Beyond Amusing

Remember the good old days when Donald Trump was merely a goldmine-source of unintentional comedy? That's not to say that the guy is no longer ripe for satire and dark humor; he is. The problem is that what has happened to America is no longer particularly funny. I've been saying for nearly eighteen months, "This is going to end badly". The word "bad" can be read in many different ways. I fell down a flight of stairs in my house a couple of months back, and while this not a good thing it certainly wasn't "tragic". The administration of Donald J. Trump is going to end tragically - and not just for him, his associates and his family. This administration is going to end tragically for all of us. The writing is on the wall, folks - minus the errors of grammar, spelling and punctuation.

We saw the tragedy unfolding before our eyes last week at the Mexican/American border. Children were snatched from the arms of their loving parents without - amazingly - being provided with any documentation as to where those kids could be located. As if that wasn't bad enough for the tastes of thinking people everywhere, the government (that would be our government) apparently did not record the names of the parents or the children. Remember, some of these kids are infants.

Trump is quite a new experience for the American experiment. We've never really had a genuinely bat-shit-crazy president before.

The round-the-clock pressure that the Watergate affair brought upon Dick Nixon began to cause the hideous old bastard to become unglued. He began to drink heavily and there are credible reports of him having conversations with the painted portraits of some of his dead predecessors (I can just imagine him snarling obscenities at JFK!) But for most of the five-and-a-half years that The Trickster called the White House home, his judgments were, for the most part, sane - horrifically misguided, true, but quite sane all the same.

Theodore and Elliot Roosevelt
`

Theodore Roosevelt was a man who underwent periods of debilitating of depression for his entire life. In fact, a few historians have made the argument that old Teddy was, perhaps, bi-polar. There is some evidence that this might be the case. Roosevelt was a man of almost manic enthusiasms that could leave the people around him bewildered. On the day that he was inaugurated as vice-president, President McKinley's chief political advisor, Mark Hanna, told him: "Do you realize there is but a single heartbeat between the presidency and that mad man?"

Certainly it cannot be argued that going into the Brazilian jungle at the age of fifty-five (an episode from which he almost didn't return) in hindsight had to be a bit nuts. His younger brother, Elliot, succumbed in his early thirties to the ravishes of drug and alcohol abuse; and although it is impossible to clinically diagnose both men a century after their passing, there is some evidence that a strain of mental illness existed in that extraordinary family.

But for all of TR's craziness - real or imagined - the only people who had a real (and justified) fear of his presidency were the richest one percent, or, as he referred to them, "the malefactors of great wealth". He was sincere when he said that he wanted a "Square Deal" for all of the people. Unlike Trump, Roosevelt was noted for his sound and reasonable judgment.

Abraham Lincoln was another president for whom an argument can be made that he suffered from some form of mental illness. Like Roosevelt, Lincoln was plagued throughout his lifetime by episodes of  severe depression (back then it was referred to as "melancholia"). There were times when his sense of inner despair was so profound, that he would retreat within himself for hours, barely acknowledging anyone. Indeed, a poem he wrote in 1844, when he was thirty-five, reveals a dark, inner world that must have been bleak:

 

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
              I'm living in the tombs.

 

Lincoln's personal turmoil does not take away from us his rightful image of one of the greatest presidents in history; in fact, it only enhances it.

Past chiefs-executive were made up from a vast landscape of emotional and psychological variables. They were forty-three differing men of differing intellectual capacities. Some were blessed with great strengths, while others were cursed with monumental weaknesses. A few offered to the American people farsighted ideas that made for a more perfect union, while still others were incapable of visualizing this country's potential. Donald Trump is something else altogether. This is going to end tragically....

....but I repeat myself.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY 
                                             
SUGGESTED READING:

Grant
by Ron Chernow

I had an understanding about the general and the president, but the private man has been a joy to get to know. The best bio I've read in a long time.