A Deadly Serious Circus

Month 2 of 'Trump - The Sequel'

On my 2017 album ‘Nothing Left To Lose’, there’s a song called ‘Firebrand Days’. In its lyrics I make an honest assessment of my younger self. Of the harm I’d done in the world because ego and alcohol made me careless of others. Here’s the first chorus:

You should have seen me in my firebrand days;
I’d charm all the women, hell I’d steal ‘em away.
And oh how they’d cry … when the big-top blew down.
I’d pull my stakes sadly … and drift … out of town.

I used the imagery of a traveling circus, because that’s what I was in those days. Lots of fun and excitement, with a steep price to pay at the box office.

I’m coming up on 15 years since I gave up the booze. In my piece for Valentine’s Day, I think that I mentioned the sort of Hippocratic Oath that I’ve tried to live by since those last humbling days when I was gathering up my circus tent, and determining to be a better man. First, do no harm.

Of course I’ve failed to hit the highest marks, but mostly I’ve held myself to a standard of behavior that allows me to look back on most days knowing that I made the effort.

After all. That is the only thing that we know for certain … that each of us can leave the world a little better for having lived. Or we can fail to do so. Truly, coming out on the plus-side of that equation is my only abiding ambition.

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Like all of you, I watched as Donald Trump’s circus opened for business in the field outside of town. We’ve all been amazed as the Ringmaster in the red tie has introduced each of his cabinet members. Each - with a precious few exceptions - seemingly selected based on two qualifications: slavish fealty to Trump himself, and at least one character deficit that - in normal times - would disqualify him/her from serving in his/her appointed role.

Anybody watching objectively has to conclude that the president’s primary goal, is to communicate a near-total contempt for American governance in its traditional form.

Every day he signals that - if allowed to - he’ll change any and every norm at will, and at the slightest personal whim. And it’s all flown at us with such shot-from-a-cannon velocity, that we can barely comprehend what has just happened, before something just as shocking bursts into our newsfeeds.

(I mean … even as I was writing this piece, we learned that Trump’s national security adviser had included an editor at The Atlantic, in a chat on the app, Signal, that disclosed plans about the attack on Houthis. Things that should have been top secret. Others were on that thread, included the secretaries of State and Defense!)

Only those few who’ve spent a lifetime studying our institutions can grasp the probable impacts on each of these, as each is swept into the center ring and forced to perform with clowns and jugglers and illusionists for the bafflement of the stunned audience.

It’s surely a wild time for journalists and commentators in the political game. Some are attempting so much daily analysis that I fear for their sanity.

And those ‘civilians’ among us who also feel obliged to offer thoughtful commentary? Well, I can only speak for myself, but since ‘Trump - The Sequel’ hit town, I’ve written ten pieces that will never see the light of day, because the man pulled a switcheroo while I finished up, that made the whole thing irrelevant.

Try for a minute, to imagine what the millions of career civil servants have been going through. Remember, it’s not only those who work for the federal government who can’t count on their jobs existing by summer. As Trump-cuts affect those agencies so many of us take for granted … state, county, and municipal institutions will have to be beefed up, reconfigured and even created in order to handle the load. Because the load doesn’t go away.

Call it what it is. Chaos.

I’d guess that what Trump himself has in mind, is what the ancient poet, Juvenal, called the formula used by Rome’s ruling elite. Bread and Circuses. The bare minimum required to keep the people satiated so that they wouldn’t turn against their rulers. A full belly, and something entertaining to distract them.

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I was raised by two intelligent thoughtful human beings who took their citizenship seriously, and generally voted Republican. My parents had such a developed sense of responsibility, that I can’t even imagine one of them cheating on their taxes. Or running a red light. Or failing to correct a mistake at the grocer’s that fell to their own favor.

These were scrupulously honest people who - in general terms - agreed a bit more with Republican agendas than with Democrat agendas. But I never heard either of them bad-mouth a sitting president. If their guy lost, they accepted that the majority felt differently from them, and went right back to their own responsibilities, civic and otherwise.

My folks thought first about the overall good of the greatest number. And only then thought about what was good for them specifically.

Growing up in California in the 60s and 70s, I became a ‘default Democrat’. But over time, the almost infinite desire of that party to help the disenfranchised, began - in my eyes - to do more harm than good. (I think ‘tough love’ is ultimately more helpful than coddling) So I wandered away from the consensus liberalism of my peers, and into something closer to what my mom and dad thought.

By 2015, I was ready to leave The American Left, and vote for something that felt familiar to how I was raised.

I first backed Scott Walker, but he dropped out early on. Then I felt pretty good about Chris Christie. But he dropped out too, and then I figured that John Kasich would be alright for my very first Republican vote.

Nothing at all about Donald Trump appealed to me. I was certain then that he was only running to feed his insatiable appetite for attention. I was equally convinced that the scorn heaped on him by lefty media was hyperbolic in the extreme.

It was the first ‘presidential media-circus’ that really lived up to the title. Like everybody else, I assumed that Trump was the ultimate spoiler. Selfishly hogging all of the press while legitimate GOP politicians starved for coverage. This, it seemed, would usher HRC into the White House without her ever breaking a sweat.

But the guy won. And around that same time, I was weighing in on social issues as Facebook gave me a forum. Next thing I knew I had a partner and a Facebook video channel, and an amateur’s bullhorn.

This while an absolute cyclone of hatred burst forth from Democrats at every level. I defended Trump because he was The President Of The United States, and I wanted the country to succeed. It’s the old trope. You might think the pilot is a jerk, but let’s not throw him out until we land the damn plane.

I didn’t think then, that Donald Trump was a closeted authoritarian. Truth is that I’d never paid any attention to the man. I was an L.A. singer-songwriter, getting by painting houses, for widows mostly, in unremarkable middle class areas. I knew nothing about the world of Manhattan real-estate development from which Donald Trump had emerged.

It’s ironic for me, and embarrassing too, that virtually all of the characterizations of this guy that seemed wildly exaggerated by MSNBC and their ilk, during his first term … seem now to have become almost a blueprint for his second.

Most of what was thrown at him was made up. But there were New York journalists and business people who’d seen the man operate for decades. So some of the accusations that seemed over-the-top to me, were rooted in a bit more than just the standard partisan dismantling of reputation.

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Trump - Chapter One, was also chaotic. But mostly he was working from a Rush Limbaugh laundry list of standard Republican tropes, aided by people with long experience in the ways of government. The instability of his first administration, mostly had to do with his ignorance of how Washington worked. And also his own stunted psychology.

He grew up groomed to inherit a real estate empire. His dad was an independent developer who broke the rules at will. In a place - and at a time - when that was standard procedure. His son learned those lessons. He doesn’t possess the soul of a civil servant because he never internalized an ethos of service. Not even a little bit.

The current president’s guiding principles are, instead, those of a property developer in one of the world’s most competitive markets. Spot an underutilized property, buy it at a bargain, and then turn it into something valuable.

This requires exaggeration at both ends of the process. You need to make the seller think that nobody wants their crappy land. That they’re lucky to be rid of it at any price.

Then, once you’ve grabbed it and renewed it, make everybody else think they can’t live without it.

Sound a little bit like what Donald Trump has done with the neglected bloc of American working class voters?

He grabbed ‘em dirt-cheap, and now everybody wants ‘em.

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Trump understood at an early age, that hype and showmanship were part of the game. It was natural for him to branch out into casinos. The rare legal business that thrives because EVERYTHING on the floor, from the slot-machines and roulette wheels, to the pretty girls and the free drinks, is designed to funnel money from the common and credulous, upward toward the profiteers in the penthouse offices.

Legal, state regulated ‘gaming’ … is a microcosm of everything rapacious that spins out of capitalism, when it’s practitioners leave their ethics at the the door.

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His affinity for Professional Wrestling, was another step along the path leading to his strange style of governance. He’d be right there at ringside while two steroid-pumped human cartoon characters acted out a crudely scripted dude-feud. Sometimes Trump was actually in the ring himself.

Google ‘Pics of Trump at World Wrestling’. Everybody in the building, and in front of every TV everywhere, KNEW that the whole thing was a gag. And still they cheered and jeered as if a genuine battle was being waged. Like pretend Romans at The Colosseum. And Trump LOVED to be involved with all of that.

Even now, Linda McMahon, who made her fortune running ‘World Wrestling Entertainment’ with her husband Vince, is deciding for us all, what will be the future of such trifles as Pell grants and student loans.

The last few months of Trump’s second run belong in the ‘you can’t make this shit up’ file. Trump concluded his presidential campaign at Madison Square Garden with friggin’ Hulk Hogan as a surprise guest. Addressing the crowd as ‘Trump-Maniacs’.

And then the retired fake wrestler appeared again as a scheduled speaker at the GOP convention. Give it a listen if you missed it. Thrill to the spectacle of Hogan accidentally calling the nominee “Donald Dick Trump”. Feel your pulse quicken when - with a ear-bandaged Trump looking on - the ‘sports entertainer’ calls the audience the REAL Americans, and says that ‘they’ (Democrats) tried to kill his hero. Then stripping off his blazer , he vows that all the Trump-Maniacs will run wild and ‘rule’ America again. Sounds prophetic now doesn’t it?

When he starred in The Apprentice, anybody with more than a half-dozen brain-cells rattling around in their skull, knew that Donald Trump did not really sit atop a sort of shark-tank investment firm for telegenic entrepreneurs. It was all fakery. Including the board-room set where he furrowed his brow and said ‘you’re fired!'.

And that handful of neurons ought to also understand that the primary reason that Donald Trump sits atop our great nation now, is because our citizens are programmed by television to worship celebrities.

Trump was one of the earliest profit-takers from TV’s branding effort to label falsified on-camera human interaction … as Reality Programming.

I threw my TVs away in 2011, for that exact reason. Television had been taken over by ‘reality shows’ that were teaching an apathetic generation of Americans to view life as a string of petty dramatics, followed by empty resolutions.

It’s all show biz to Donald Trump. It’s all Kayfabe. To Donald Trump, it’s all a rowdy crowd in a big striped tent, there for the express purpose of ESCAPING reality.

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Where I live there are several stores that sell party supplies. In any of them you can buy a Donald Trump piñata. Though there is an implied anti-Republican statement in selling such a thing, the kids at the party don’t care. They just know that paper-mache man with the yellow hair is full of candy. Wack him and get a treat!

How apt.

Ever since Trump came down the escalator, he’s been the piñata that never runs out. A cornucopia of outrage for biased press old and new. Hit him solidly, and out comes something to write about, or podcast about. He’s a bottomless font of material for daily - even hourly - ‘hot takes’.

You can almost hear the calliope wheezing in the background, and the carnival barkers calling “Step right up, Ladies and Gentleman! You’ve never seen anything like this!”

All of it is so degrading. To this great country. To the institutions that make it great. To the citizens that - when not driven half-mad by bullshit - are as good a people as a people ever were.

We don’t need an entertainer running amuck through our hallowed halls in an attempt to live up to Hulk Hogan’s phony hero worship. We don’t need would-be oligarchs stepping up to aid him in his dance of chaos.

We’ll always need bread. But we have more than enough circuses already. And the very idea that the deadly serious business of American government should be turned into a burgeoning, bulging, big-top tent containing The Greatest Show On Earth? Well that’s an insult to the men and women who have fought and died - or simply soldiered on in boring government jobs - so that we could deserve our reputation as the greatest nation on the planet.

As for myself? I’m gathering anew, the video-making tools lost to the fire that wiped out my town. I’m going to rekindle my YouTube channel, in an effort to reach and gather a few thousand naturally conservative Americans, who are ready and willing to join naturally liberal Americans in a realistic discussion-based approach to our political culture.

I’ll talk about the issues that others use to divide us, in such a way - I hope - that each side of the organic political spectrum can see and understand the other sides’ thinking.

I’m too old for childish games. But I’m not quite finished yet.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your own thoughts. And do me a favor if you would. Scroll back up and hit the little ‘heart’, if you liked this piece. I average over 500 views here, but get so few of these likes, that Substack algorithms see no reason to promote my writing. It costs you nothing, and might help me quite a bit.

Yours, Dave