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I wrote the following as a reply to Steven D’s recent front-paged post “I Wish I Could Go In”, a story about trying to get to a Bernie Sanders rally. Read on.
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I would like to offer y’all something to…cheer you up, I guess…tell you something about what’s really going on around the other side of the bend. Scare you? Maybe. But it’s a fine scare for all that. At least it is for all of us with a remaining ounce of sense left about this country.
I ran into the following article yesterday:
Lost in Trumplandia by Patricia Lockwood, a truly gifted writer. She went to a Trump rally in New Hampshire this February and wrote a totally brilliant, totally subjective piece about what she observed.
I’ll quote a bit of it…go read it. It’s Jimmy Breslin/relatively early Hunter Thompson good, and that’s about as good as journalism gets in my opinion. Joseph Mitchell good too. Heavy duty. It’s not “like” them except in the truly individual vision that it contains.
LOST IN TRUMPLANDIA
It’s his country now–we just vote in it.
Patricia Lockwood“THE FED OWNS COWS!” a protester bellowed at me as I moved blindly toward the doors of a Donald Trump rally. It was February 8, the eve of the New Hampshire Republican primary, and I was surrounded by whirling white. “Thank you,” I said, shaking the protester’s hand. “Good luck getting those cows away from them.” Nice, I thought as I walked away. My interviewing skills were as sharp as swords from the mall. Discerning the true nature of the Trump phenomenon, one so baffling it’s in the process of ruining some of the more rational minds of our generation, was probably going to be easy.
I had touched down in Manchester a few hours before, just as darkness began to fall together with snow. I entered the Verizon Wireless Arena, a 10,000-seat venue, to see a jumbotron projecting a photograph of Melania Trump in a bikini embracing a blow-up doll of Shamu. A hallucination? It was no longer possible to tell. The great crush around me seemed to be made up of two kinds of people: Trump supporters, and people there to goggle at Trump supporters. I flowed between both, listening. The second kind loved concession snacks. The first loved snacks and also hated Muslims.
Remembering my mission, I made my way to the media “pen”–a special zoo at the back of the arena for reporters, which was populated by a hectic collection of humans in black peacoats who seemed capable of watching C-SPAN without screaming–and took my place at a table among them, though I did not feel I belonged. I was there as a person who thought a great deal about farce, and where it turned into something else.
The pattern-finding sense goes wild in such a place. The corner of the eye takes over the whole. Language as I knew it had either ceased to exist, or else reverted to an automatic form. A phrase lit in a mouth was spoken, went looking for another. A different kind of thinking was happening–the kind you find around racetracks, casinos, the floor of the stock market. I had not thought politics was a physical pleasure. Feeling the air crackle around me, I knew it must be.
—snip—
The reporters around me entered a hive rhythm, interacting with the scene entirely through their laptop screens. I wondered what they were writing, what it was possible to write. Polemic has not worked, and neither has the I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know-that-we-know tone we’ve come to adopt in straight news stories. Trump presents a surface with no handle, a wall without a door. He is the opposite of nuclear physics but has the same effect: When you set out to think about his implications, your mind runs up against the problem of scope. “We either have a country or we don’t,” he told the crowd, as another news team dashed over and bent a microphone down to [her dark-skinned Sudanese Uber driver] Babiker.
A flurry of movement in the pit: A woman in the crowd had called Ted Cruz a pussy. In retrospect, it’s only surprising this hadn’t happened sooner. It’s surprising people don’t congregate by the millions in sports stadiums and eat nachos as they call Cruz a pussy, while a life-size vagina mascot runs around the field with a megaphone. Trump pounced. He made an oh-my-goodness face. “She said, `He’s a pussy.’ That’s terrible. Terrible. What kind of people do I have here?”
My heart went into free fall. The laugh that went up even in the media pen was the reason he was there, the reason he was going to win New Hampshire without breaking a sweat–no one else in the race would have said that, and there is some apparent hunger among us to be represented by a man who has the seeming freedom to say anything, who moves with impunity in a world he as good as owns. “I love you all, I love you all,” said the man who could say anything, before stepping off the stage and vanishing into the white night. “You’re special,” he told us, to a wall of identical roars, where any sound of protest could no longer be distinguished.
—snip—
There’s more. Much more. Go meet an original mind. It’s sheerly a pleasure.
AG