Trump His Fall, Part 1

“Destruction” from “The Course of Empire” series by Thomas Cole, 1836. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

(KJV, Isaiah 14:12)

Forgive me the sacrilege of borrowing the title of Ben Jonson’s tragedy to signal the downfall of Donald Trump. Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall stands in correspondence to the Trump presidency as the Alhambra of Granada stands to Trump Tower, or as Tecumseh Sherman’s monument in New York City (at Central Park, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens) stands to Humpty Dumpty of nursery rhyme lore. Trump will soon shatter in one thousand pieces. All the King’s horses and all his own men will have pushed him ignominiously from his gaudy seat on his wall.

Indwellers and Immigrants

Cover of “The Heroes of Battle Rock” narrated by J.M. Kirkpatrick and edited by Orvil Dodge, 1904. (Credit: Robert L. Ivie)

In the middle of September, Bill-the-mail-carrier delivered a package containing an old pamphlet and an accompanying note from my brother saying he thought I might find it “a fun fast read.”  The pamphlet likely belonged to our deceased mother.  She could have picked it up on a visit to the Oregon coast with her historically-minded brother and sister-in-law.  The whole family, including my brother and me, is Oregon born.

There is something atavistic about this pamphlet.  It manifests a recurring ancestral outlook, the cultural DNA of white settlers, the origin myth gone ironically nativistic in today’s battle of white indwellers against immigrants of color.

“The Heroes of Battle Rock” is what Kenneth Burke calls a representative anecdote “in a bad sense.”[1]  Its implications for human relations are anything but positive.  It is reductive in its “motivational calculus” and thus simplistic, polarizing, and combative in the attitude it conveys toward non-whites, which would not be a matter of so much concern if it were atypical and strictly historical.

The Low-Bar Trope

Democratic Primary Debate Participants, 27 June 2019: Michael Bennet, Joseph Biden, Peter Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Hickenlooper, Bernard Sanders, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang. (Credit: DonkeyHotey / Wikimedia Commons)

You have heard it said before. I’ve said it myself. As a colleague recently grumbled: “The bar is low. All I want is a return to the rule of law.”

Indeed, the bar is set low for the 2020 presidential election if it means Democrats should nominate the person most likely to defeat Trump, that candidates competing for the nomination should do no harm to one another in the primaries, and that they and their supporters should rally behind the Party’s eventual nominee on the assumption that winning the election will return the nation to the status quo ante.

Is a reset enough? Is restoring the state of affairs as it existed before Trump’s presidency the right goal and the likeliest way to win the election?