Written by Igor Goldkind
But going back to
the pistol Thomas Paine is holding against Donald Trump’s head; no,
I didn’t forget my premise. Imagine it with me. There’s Thomas
Paine, his hand steadily holding the cocked pistol, fully powdered
and loaded with a small lead ball. Tiny, but big enough to leave a
good sized hole at such close range. And there’s Donald Trump on
his knees, shaking. He’s already wet the pants of his suit. He
tries very hard to hold back his urging defecation and finally fails.
Now Donald Trump is soiled. Soiled with the same feces he’s
been feeding to the American voters for years. Soiled by his
indifference, his empathy deficit, his reckless, unfeeling impulses,
his sociopathic disconnect from the human race. Remember, Donald, to
say “I hear you.” It fools them every time and leaves plenty of
time for self-gratification at the expense of others. Trump is soiled
by his own inhumanity, his unbridled carnal greed to accumulate wealth, power and women. He assaults women not because he can get it
up anymore but because they have power he wants to dominate.
Look
at his wife. I haven’t seen such a blank dead look of a hostage to
circumstance since Patty Hearst. It was the money that bought her and
like some particularly gruesome episode of “Black Mirror,” she
got exactly what she paid for, with her integrity, her self-respect
and herself. Imagine the morning she awoke to the dawning denouement.
Sure she could leave any time, with her child. But where would she
go? What would she do? In the afterlife of existence everyone writes
a book and sells it. When things go badly; when the world seems to be
against me; when I lose; I always remind myself - it could always get
worse and at least I don’t have to fuck Donald Trump.
The
thought makes me feel better but my heart tears up when I think of
her suffering. It is the suffering of the affluent. The ones who have
accommodated everything they were told they needed to be happy.
Everything they worked hard to acquire in lieu of happiness only to
find that very object eluding them. That’s the horror of the
denouement, you reach the summit of your life’s ambition and now
the only thing left to do is jump off. Because happiness is not an
object or an objective. It flits effortlessly in and out of our lives
like a butterfly, briefly lingering on a flower and moving on. Ever
try to chase a butterfly? Exactly.
Back to Donald Trump having shit and pissed himself
while one of the fathers of our country held a pistol to his head.
Perhaps at this point Donald would beg for his life like the scene in
“Miller’s Crossing,” “Please, Thomas, Please. Look in your
heart, look in your heart. You don’t want to do this. You’re not
that kind of man. Look in your heart, for god's sake !”
God
is a natural place to go. After all, the divisions we are now facing
in our country are by no means recent. They’ve been brewing for
decades. The divisions are not entirely geographic although the three
states that assured Donald of his electoral victory do have a
concentration of post-Calvinist evangelicals. Nor are they solely
cultural; after all, Donald Trump is the epitome of the urban
gangster. A smooth talking, wheeling dealing property developer
soaking in the comfort of Manhattan luxury. He should be anathema to
his base of supporters. But he’s not, instead he speaks their
language; the language of PT Barnum and Charlie Chan both as fake as
a wooden nickel but master showman to a 'T' (Only white actors played
Charlie Chan which ironically was invented by Earl Derr Biggers as an
alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes and villains like Fu Manchu).
And Trump talks about God. He doesn’t so much talk
about his beliefs (if he has any), but about the threat that
nonbelievers and other religions pose for Christian evangelists,
particularly targeting Islam. Trump runs his own circus of fear and
the punters are more than happy to pay to be scared or at least have
their irrational fears affirmed. Donald Trump should be played by the
late Robert Mitchum (if he were still alive. Hey, we brought Thomas
Paine from two centuries ago; a zombie Robert Mitchum should not pose
too many difficulties). To be exact, Robert Mitchum in his role as
the greed-laden preacher in the classic American Gothic “The Night
of the Hunter” in which he plays a psychopathic man of the cloth
bent on money and murder (in that order). He pursues two children who
hold the secret to a hidden fortune down a river in the south, riding
a donkey and singing hymns. A fake, a demon, a creature of merciless
malice.
So is Thomas going to shoot Trump in the head for
using religion to accumulate power? Of course not. Thomas was a
believer but not in God, in reason. “It is by the exercise of
reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would
be incapable of understanding anything.” The reason Thomas Paine is
holding a cocked pistol against the back of Donald Trump’s head is
not God; Trump hasn’t blasphemed against faith; he’s blasphemed
against reason. Trump has spent his entire career disseminating the
appearance of things, not the truth. Truth is the enemy of Donald
Trump, because in truth, he is an insignificant man in the scheme of
things just as we are all beholden to the significance we manufacture
and some of us have made peace with that. Donald Trump has not. Like
a “hungry ghost” in Chinese Buddhism, Donald is compelled by
desire, call it lust, a lust for significance. This is why he builds
towers, not to house offices or hotel rooms, but to prop up as high
as he can his name: Trump.
At the start of this year we had a
crisis in authority due to the steady lies being pumped from the
White House by Trump. The first rule of autocracy is to shake
people’s belief in authority, so that they only can believe in you.
Donald Trump is attempting to destroy the pillars of the Fourth
Estate. Now we’ve entered a period of crisis in competence. When
the very ability to address real world problems by Trump and his
stooges is dubious at best.
Remember that the balance of powers in the
Constitution is all beholden to having a free press in which people
can report the truth and express their opinions of their government.
That’s what Thomas Paine counted on in drafting our rights. Each
right has a corresponding duty. Paine said our first duty is to be
kind to others. Paine also said that a person's corresponding duty is
to allow the same rights to others as we allow ourselves. From this
basis we can use our abilities to promote mutual understanding. These
expanding circles of reciprocal duties and rights weave a tapestry,
built on democratic norms, of liberty in the context of societal
interdependence. It’s called a society based on equality.
Did you know that Thomas Paine was the very first
American abolitionist? In 1775 he wrote, "To
Americans: That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal
and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable
than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people
should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is
surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved
contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and
humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and
several late publications.
Our traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must
know the wickedness of that SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning,
or the dictates of their own hearts; and such as shun and stifle all
these willfully sacrifice conscience, and the character of integrity
to that golden idol."
Thomas Paine was like the first white citizen member
of Black Lives Matter. He and his pal Thomas Jefferson originally
included an amendment to the Constitution ending slavery. They wanted
to create a revolutionary society in which ALL men are created equal.
As usual, women would have to wait. Of course this amendment was
vetoed by the southern slave owning states. The same states
suspiciously from which Trump derives the concentration of his base
support. But the point being that the Founding Fathers, if not all,
enough, wanted to establish an egalitarian society in all respects.
Paine referred to this, as did the other Framers, as ‘the common
good,’ something the alt-right abhors because they understand it
as: control by somebody that isn’t them. Nonetheless, contrary to
Constitution literalists the "common good" involves a
mental posture taken by citizens in their deliberations where they
account for, yet transcend partial interests to look at the good for
each and all in their decisions.
Even in business, Trump’s
claimed turf, the right of commerce was seen as transforming the
mindset of feudal, dependent relations between men and their
government. It helped transform subjects into confident citizens.
Trade was viewed not as laissez-faire, but in a web of social
interdependence. It was seen as a major modality for individuals to
use their reason (not faith), to develop better mutual understanding
of others' interests in society. While aware that too much indulgence
in commerce could lead to the decline of spirit and patriotism,
making reason subservient to commercial interests, Paine felt that
man would use his religion of reason to place commerce within a
broader quest for lifelong education in the arts, sciences,
engineering and philosophy in order to progress to a universal
society and universal happiness.
Paine believed that man's highest spirit of reason is
its motives and applications such that it does not have to be
concentrated solely in pursuit of commercial interests. Art, science,
and commercial enterprise can be placed in service to humanity and
universal happiness. Moreover, each individual deserves minimal
dignity and a minimal economic base to pursue their natural rights.
Like Paine and Edward Bellamy advocated two hundred years ago, some
form of guaranteed minimal annual income ought to be adopted for each
citizen, regardless of wealth or other distinctions. Imagine what
Thomas Paine would make of the modern day commercialized medical
establishment!
Sounds like a socialist that Thomas Paine,
don’t he? Not at all really, just your average post-Enlightenment
philosopher and thinker. Or perhaps he's a socialist only as far as
socialism is dedicated to the fairer distribution of resources so
that everyone might enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
more equally. Paine wrote, “Some men and women, through greed or
disproportionate natural or social advantages, will contribute to
others being systematically impoverished in the imperfections of
man-made civilization:
The earth is the common property of the human race;
thus each human being is equally entitled to have dignity and minimal
share of the earth's bounty, including clean water, air, and access
or rents from land. Thus, men and women must discover those laws
operating in society which will create a greater harmony of overall
interests. Democratic communities will have to choose to redistribute
some minimal baseline of societal resources to those at least most
vulnerable not as charity, but as a right in the name of social
harmony.”
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