As I write this post, on a Sunday afternoon, a bit of news breaks: the FBI has finished its latest review of Clinton’s emails and recommends no new action. So that should be that, right? And now we can say adios to Trump’s racism and demagoguery and begin to celebrate the imminent election of our first female president.
But that would be too easy. And Trump has proven himself to be like one of those movie monsters that leap out of lakes or forests or coffins, long after you thought they were done for. (In Trump’s case, he leaps from a gold-plated chair.) Plus, as we’ve consistently seen over months and months of polling, about forty percent of the electorate will never be ready for Hillary. Who knows why? Here’s a poem from Jason Whitmarsh that reminds us of the stakes:
IF NOT FOR HER EMAILS
Hillary’d
be pilloried
for some other imagined slight,
and the media would tut-tut her,
and the Donald rut and sputter,
and the jackboots still in sight.
And here’s a link to a poem by Richard Kenney that, among other bracing and necessary things, excoriates the faint-hearted House speaker. (“Poor Paul! Give him bicarbonate of soda. / His future echoes, loud with slamming doors. / He broods. Now with the subtlety of Yoda / proclaims he can’t defend what he’ll endorse.”)
And because the end is nigh (for Trump’s hopes, or for American democracy), I’d like to offer passages from two books I’ve been teaching this semester. The first comes from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—specifically, from the section titled “Litost.” “Litost,” Kundera tells us, “is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog.” Kundera goes on to define litost as “the state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” An unnamed student, trying to combat feelings of litost, receives a love note from a woman he barely knows. “He had a craving to get up and wave the sheet of paper over his head, so everyone could see it, so everyone could know that he, the student, had been loved, infinitely loved.”
Is this Trump’s end game? Why else would a spectacularly uninformed and uncurious seventy-year-old man seek the presidency? Recall his answer, last July, to what he hoped people would take away from the week-long Republican National Convention: “The fact that I’m very well liked.”
It’s almost poignant. If his candidacy weren’t a direct threat to every marginalized community you could name, you might feel sorry for his tormented soul.
The other passage I’d like to share comes from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village.” Baldwin writes: “American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make.” A bit later, he adds: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
We were talking about monsters, above.
So that’s it: the last of my twenty or so Trump posts (I hope, I pray). Be sure to vote on Tuesday; if you don’t know where your polling station is located, you can click on this link and type in your address. I’ll close with some rhymes I wrote yesterday:
REFRESH, REFRESH
1
The past week has been horrid, a
real shit-storm
for Clinton. But lo! Florida
now looks kinda sorta OK!
And a swarm
of polls say Nevada’s in play.
2
When Trump was rushed off stage by the Secret Service
I got nervous.
A President Pence
tops a President Trump in the same sense
that being struck by a comet
tops choking on vomit.
*
TODAY I CANVASSED FOR CLINTON
for three hours and didn’t, to my knowledge,
change the mind of a single voter. But then
I traveled to the future where—great news—Ben
Franklin is not turning in his grave and where
Clinton leads (thank you, God, for noting my prayer!)
by twelve votes in the Electoral College.