, and the putative regency of The Black Man. 

Americans swallow the fol-d-rol hook, line, and sinker.  Environmental Armageddon is coming in our lifetimes, the polar ice caps are turning to water flooding the oceans while forests will soon be incinerated.   The next cataclysmic depression is coming in a wash of new credit swaps, innovative financial instruments, and soulless Wall Street investors.  Artificial Intelligence is on the cusp of wiping out reality, truth, and God causing the greatest social upheaval since the Cretaceous. 

Enter Donald Trump, a politician far from the anomaly the Left assumes - a crazy man out of nowhere tapping into American animism, a demigod, a pagan nonsensical aberration.  Trump, to borrow the line of the movie Freaks, is 'one of us, one of us', no more freakish and side-show ready than any other American, and certainly no weirder than the Chicken Little worriers whingeing and whining about the end of the world.  He is the first real Man of the People, a man who is the heart and soul of a virtual, fantastical credulous electorate. 

There is no shame in this patent gullibility.  Philosophers and artists since Plato have understood that there is no such thing as the truth only subjective interpretations of it.  Kurosawa, Browning, and Durrell have created a fictional world of alternate truths which when assembled resemble some vague, collaborative version of what happened but probably never did.  

Bystanders witnessing a crime will all see a different version of what happened - the perp was black...or white; the car was a sedan...or an SUV....It was green, speeding or grey and slowly moving.  Lawyers in courtroom trials stretch the facts, tempting the jury with alternate visions of reality. 

Why should anyone, philosopher or Americans tuned in to As The World Turns to see if Amanda killed Robert, assume that there is such a thing as the truth? And why, more importantly, should they care. 

America is not the crass, bottom-feeding, populist culture so ridiculed by the French.  By placing this faux reality, this virality, this artificially intelligent preference and its high valuation of show girls, pasties, starlets, and glam front and center of this fantasy make it a cultural avant garde. 

While coastal progressives- old Samuel Gompers Upper West Side Jews, inner city racial demagogues, academics, and hot house-grown politicians - believe that there is such a thing as truth and it is theirs, no one else does.  The rest of us want the Barnum & Bailey big top never to leave.  Let the bearded ladies, two-headed babies, dwarves, and camel-backed Quasimodos stay forever.  We could watch them ad infinitum, and to give us a new look, we have Donald Trump. 

France claims that it is, la fille ainee de l'Eglise - the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, a title assumed thanks to Charlemagne’s victory over the invading Muslims at Roncesvalles, saving Europe from the brutal Dark Ages of Islam - and considers itself the cultural regent of Europe spreading high culture and enlightenment throughout the continent.  

For years Apostrophes, an intellectual talk show about esoterica, was the most popular prime time show on French television.  It symbolized the cultural heights of the nation, expressed the conviction that every Frenchman, high-born or -low, was heir to France's storied tradition of art, music, literature, and philosophy. 

America was the antithesis of French cultural supremacy.  A nation of fast food, fat people, brawling politics, foul ghettoes, and mind-numbing entertainment was a gutter culture, worth little in the universal scope of things. 

Nothing could have been further from the truth.  American culture is the universal world culture.  Sensationalist movies; hip-hop, bling, grilles, ho's and pimps, braggadocio and bombast, cheap thrills and cheap carny rides are everywhere. Nothing escapes.  Friday nights in Dubuque or Monday mornings in the well of the House of Representatives are no different - nothing but a revival, a carnival, a show of shows. 

The American Left wishes that this populist America would go away, but they have no idea that they are as much a part of it as anyone.  They are just as captivated by fanciful, outrageous ideas as the people of Dubuque.  They are clowns, mountebanks, and fools.  Each day in Washington they do a St. Vitus' dance, a rollicking, possessed whirling dervish escapade; and we are supposed to take them seriously. 

Finally in Donald Trump Americans have a man with no such pretense.  He may be a vaudevillian, Borscht Belt tummler but he admits it.  He makes no bones about his lowbrow taste for arm candy, yachts, mansions, and glitz. What you see is what you get. 

His followers are not exercised over his exaggerations, distortions, and hyperbole.  That is the American way after all.  They simply pay attention to what he means, not what he says. 

This cultural icon, this Man of the People, this oversized panderer is about as American as you can get, and if he wins the election, hold on to your hats.  The rats will be scurrying off the ship in no time.