Jesting Trump

The car, a maroon SUV, sits at an angle across the road; has it skidded in the snow, or has the driver encountered an obstacle, and decided to turn round before having their attention called by someone just out of picture? Two men, masked, move towards her, and now the driver decides to turn fully and move away. Whilst she’s in mid manoeuvre, one of the masked men advances to the driver’s door, produces a firearm, and proceeds to discharge it through the window, three times. The car, still in gear, but its driver dead at the wheel, continues to run away from the scene, before curving aimlessly and pathetically into another parked vehicle. The scene has been viewed millions of times in the last few days, and repeated viewing does not dull the horror of the sequence, or the terrible truth of what it reveals about the Land of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Unless, of course, you’re Donald Trump, or any of his paid up acolytes and lickspittle sycophants. The truth they see is not the truth the rest of us see- where we clearly see a driver moving away from trouble, they, seeing through a glass darkly, behold a terrorist intent on ramming a peaceful, though gun-toting and masked, member of ICE- and rarely has an acronym been more appropriate, in its unwitting depiction of its psychopathic representatives.

Well, people see what they want to see, I suppose. And this clearly warped perception is merely the grisly suppuration seeping from the open wound in American discourse, a gash into the Body Politic inflicted by the knife of political propaganda, a wounding of which Goebbels would have been proud. In support of the official view that the deceased, now identified as Renee Good, a mother of three and writer of poetry, was a domestic terrorist, are advanced these very points, yet subtly nuanced, and taking obvious lessons from George Orwell’s two-minute hates. She was a poet (note the prosodic stress); speaks for itself. Boo, hiss. They’re probably, being well versed in Romantic literature, thinking of the terrifying figure of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan- “beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair”. As well as being a Poet, she was lesbian. Again, conclusively damning; what human evil cannot be ascribed to sapphic encounters? Double boo, double hiss. And, what’s more, she used pronouns. I rest my case, m’lud; the woman is guilty of grammatical compliance, and obviously deserved to be shot in the face on the way back from dropping her child at school. Thrice times boo and thrice times hiss. Ergo, it’s true that she was a domestic terrorist, and the Masked Man from ICE shot her in obvious self defence- he probably thought she was about to recite a poem at him, or attack him viciously with a pronoun.

For anyone who thinks about these things, and has no particular axe to grind, Truth has always been a slippery concept- so hard to nail down, or define, and this perhaps explains the tyrant’s need to claim it, distort it, and to punish those who challenge it. The Catholic Church, threatened by the Reformation, and above all those who wanted to make the holy books of Christianity intelligible and truthful, mercilessly pursued and murdered the heretics; Lenin, following the revolution, called his organ of propaganda Pravda, the truth, and Trump told us all we needed to know about his relationship to moral probity and authenticity when he decided to publish his lunatic, unfounded ravings on something called Truth Social. Those who tell the truth, rarely need to advertise that this is what they are doing; the president, like Hamlet’s mother, doth protest too much methinks. Like Orwell’s Big Brother, Trump just makes it up, knowing that in the end it doesn’t matter, as his order to us all is to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears- it’s the final, essential command. Two and two make five, and you’d better believe it- it’s the truth. It's no wonder that Trump wants to destroy the BBC, with its annoying habit of asking difficult questions and fact checking.

It’s true that Christ does claim, according to St John, that he is The Way, The Truth and The Life, but then he was living in an age of false prophets, and by Truth meant something spiritual, numinous, rather than a Stalinist falsification of record breaking units of pig iron production or crazed female poets attacking armed men with heavy duty grammar. Jesting Pilate, as he’s called by St John, faced with the impossibility of passing judgement on Christ, famously dodged the question, asking merely What is Truth?,  his question hanging in the air with satisfying dramatic ambiguity as he, according to the scriptures, did not stay for a reply.

When Tennessee Williams makes the tragic, drink-soaked Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire claim to be the author of what ought to be the truth, we are primed to disbelieve her, although she is in her way the inheritor of a Romantic tradition in which truth is subjective, elusive, even contradictory. John Keats, after abandoning his embryonic career as a surgeon, surely the best decision he ever made, both for himself and for his future patients, famously thought- or felt- that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, a neatly phrased summation of the idea that truth, if it is anything, is aesthetic. Coleridge, in the full flush of anti-Enlightenment fervour, expressed his incredulity at the idea that anything could be known by what he called consecutive reasoning, or logic, and went on to extol the virtues of not knowing, of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, and called this desirable state one of Negative Capability. This Romantic conception of truth recognises that it’s difficult to be certain about most things, most of the time, life being essentially mysterious. And perhaps it’s a reminder that when we see someone whose conception of Truth is purely utilitarian and basic- who did what to whom- and, furthermore, desperately insists that their version of the narrative is the One True Version, particularly when the counter narrative is pretty unambiguous, then- well, then we know we’re dealing with a villain, villain, villain, as Hamlet so rhetorically puts it.

Whatever bastardised version of truth Trump and his fawning mercenary minions claim to express, he has created in ICE, a legalised instrument of state brutality that is most reminiscent of Nazi Germany. In the 250^th anniversary year of Thomas Jefferson’s beautifully phrased and noble Declaration of Independence, what could be more sad, what could be more true?