Trump, The Grotesque, and The Lonely Monsters Within

There is something at work in

my soul, which I do not understand.” 

― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

I like fairy tales and mythology and I understand the world best when looking through them in order to make sense of the world around me. It helps, especially, when one feels like things are so overwhelmingly wretched you can’t even bare to think about the news. So lately I’ve struggled to find out a wise way of thinking about the figure (and rise) of Trump. Because I am equally fascinated and disturbed by such a figure, and what it says and reflects about a country that is my home and a place that I love. Rather than turn away in disgust, I feel it’s better to explore the idea of Trump through mythology, the only language that makes sense to me, than pretend it doesn’t exist, or that it is not as important as the stories I love about Zeus and Freya, Demeter, The Minotaur, etc. 

I am suspicious of my anger, my smugness, and/or self-righteousness at both him and his followers. It seems to me to be incredibly unwise to allow such a man who brings out the worst in himself, to extend that indignity by also bringing out the worst in us. 

It is so easy to confuse the symptom with the disease; the truly scary part is that Trump is merely a symptom of a disease (a rot) we have yet to identify and furthermore, unwilling to find within our own self. I certainly know I don’t like to look within myself for rot. And a communal disgust of a man we can all agree to deplore (at least the friends and family I have thus far) is incredibly cathartic and maybe even useful up to a point, but then there comes a time to look past the obvious and turn around the examination to ones self. That is a choice that comes out of growing—leaving a juvenile, communal condemnation of “other” and turning inward to inspect and confront the much more insidious shadows of our own “Ugly”.  Wouldn’t that be far more useful?

I like poems, old books, and I also like pop culture.  As a Millennial, I am surrounded in the communication of an Internet age—trending stories and hashtags and a kind of dumbing down of language. I don’t really like it, and I return to “old things” as a respite. I went to England to study Myth and fairy tale because I revered Carl Jung since I was thirteen years old and my mom kept one of his books on the bookshelf. I wanted to be wise like Carl Jung. I wanted to sit in candle lit rooms, listening to the Blind Willie Johnson song, “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground,” and Debussy’s “Reverie” while reading a Keats poem and thinking about how Jung might interpret it. Instead I sit by glow of the internet and cannot escape the actual-world-I-live-in, that actually includes figures and incidences I’d much rather not know exist.

But by shaking my head at it all, sighing, I can’t help but feel like I am taking the easy way I out. I was made for these times. This does not have to be a low-brow tabloid story—this can be myth. And like George Carlin said, “When you are born into this world, you get a free ticket to a freak show. And when you are born into America, you get a front row seat. Personally, I’m delighted.” So too, can I be (maybe not delighted) but get something out of it. Bring a new plane of understanding that is not based on mere disgust, but sincere desire to allow our greatest enemies to be our wisest teachers. God forgive them, for they know not what they do. My favorite prayer in the Bible. 

The world as it is now is only a reflection of what it so desperately lacks, and if “the unexamined life is not worth living” then why am I so reticent to examine it? I love scary movies, books and stories.  But I am squeamish with the news. I read about another cop killing an innocent person, and I cry myself to sleep. Mostly because I think about his mother. She is not a part of a debate about police accountability. She is a real person who just lost her real son. I can’t even process my seething anger, so I keep the stories closed. Is this how thin-skinned I’ve become?   I like to look at Titian paintings of the downfalls of men. But my heart sinks every time I read at a Trump supporters comment on the Internet. Why don’t I have the strength to face the hubris and/or cruelty of man, now? Why can I only do it looking backward into the past? 

The America I love is there too, even in its most grotesque form. 

All through our history, America’s had a fascination with the Grotesque, from the turn-of-the-century freak shows with bearded ladies, “dwarfs” and the disabled, in which throngs of Victorians, and then, Edwardians came to communally gasp and gape at like animals in a zoo.  The vaudevillian “black face,” that reduced African-Americans in to caricatures. Freddy Cruger’s distorted features in Nightmare on Elm Street. American Idol try-outs where the nation collectively, yet passively, mock societal outcasts for entertainment.  There is something deliciously appealing at looking at something “other” and being thankful it is not us. It’s a kind of sickness perhaps we’ve yet to grasp fully, and certainly would never admit to, outright. I wonder if there might be a sickness too, in gleefully watching someone like Trump self-destruct. Is it really the best we can do? 

Once the monsters (the freaks) were outside of us. We paid to go into carnivals and freak shows and vaudevilles. But now, perhaps to supplement our i-everything age, we’ve created the Grotesques to be us, so that we do not have to be directly accountable for the consequences of our own ugliness.  No matter where I look I can’t seem to escape the word “Trump” or the word, “Kardashian.”  This is the era of the selfie and normalization of narcissism and self-marketing. It is no different with our veneration of these cultural “gods.”  They are simply a reflection, a cultural “selfie” of the monster in the mirror. Trump does not exist on his own. The Kardashians do not exist on their own. (Indeed, no one can even adequately explain why they’re famous, other than we’ve allowed them to be)!  We’ve created them, like mini Dr. Frankenstein creations, to displace our own immense darkness and confusion onto something out of our control.  But does this displacement of darkness onto another draw out our anxieties, as Stephen King suggests? Or does it perpetuate them?

  “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another,” writes Mary Shelley.  And with this, the world grows smaller, and we smaller within it, while our idealized monsters stretch up into the sky and out of our control, or beyond or ability to care or even understand anymore. 

And that is the beginning of loneliness.

The sacred and the profane —mixed together, the crassness of celebrity, and the simultaneous saintly adoration and repulsion of a singular thing is a strange phenomenon. Even listening to Trump’s spoken words, he seems to be equally obsessed with women’s superficial attractiveness, as he is his disgust that this value-currency cannot hold up. It seems like the same area of the brain sparks—whether adoring or reviling a thing. This is easily recognizable in one’s self. Both give off a similar pleasure.  Whether it is the creeping normality of bodily nips, cuts, implants and botox to become the “other”  (Kylies’ transformation into a Kim, wherein she no longer physically looks like herself), or,  the creeping normality of racist asides, outright lies, and insidious violence (Trump) coming off as nothing-much-at-all, nothing-much-to-bat-an-eyelash at, because of the very ISOLATING LAB wherein these weird experiments play out (whether it be a Beverly Hills neighborhood, or a town in Alabama wherein entrenched beliefs become normalized and never once questioned.  All of it is distorted, unnatural, comic, tragic and absurd. But we would be amiss not to see these places—this very landscape, within us and our very own thinking about the same exact things. 

There is a vacuum of emotion, and in its place, a kind of void that people seem to want. They seem to want it because it has no end. It is all-consuming. A secret desire for chaos and decay, a kind of Dionysian death-wish, that allows for a giddy stupor where a mind does not have to measure, understand, think critically or reflect on the past, or even consider the future (one that does not belong to us). We don’t have to live an individually lived myth because we are told to wear the mask of celebrity or “other” without having to answer for its Grotesque-ness, the past, or the future. Nothing but now.  It is a plastic representation of the lowest common denominator of our selves. 

Nietzche believed there was something good in having our sense of self shattered and joining the dancing throng. But is this it? Eroticism is transferred into faux-faces, faux-hair, faux-facts, or what Stephen Colbert aptly labeled, “truthiness.” There is something vague about this shiny new way of being a public figure. There is something intentionally, clipped, trimmed and kept to vague ideals—of never having to really be anything at all, or attach yourself to anything at all. Why are the Kardashians famous? They are because they are. Why is Trump allowed to be held unaccountable for the things he says? Because he can. The truth can be genetically modified —the truth can be corn syrup. People consume it like food; because it is called food. Nobody wants to hear that it’s not. Behind the physical, we can usually seek out a spiritual element. But the spiritual has eroded away and in its place we seem to be okay with cheapness and temporality.  Distortion has become some kind of entertainment passed off as truth. And we want our entertainment to be us, more than our desire for truth. 

Where is the hero/heroine here? If this Faux-Us is always there, no matter how hard we try to look away, where do we find the soul of the matter? Do we even have one, any more? Can we find it, even in the Grotesque, if we look hard enough? Is it closer there, perhaps, than anywhere else? Division creates longing for unity. And as much as I’d like to dispossess myself of these uglier aspects of my own psyche, there they are, and very much a part of me. The Trump-ian aspect is part of this “me” I belong to, and it will always be. It will be a matter of keeping it creatively under control.  And the Kardashian aspect is a part of this “me” I belong to as well. I too cannot untangle my sense of identity to what is most superficial about me. Even on my best days, I struggle to be a person who knows better, and does better. And again and again, I fall into my own lowest common denominator, and allow the worst of myself to deflect it onto the most convenient “other” at the moment, displaying my monsters as ones outside of my own self. But… there is something interesting about that. We don’t have to be disgusted. It can be interesting. We can peer into this abyss and by doing so, root out the falsities in ourselves. If this is me, what can I address today, to amend my own blindness, my own failure to see The Grotesque in me, leading to my isolation, loneliness and masks an emptiness that I cannot heal? If Trump were not so awful, if the Kardashians not so (seemingly) shallow, would we ever hear about them?  Maybe not. And in this I feel comfort. Maybe we need these symbols of the basest parts of ourselves to outwardly manifest, and give relief to the deeper parts, struggling to answer the real questions. Frankenstein’s monster in his anguish, said, “If I cannot inspire love, then I will inspire fear.”  We might be crushed by a sense of loneliness (by this I mean a soul-based loneliness) that cannot bear to meet the internal monsters all on our own. But watching the hubris of a man crumble before our feet should not just be a downfall to revel in; it is calling us to a higher way of being human—one in which every mythological character (whether in reality or legend) is actually our own self; a shadow we should recognize from long ago, and an incentive to no longer deny, chastise, mock or exclude, but reaffirm its true value, a new kind of worth, and a very new understanding. We can be better people. And we should do so right now, more than ever.     Again quoting Shelley, “With how many things are we on the brink of becoming disacquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.” 

A little prayer from one still learning to believe: 

Let me not be disacquanited of the monster in my own self by deflecting it onto another. And through a hard-won wisdom, let me touch every other soul that ever has lived.