As I awaken each day, I wonder what that day will bring . . . rain, sunshine, heat, coolness, or, of course, total madness . . . absurdity even. Because we no longer should expect “normality”. And what is “Normality” you ask? Well, being of (still . . . for a while) sound mind, even if a mind that is long in the tooth, each day brings to mind memories of 80 plus years of daily events and activities. They form a pattern that for me defines “Normality”. Yes, we went through economic depressions, several of them in fact. We encountered Wars, and pseudo-Wars. What is a “pseudo-War you might ask? Well, the Middle East killing spree meets that definition. Vietnam and Korea are probably somewhere in between a “World War” (think I and II) and a killing spree. And in between, we experienced what we knew as “normal days and nights”. The economy rose and fell, we went to work each morning and returned each evening. We ate normal meals at normal times. We entertained friends and family, or were entertained by them. We attended theatre, or concerts. Occasionally, we went to exotic places for things called “vacations”. And life just went on. Presidents came and went, as did other politicos. And some were good (think FDR, Kennedy, even Johnson) and some were awful (think Nixon, Reagan, Shrub). Mostly, though we argued about them or their policies, one came away still, thinking that, whether we agreed we them or not, fundamentally they still believed in our Democratic system of governance. They were “Americans” all.
And then came 2016, and the election that now
defines our times, and many of our people. Whatever thoughts I have of Hillary, she too
was “normal”, and “American”. But then
who should arrive on the scene, but Donald Trump. And who is Donald Trump you might ask? Well,
Donald Trump is a demonstrably unsuccessful human being. He was raised by an
angry, pseudo-Nazi father who had migrated from Germany to the USA, in part
because he did not wish to serve in the German Armed Forces. He raised and partly destroyed several
children, one of whom was The Donald.
The father operated in real estate, buying housing units and them
leasing them to folks. The father was a
racist, so he elected not to lease to people of color. The son caught onto that
life approach. Donald went through his
education stages apparently without ever becoming educated. Then Junior also became involved in real
estate. But the Donald had grander schemes in mind than Daddy. He branched out in terms of the kind of
projects in which he became involved, to include things like gambling casinos.
But he seems not to have known what he was doing most of time, so Bankruptcy
was the dominant characteristic of his economic ventures. Totally, he engaged
in six bankruptcies. Each seems the result of over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in
Atlantic City and New York: Trump Taj Mahal
(1991), Trump Plaza Hotel
and Casino (1992), Plaza Hotel (1992), Trump Castle Hotel
and Casino (1992), Trump Hotels and
Casino Resorts (2004), and Trump Entertainment
Resorts (2009). Beyond those, he engaged in other spurious enterprises,
such as “Trump University”, a fake university that provided real estate
training courses. It finally went out of
business altogether. So “fakery” seems a common theme in TrumpWorld.
But even beyond his various dubious
claims to fame, his election served to elevate something I now call our Daily
Theatre of the Absurd. And what is that, you might ask?
Well, Theatre of the Absurd, refers to dramatic works of
certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early ’60s who agreed
with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, in his essay “The Myth of
Sisyphus” (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose.
The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of
those works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed as such, dramatists
as diverse as Samuel
Beckett, Eugène
Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter,
and a few others shared a pessimistic vision of
humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and to control its fate. Humankind
in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious.
The
ideas that inform the Absurdist plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist
playwrights, therefore, did away with most of the logical structures of
traditional theatre. There is little dramatic action as conventionally
understood; however frantically the characters perform, their busyness serves
to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence. In Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot (1952), plot is eliminated, and a timeless, circular
quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as tramps, spend their
days waiting—but without any certainty of whom they are waiting, or of
whether he, or it, will ever come.
Every
day, since his (seemingly Absurd) election, we have been treated to daily
storms of absurdist utterances, mainly in the form of Tweet Storms. Our
pseudoPresident seems to love Twitter, that communications system for people who can’t really write or think in any language.
He seems to sit up at night, after watching or even participating in the
Fox Fake News programs, and then his brain seems to explode and he sends out TweetStorms of palpable drivel. And then every day, we must listen to news accounts
of his twitterisms. We all must look at and attempt to interpret the language
of the Theatre of the Absurd, aka, Life in America.
And
so now each day begins with a question: what totally absurd utterance will
emerge today from the White House, or from one of his many golf clubs, where he seems
to spend most of his time? And his absurdist language (because he seems not to
have learned English) becomes the language of the day, then analyzed by the
increasingly absurdist pseudoanalysts on the Fox News outlets. And so it goes.
And
I sit in my chair each day (oh we are no longer allowed to go anywhere because
of the deadly Pandemic COVID19) and think about language, and the activities of
daily living, and how I must come to terms with what Life has become. And I am drawn to yet another phrase, originating
in the world of theatre. And that phrase is “Suspension of Disbelief”, because
our life has now deteriorated such that we need to employ the theatre to define
Life. And what is “Suspension of
Disbelief” you might ask? Well, it refers to the
temporary acceptance, as believable, of events or characters that would ordinarily
be seen as incredible. In the theatre, this is usually to allow an audience to
appreciate works of literature or drama that are exploring unusual ideas. This
term was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 with the publication of
his Biographia literaria or biographical sketches of my literary life
and opinions:
The state is
arguably an essential element when experiencing any drama or work of fiction.
We may know very well that we are watching an actor or looking at marks on
paper, but we willfully accept them as real in order to fully experience what
the artist is attempting to convey. And is that not a perfect description of
Life in Donald Trump’s America? How else can we deal with our otherwise
absurdist life than to treat it as the equivalent of a theatrical play, in
which we are all engaged as an unwilling audience?
And to cap off
this absurdist idea piece, I am drawn to a recent conversation we had with a German
friend of long standing. We had engaged in a Zoom call, since she is in
Hamburg, Germany. We have known her since our days in India during the 1960s, where she was working in NDR radio. We
were talking about life here in America, and we mentioned our baffled state of
mind concerning the seeming fact that many Americans were still supporting Donald
Trump, despite everything already known about him. We said, “We really cannot
understand how/why Americans continue to support him”. And our German friend
replied, “Well think about how Germans continued to support Adolph Hitler and
Nazi Germany”. And we all
stopped then, to consider her thought. And we had to leave it there, because it
said everything.
And so, now we
have a few short months left until we get to decide again who shall lead our
country. Think hard folks. Lives depend
on that choice. If we go the wrong way, Life in America will flow even beyond
the Theatre of the Absurd into another world altogether, a world we may regret
forever. There is still time to recover, just not much time. So VOTE as though your lives depend on it.
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