Like virtually every aspect of all-things Trump, he (and the damage he’s wrought) manages to be beyond satire, beyond fiction, and even the real time (fake news?) accounts strain credulity.
This piece, from The Guardian, about Brian Rose’s Atlantic City, is instructive, appalling, and depressing.
It’s not merely the decades-long Trump scam redux, it’s a succinct expose of America’s obsession with wealth (the attainment of it, the proliferation of it, the possibility of it), and how consistently our media has done the dirty and disgusting work of elevating these sociopaths and hucksters.
Look: the fact that Trump repeatedly stiffed contractors should have made him a public joke beyond redemption (not to mention criminally liable, another case study of how wealth forever insulates white collar cretins) many years before the same imbecile who managed to bankrupt a casino (!) became a reality TV mega-star.
I know I’m not alone in being often flummoxed but also awed by the Trump trajectory: as a writer, it would never occur to me to think a satirical tale about America’s peculiar psychosis regarding celebrity worship could ever conceivably involve a thrice-married dirtbag being embraced by the Evangelical community (not to mention a demonstrable unfamiliarity with biblical text, the bare minimum qualification for Elmer Gantry wannabes less than a generation ago), a fat fast-food devouring slob with a hideous combover and perma-tan regarded as an Alpha Male, a semi-literate quisling who orders his grade-D steaks well-done (actually, this last one, sadly, makes perfect sense), a creep who fetishizes his own daughter, and, it must be repeated, a charlatan who perpetually refused to pay the (blue collar!) workers who helped construct his shitty properties…
I also know I’m not alone in looking at the picture above –all of this and more reduced to one image– and thought of how there’s nothing new under the sun.
Or, as this guy put it:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Or, as this guy also put it, in a different (and similar…) context:
