Awake

It’s three-something a.m., the fourth night of a painful cold. I’ve switched from bedroom to livingroom because I don’t want my coughing to wake up Karin. The twerps, Ziva and Jasper – who’d been sleeping peacefully, obeying the human timetable – now wrestle at the fringes of my blanket and compete for my attention.

It’s distressful to be awake at this hour, but sleeping is worse. Asleep, I can’t stop thinking about tedious details of Spanish grammar. Awake, my mood is OK. I remind myself that I’m married now and that being sick and married is immeasurably better than being sick and single, which was how it was for me in grad school.

Lately, at the high school where I work (and from which I’ll be taking tomorrow off), certain English teachers have been assigning Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” In that story the carelessness of one man leads to the disastrous, apocalyptic election of a ruthless president named Deutscher.

People are taking this Trump business very hard.

Trump’s actions so far have not been to my liking. But I refuse to give in to despair. I’ll continue to think kindly of Trump, if only by dwelling on how lousy the opposing candidates were. For example, they did nothing to check the lie that America is great. Trump at least acknowledged the falsehood of that belief with his slogan “Make America Great Again.”

What? Trump the most honest of the field? Doesn’t the sheer frequency of his lying disqualify him from that?

It doesn’t. The other day, I read this passage by Mark Twain that puts the idea rather well:

When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals? Why should we try to make it appear that abstention from lying is a virtue? Why should we want to beguile ourselves in that way? Why should we without shame help the nation lie, and then be ashamed to do a little lying on our own account? Why shouldn’t we be honest and honorable, and lie every time we get a chance? That is to say, why shouldn’t we be consistent, and either lie all the time or not at all? Why should we help the nation lie the whole day long and then object to telling one little individual private lie in our own interest to go to bed on? Just for the refreshment of it, I mean, and to take the rancid taste out of our mouth.

The election

For my birthday, I’ve been asking for books by G.K. Chesterton.

Today at Bethel I spent one class session making the students read Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and the other making the students take a quiz. I was able to sit quietly at my desk. Such are the sessions that I truly love to teach.

Tomorrow, due to the election, I’ll enjoy six hours off from work. Whom shall I vote for? Not Trumpie, and not Hillary. I’d vote for Hillary if Indiana were a “battleground” state; but, according to the polls, Trump is certain to win here, rendering my vote causally irrelevant. And so I plan to use my ballot to declare my preference for a decent human being.

In Ecuador, the people simply stage a nice coup if the president turns out to be a knucklehead. (Setting aside the “coup” that was held against him in 2010, the fact that our current president has been in power so long is one indication that he isn’t such a knucklehead.) Our military is obliging in this respect. It allows coups to proceed against the unrighteous. Not so in the United States, or in any country where a rebellion would be put down by the invincible and loyal guardians of the regime (and where, moreover, the civilians would be at a loss as to how to rebel). I quote from Chesterton’s essay about Rudyard Kipling:

Now, Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism, but his opponents are, generally speaking, quite as wrong as he. The evil of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty and excessively warlike. The evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines. Thus the Pretorian guard became more and more important in Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble. …

In the U.S., no institution is more important than the local Pretorian guard, which is constituted by the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and so on. This guard was built up ostensibly to defend citizens from aggressors and would-be aggressors (the British, the Native Americans, and the Spanish; and, later, the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the terrorists). But its chief function, which no one discusses, is to be so big and powerful and disciplined that civilians could never overthrow the likes of Trumpie or Hillary – or any knucklehead who should be elected.

Trump syllabus

The U.S.’s presidential election is just around the corner. Trumpie has been lavishing us with the spectacle of himself. But I believe that he’ll lose, and that Clinton will maintain a “business as usual” regime for at least four more years.

The academic folks at The Chronicle of Higher Education also believe that Trump will lose. Though the election is yet to be held, they’re treating Trumpie as a seminar topic – as a puzzle to be leisurely studied – rather than as a plague to be dealt with. They’ve recruited some of their all-stars to write a “syllabus” in order to “explore the phenomenon that is Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” The items on the syllabus include utopian and dystopian writings (Plato’s Republic; Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America); very, very old historical writing (Thucydides); thinly-disguised, fictional portraits of real-life demagogues (Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men); and exposés of how Trump rose to prominence. A lot of these items are for lulling one into a comfortable sleep in front of the fire, not for lifting one’s ass up by lighting a fire (under it). Well, that’s to be expected, I guess. Professors would have everyone just sit and read.

Last night there was a debate between Clinton and Trump, but I didn’t watch it – it began at 9:00pm or some such hour when schoolworkers ought to be in bed. The truth is, though, I love to watch Trumpie in the debates. I read that last night he had a good line about a “400-lb. guy lying in his bed.” Brilliant. If only Clinton would talk like that. … No, it wasn’t because I listened to any of the debates that I decided that Trump was incompetent. My mind was made up by a short documentary from 2009 – an entry in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, on Netflix – Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?

Not that the CHE would’ve asked me, but that movie is what I would have put on my Trump syllabus.

Basically, Trump is the guy who shows up at the playground and insists on everyone playing according to his schedule and rules, at his house, and with his toys; and who gets enough suckers to join him so that he is able to ruin the game for everyone. Trust me, sports lovers: you don’t want this guy calling the shots. Watch Small Potatoes – which was broadcast years before Trumpie decided to run for the presidency – and you’ll want to stop whatever you’re doing and go stand in line for the next month, so that you can be sure to have a place at the polling station to vote against Donald Trump.

Trumpie

A lot of people are rattled by Donald Trump’s campaign. They’ve never seen a candidate in the fashion of Trump enjoy this level of success. But I’ve seen it. Trump reminds me of Abdalá Bucaram, what with his wit; his uncouthness; his recklessness with the facts; and what with the fervor of his fans.

(Clinton, then, must be the analog of the “establishment” candidate, Jaime Nebot.)

What happened in Ecuador was, Bucaram won the 1996 election. He recorded some pop songs. He stole some money. And, after six months, he got booted out of office, basically because the “establishment” people hated him. (That booting out wouldn’t be so easy to achieve in the USA. The people wouldn’t be so handy at doing a coup.)