While many who voted for the heir of Drumpf immigrants from the fatherland not two generations ago assumed/hoped he wouldn’t do half of what he said he was going to do, or at the very least that he certainly wouldn’t enact the bat-shit-crazy theocratic, oligarchic, autocratic, anti-democratic…ideologies of Heritage Foundation high priest Paul Dans, I wonder how many of them are now aghast at the fury and fanaticism of MAGA 2.0. My guess is not many, that they lie silently in wait for their IRAs and stock investments to blossom as corporations reap the rewards of their fealty to the felon-in-chief.
So, he’ll gut as many federal programs designed to aid and enrich people’s lives and guarantee public safety, clean air and water, adequate education, equitable hiring and other fair business practices, and so on and so forth…as he can possibly get away with. The little bubble I live in remains intact. I can still make the payments on my mortgage and my fast-plush-gas-guzzling vehicles, and if the lives of the poor, the indigent, maybe just the unlucky, take a turn for the worse, so be it. Back when America was great, we didn’t bother with such inconveniences, believing even as fact after fact denied it that we were Horatio Algers all, had pulled ourselves up by our boot straps, had reached our positions of privilege through effort and determination alone, each a shining incarnation of the great American Dream. Anyone beneath us deserved to be there, were welfare queens or just lazy, good-for-nothing thugs and riffraff.
Then there are the farmers and hardworking, lower-middle class and lower blue collar folk who have been the target of conservative Republican bamboozlement for decades. Might they just finally be starting to see that in the great America MAGA imagines they aren’t worth a hill of beans—that while MAGA played the populace card hard and fast, they really always only envisioned an American greatness that rides on the shoulders of the mega-billionaire oligarchs and hip, Silicon Valley greed (just the same as old-school greed, but with more expensive espresso machines and faster, slicker cars)? Will farmers soon be wondering who will buy their produce when the tariffs really kick in? Will the blue collar, pickup-truck-driving, hand-calloused, blue-jeaned-hardworking Americans watch inflation soar, their lives becoming more and more desperate, the American Dream fading, slipping further and further out of reach?
Questions abound: Do we blame Biden for his hubris? Do we go back and blame Hilary for not once visiting Wisconsin? Fox for their litany of lies? Redistricting, exclusions from voter roles of minority and other Democrat-leaning voters…? Will former living presidents make their voices heard as the coup continues on in real time? And where have the more “moderate” Republicans gone? How does Susan Collins of Maine, say, manage to join ranks, goose-stepping in lockstep with the other members of MAGA, all “independent moderation” gone? Where are the farm-belt Republicans whose constituents will bear so much of the brunt of an economic vision that utterly excludes them?
I saw a headline the other day that I thought was surely an Onion parody—that Trump had offered preferred immigration status to Afrikaner whites from South Africa whose “rights are being violated” by a new land use law there (surely at the behest of Elon and other members of “the PayPal Mafia”). No. It is true and as ludicrous as anything else we have been bombarded with in just a few short, bizarre weeks. And, of course, “The South African government has denied there are any concerted attacks on white farmers and has said that Trump's description of the new land law is full of misinformation and distortions,” and, furthermore, Kallie Kriel, the CEO of the Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum, said: "We have to state categorically: We don’t want to move elsewhere.”
Through it all, I’ve found myself returning to the incredible final pages of The Great Gatsby, where the narrator, Nick Carraway, finds himself meandering through Gatsby’s abandoned, outrageous castle of a home—Gatsby, remember, is revealed in the end as a criminal maniacally intent on rising to the highest echelons of American society at any cost (though “old money” would never have him in the end). Nick has his one grand epiphany here, all his earlier pomp and show-offishness and superiority and judgement vanish away as his rhetoric soars to new heights, and he poetically dismantles the ideology at the root of the “American Dream.”
I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more…Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
… as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an esthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. ... And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
MAGA is surely a “huge incoherent failure of a house” too, the end product of fanatical bluster and criminality. Just as Nick imagines how “America” looked in the eyes of those “first Dutch Sailors,” seeing for the first time something they imagined was “commensurate to [their] capacity for wonder,” MAGA casts its spell over the already privileged, the not so rich, and the poor alike, who all long to join the ranks of Donald and Elon, and Zuck, and Bezos…, inviting us to—just as with Nick, just as with Gatsby—envision a world where it is possible to ascend to the ultimate heights of wealth and power (no need to worry about goodness or decency, though). Gatsby learns fast that the only true path “up” is to join forces with criminals and fraudsters (if you haven’t been born into old money). Nick, on the other hand, finally starts to accept who he is, to see wealth and power as inextricably wedded to immorality and ugliness, and he ultimately embraces his midwestern upbringing and other human values that transcend wealth and power:
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.
Just as the trees of this continent, still unsettled by white Europeans, “pandered in whispers” to the dreams of “men,” the forces of MAGA pander to their supporters, promising greatness, riches, a monocultural, Christian-pure world free of racial divisions (just don’t acknowledge them!) and injustices and expensive eggs and untainted American blood. Donald, Elon, J.D., all their many minions…do seem to believe in that “orgastic future” Gatsby (and Nick) failed to attain. But how many of us will lay ourselves down along these shores lined with the indulgent and grotesque and immense wealth of old and new money alike and wonder, as Nick does, at the futility and tragedy of it all, those houses now seen as “inessential,” those grandiose “dreams” as already behind us, receding away, though we still “stretch out our arms further,” the “current” of greed and power and an American Dream that excludes any degree of moral conscience or human decency pushing hard against us as we “ceaselessly” drift into the past, America at long last “great” again?
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Arnie,
Your writing is truly soaring here, carried on waves of disappointment, and of indignation at the warp speed of our country’s hourly collapse. Reading the concluding pages of The Great Gatsby chilled me and elevated me all at once. That is often what great art will do. Surely, there are few novels that can cause as many ripples of melancholy, emotion and loss in a manner so sublime. I may need to return to F. Scott’s masterwork to see even more clearly what you have shown in your beautiful, heartbreaking rumination.
Agreed. Soaring writing indeed - I feel your pain and despair from here. From over here, we can only watch on in dismay as we wait for the next crazy instalment from Trump-land. Truly so sorry for your country right now.