The Hollow Man--Trump

Photo courtesy of  The Daily Mail

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

                                    From “The Hollow Men”

                                    T.S. Eliot

Standing in the checkout line in a grocery store way back in the supposedly safe days of early March.  Two guys waiting at the next register:

“Dude, can you believe this?  I mean, maybe I should get more beer and toilet paper, eh?”  Sweat pants and Dodger cap, six pack cradled to his chest.

The other, full beard and bed head hair, shorts and sandals.  “End of times, dude.  End of times.”

“It’s what I am telling you, man,” says the walker in my neighborhood yesterday sans mask.  “It’s like the end times.”

It is the end times for Trump, the original hollow man, the stuffed shirt, the Scarecrow drunk with his own narcissism.  Will the country survive this disaster of a president?

One hundred thousand plus dead of the virus.  The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The shotgunning of Ahmaud Arbery in a quiet neighborhood in south Georgia.  The attempt by Amy Cooper to incite a confrontation between police and an innocent black birdwatcher in Central Park.

All of this is on you, Mr. President.

Is this making America great again?  Is this what winning looks like?

Those who cling to rational thought like the life raft it is are fed up with Trump’s stalling on coronavirus testing, his misinformation about the virus, his white nationalism and insistence that there are good people on both sides of the racist street, his supporting white supremacists, his crazy, inept, incompetent, boorish behavior.  He permits such atrocities on his watch; he condones violence and discrimination.

That one statement alone:  there are good people on both sides.  Hate-filled hearts are never good.  Someone who does violence to others under color of authority must be brought to justice.  The hate has swallowed that person up.  That person is a black hole of human depravity, no longer human at all.

From every angle, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin who was himself aided and abetted by his brother officers on that street in Minneapolis.  He keeps his knee on Floyd’s neck, his hand in his pocket, the smug superiority plain on this face.  This is a hate crime true to the very definition.  Floyd questioned the officers.  He had the temerity to question why he was being assaulted in the street.  This is America where people are allowed to question, people are allowed to know why we are being arrested.  Floyd’s death penalty crime was to ask why.

As for the burning and looting in Minneapolis each night, the people speak to authority in the only way they can:  with property damage and rocks.  They burn stores, they burn the police station, they destroy the neighborhood.  There are only a limited number of ways that the public can be heard when the violence, injury and murder continue on and on.  We are talking, across the country, a pandemic of deaths for blacks at the hands of police.

Trump has never shied away from racist and misogynistic language.  Back in 2017, he encouraged law enforcement to use more force than necessary with those being arrested.  He was quick in 1989 to condemn the young black men arrested in the Central Park Jogger rape even when that case later fell apart and DNA revealed someone else was responsible.  The things he says every day in his briefings and in passing to the press make clear his feelings about the people he is supposed to serve.  He sets the example for incendiary language.  His presidency reflects his inability to do his job, his whiteness, his disregard for anyone’s rights but his own and those of his family and cronies.

This nation is one of fault lines and cracks in the foundation.  Trump has spent his presidency widening the cracks and dividing people.  We are left with that indelible image of George Floyd pleading to breathe under the knee of a police officer.  It is America’s neck under the knee of this president, and we are dying.  We desperately want to breathe again.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper