The Poet Defends Himself Against His Critics
The Weave
Drawing by JaysonZHahn/Medium.
The Poet Defends Himself Against His Critics
by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America
AND THEN THE PRESS WHEN I SAY DR HANNIBAL LECTER.
THE PRESS SAYS, OH, WHY DID HE MENTION THAT?
THEY ARE WISE GUYS BACK THERE? JUST WISE GUYS. THEY SAY
HE RAMBLED AND STARTED TALKING ABOUT
HANNIBAL LECTER. WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO?
THAT'S A REPRESENTATIVE OF PEOPLE THAT ARE
COMING INTO OUR COUNTRY. DR HANNIBAL LECTER,
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. YOU KNOW THAT
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. NO, BUT THIS
IS WHAT'S HAPPENED. THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING AT LEVELS
THAT NOBODY CAN EVEN IMAGINE. MILLIONS AND MILLIONS.
I love how the critics speak mostly in an easy dactylic pentameter in the first five lines, before Trump responds in his own choppily unmetered voice.
Dr. Lecter is just what your fancy-ass literature professors refer to as a metaphor. That is, not a "representative" like your congressman but a symbolic representation, of the millions and millions of Latin American lunatics, mental patients like Dr. Lecter, driven by their governments from the asylums of their own benighted countries and pushed to cross from Mexico into the USA to find asylums here. The liberals even admit this!
Not that they're really cannibals, exactly, that's a metaphor too, though they really are criminals. It means their rapacious consumption of all the generous benefits we give them is eating our lunch.*
And finally, like Dr. Lecter, they don't exist, just like the benefits we don't give them. Their existence isn't the point! This is literature, people! The point is the emotions they give us!
"True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story."
He's not rambling at all! He's weaving! As the fancy-ass literature professors in his own circle have told him.
*I think Hannibal's joke, the play on the ambiguity of "have for dinner", may be the first and even only piece of purely verbal humor Trump has ever understood, his first or only experience of what it's like to "get" a joke of that kind. That's surely why he's compelled to keep repeating it, in every speech.
It is fascinating, the extent to which our 45th president (still hard to type that) is a literary character more than a real person. That is, a snarl of discernible cause and effect and metaphor and metonymy, a composition of depths so easy to perceive that he becomes a kind of poetry, meant to be understood, to clarify the world. Most real people are ill-defined, full of contradictions and mysteries, dozens of causes crashing into each other inside a black box before they emerge as effects.
Obviously part of the reason Trump is not a black box is that the presidency puts a man (or let's hope, soon a woman) under a magnifying glass for years, not one minute out from under it. So you might feel you know Joe Biden as well as you know your own sister who moved to Utah. In fact Biden plays as unusually clear too, partly because he's less a snarl of a man; so it might be more instructive to compare Trump to Hillary, McCain, Cheney, Kerry, W, Pence, Clinton -- none of those national figures really ever threw light on the human experience like Trump does. Not even Obama, who spent so much care writing about his life, parsing his own motives; for all that, Obama remains too complicated to have a plain effect on the narrative the way Trump does. Obama remains human. Trump is literary.
The enormous problem is that Trump is a composition in a cautionary tale, or perhaps a bitter satire, that is being read by millions as a heroic epic.
As noted elsewhere ~ there really is a pony in all that horse-hockey ... !