Trompf from Here on Out (16)

5-25. Memorial Day. On this national holi-day, we enact one of our most humanizing traits, individual and communal memory. Individually, as families, and as friends, we celebrate the lives of our beloved who have died before us; and as communities of all sizes up to the whole nation we honor persons who have given their lives for our democracy and general wellbeing. This year our dead include victims of pandemic, and we are expressing our gratitude to persons who are risking their lives to treat our sick and to maintain essential services.

Our Pr*sident is observing the occasion with a weekend of golf and rage-tweeting. Is there, out there somewhere, a final straw that will break the elephant’s back, and break the spell that this madman has cast upon the most gullible, hateful, and cowardly among us? Could it be that historians will remember this unholy pr*sidential weekend as that straw?

5-17. Woke at 3:30 this morn and thought, Madness, Horror.  I mean this has gotten serious.  I signed on to this gig to narrate a novel that pretty much would write itself, and now the plot has gone double villain by crossing fascist narcissist with novel virus—Pan-demic, the worldwide nightmare god, weighing on our chests.  I’m so bummed that I haven’t even written long patches of the plot.  

Lying there, I got an image of blood seeping out of my eyes.  This was not a dream. Nothing wrong with them, no scratches or anything, just blood oozing up, all along the bottoms of my eyeballs, over the brims and down my cheeks.

If I called 911 I couldn’t get an ambulance.  They don’t send ambulances for narrators who can’t prove that they have been in contact with a proven person.  But proven of what?  Patience?

At 4:01 I had to get up to pee, so I opened my eyes.  No blood anywhere.  Yesterday Trompf televised a brag about his new Space Force, with apparently a new rocket bomb that flies 17 x speed of the old.  The implication is that nothing can stop him from killing.  He has to.  No choice, he said.   « I call it my super duper missile. »   He’s a deadlier agent of death than the virus.  He thinks he’s Shiva, a great trickster; but the joke’s on him.

And it seems he’s on speed.  I suspect that as he spins increasingly out of control, as his chaos overwhelms even his whirling brain, as doomsday approaches, things are speeding up.  He announces Project Warp Speed; a vaccine by the end of the year.  Everything is a war for Trompf, and everything takes place in the vast fantasy space inside his head.  But “vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back.”  Schools will reopen in the fall.

Meanwhile nothing can kill him.  For the screen image, everybody around him must wear a mask, while he performs bare-faced.  We are so fragile, so limited.  But He is invulnerable, our invincible lord and savior.  

Yet it appears that He can feel the walls closing in around Him.  If He is the Republican nominee, He will not be re-elected, even by the Constitutional Electors.  Barr will not be able to excuse Him.  McConnell will not be able to protect Him, and indeed will wash his hands.  He will not be chosen by the Supreme Court.

Pan-ic attack.  “OBAMAGATE.”  His enemies are the most corrupt in history.  But that’s okay because he has disinfectant.  This is the straw floating on the waves, that the drowning man grasps for. This is the Grand Delusion, the End Game of Herr Trompf’s insanity, that his mother and his father prepared him to create.

The Horror is that in His Madness, and ours, he has become a Jim Jones.  When it is clear to him that he is going down, that he cannot escape except through a miracle of death and promised resurrection, he will call upon us all, to show faith in his vision of Himself by gulping the bleach.  Children first.

He must not die!  He cannot die!  Live in Him!

Hey! Don’t drink that!

Oh, btw, Obama has not been a major character, but I think his carefully modulated criticisms of T recently are a turning point in the plot line. His two online national commencement addresses yesterday were, in tone and content, a comforting and encouraging addition to our struggle to maintain sanity and overcome fascism and the cumulative errors of our past since 1980. He called directly for a new-generation hostile takeover (reminiscent, for me, of “Don’t trust anybody over 30.”) I have predicted that Bernie and the rest of us Progressives are going to make sure that Biden is elected. (It’s absolutely necessary, although far from sufficient.) We can add the Obamas to that cast.

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