Who needs Russia, when you have Trump. Who needs fascism, when you have Trump. And who needs covid-19 to throw a nation into chaos, when you have Trump. Trump, alas, the salvation of our salvation?
But, Trump or no Trump, he is not the problem. Make no mistake about that. He is but a means to the expression of the problem, and it is getting out of hand, or it has already gotten out of hand.
They say over time the medium becomes the message, and the American people, in their plunge into the darkest depth of the divide in the mad-max fury road to the White House, is waking up to a monster they have created in the trumpish form of an empty-vessel demogague.
Trump has thus become the embodiment of everything that the founders of the American Constitution have sought to avoid or prevent. And I can’t say that Plato was wrong about democracy as evidenced in the American election 2020.
“For Plato, democracy - the rule of the masses - and oligarchy - the rule of the rich - were dangerous because these were forms of government motivated by self-interest, lacking a higher purpose. They were also unstable, almost always degrading into the worst kind of regime, tyranny.” (p.39, “Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World” by Fareed Zakaria).
What do you then call a political system made up of the adulterous union between democracy and oligarchy when you have a billionaire leader calling his millions of supporters to rubbish (or halt) the vote counting process in the name of electoral fraud, or was it puerile insecurity?
And if democracy is the voice of the people, then we often forget that this voice, especially at such time, is no less than a deafening cacophony that is so loud, piercing and shrilling that it threatens to drown out the voice of reason, virtue, and hope.
In governing a nation, the common good must win, or eventually win. But in order to win, it must be commonly shared by the critically-reflective majority. Yet, at this moment of American history, we are indeed living in uncommon times where the common good is anything but common.
America needs to heal. And getting Trump out, with all his holy-moly pretentiousness and obnoxiousness, is just a part of the solution; not even a big part (and this, Trump will insist otherwise to placate his tremendous ego).
Unfortunately, Joe Biden (I am assuming he will finally win in a knife-edge election) has inherited not the White House, one that is united, but a White-and-Black House that is so divided he may possibly spend a major part of his first term closing the gap, instead of doing what a president is expected to do.
And when he does, that is, close the gap, he must never forget that he and his ex-boss, Obama, and their predecessors, were the main part of the problem. Mind you, Obama may be black, and Joe white, but the problem transcends the colour of one’s skin. It is essentially the problem of inclusivity, human dignity, and common humanity.
In the book “The Tyranny of Merit”, Professor Michael Sandel identified one of the root causes of the problem. An extract of his observation by Thomas L. Friedman in the latter’s article “There was a loser in election night. It was America” is as follows: -
“Even though Joe Biden emphasised his working-class roots and sympathies, the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base.”
“Even so epochal an event as a pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this. Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them”.
So, put it in another way, you can say that Trump (as a symbolic-head) is the people’s middle finger, and it is stuck right up the rear end of the pretentious elitists in society.
As Rich Lowry (editor of National Review) wrote: “Trump is, for better or for worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming work cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundation, and almost everything in between.”
So, have no illusion or delusion about it. Trump is not the real problem, not even close. At best, he is a mascot, playing or performing to the crowd, devouring their attention to feed his fragile ego, not because he is on to something, but because the crowd sees no other way to point their middle finger at the exclusive and extractive world the snobbish establishment has built for themselves.
Trump is therefore their loud hailer, the national megaphone to vent their deep-rooted frustration heaped up over the decades of being ignored, dismissed, discarded, disowned and disembodied. For all that, they have found a body-puppet to make their voices heard, and that body-puppet comes in the form of a clueless billionaire who will say anything, do anything, and represent anything, just to bathe in naked shame in the global stage, where he will get all the attention he desperately craves after. It is a mutual blood-sucking symbiotic relationship.
PS: Alas, I am so tempted to end here. But when I look at Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White, cussing and swearing in the name of God on national television, for the sole benefit of Trump, with an unknown sloppy teenager walking up and down the stage, as if mugging for a term paper, I lament for the religious in America; once a God-fearing nation (now a god-images making nation).
And that reminded me of what Jesus once said: "My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it 'a den of robbers." At times like this, we need a voice of spiritual renewal and resurrected hope, not in any man, however loud and rich, but in the one who has never changed, and the same one who has promised us that in this world, there will be trouble, but “behold, I have overcome the world”.
Where is then that voice in the desert? Where is the sober voice on the hill in a city divided and drunk with power? Where then is the voice that cries out for the bitter cup to be taken away, yet not his will but thy be done? And where is that same voice that screams out, “"Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?" ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?") and then goes on to reign in the hearts of men?
Alas, we went to do just the opposite by downing out that voice to embrace the world and became her trouble personified. As a result, we are hopelessly divided, even willing to use God’s name in vain, siding with men, whoring with vain religious ideals, calling for death or treason to those who disagree with us or for not standing by Trump, and playing god at every desperate turns and twists of events.
And if this world is not our home, why is it then that we are living our life as if it is by embracing unquestionably a man who represents everything that Christ is not?
Our faith and hope should never be born out of desperation, or the need to hide behind worldly power and fame, living vicariously off it. It should instead be born out of a furnace that makes us more like Christ. Mind you, Jesus did not take the presidential road filled with idolising crowd to the Cross. He took the road of grief, a road many avoided, because salvation is not in men, but it belongs to God.
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