A sad day

Much of the public animus hyped against Trump, to be sure, is partisan. The liberal elite are livid, caught off guard with their hands in the cookie jar of favouring Trump’s rival; sorely bitter in their defeat.      

But there is something more deeply troubling in this nation. It has lost all its habitual decorum and accustomed delusions. It can no longer fathom and dream itself ‘Great!’ Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great again!’ was a Freudian slip, the death knell declaring the American dream a nightmare come true.

Like millions of other Americans, I spent my Friday, January 20, 2017, aghast at the very sight, at the very prospect, of Donald Trump putting his dangerous little hand and big empty ego on the Bible to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. Something is crumbling inside this nation.      

But unlike millions of other Americans, I am not saddened that it is not Hillary Clinton who is being sworn in as the next president of the United States. One of two calamities were about to happen to the US and the world at large. One of them was averted. That’s the good news. The other one has happened. We need to figure out how to resist his dangerous term uninterrupted by the smokescreen of the other ‘lesser evil’.

If you do not live in the US and are not bombarded daily by the jeremiad of regret for Clinton, nostalgia for Obama, and liberal fury against Trump, you may find these staccato sentences strange. But they are not if you live here. Our active defiance of Trump must not be predicated on a false nostalgia for Obama, or even worse, on an even more false regret for Clinton. Trump was their parting gift of a Pandora’s Box to the US and the world around it.       

I glanced at the video clips of Donald Trump being sworn in as the next US president as much aghast, if not more, than any other person. But my perspective of relief at Clinton’s loss informing my focus on Trump’s hazardous course ahead is decidedly foreign in this land. The liberal chorus of Don’t Cry for me, America of Clintonites has cornered the market of opposition to Trump.      

The Democratic Party partisans from Barack Obama down to The New York Times show not a single sign they have learned anything from this calamitous election for the US and the world at large. Their ignorant loss is integral to the Republican neanderthals’ victorious ignorance, confounding the dawn of this Dark Age on American politics.     

It is a sad day for the world. The US as an idea has always transcended the US as a reality. Today, that transcendent idea has finally collapsed upon this hideous reality and become indistinguishable from it. Trump is the democratically elected president of the United States, duly voted for and now ceremoniously sworn in. 

A short subway ride from where I live in Manhattan stands tall and triumphant the Statue of Liberty, or Lady Liberty, as we affectionately call her. The Lady is now looking askance at the uncertain future of the homeland she represents.

The Lady and the Trump are at odd with each other. She is a formal abstraction incarnate, a hopeful promise in metal and might. He is concrete crudity, crass in diction and frightful in everything he represents and invokes.         

Americans are now caught in the stormy sea change between the Lady and the Trump. She is every promise yet to be delivered. He is the delivery of a punishment for forgotten sins. As our ship sails down a stormy dark future, the lighthouse of Lady Liberty watches over us helplessly, in both hope and despair.

 

This article has been excerpted from ‘Lady and the Trump’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com