I have a friend who is an expert in worldly
things. She has seen more worldly things with her actual eyes than I can shake
a stick at. (She was one of those ones who went out on the ground and did the
work that the politicians would not or could not. She fought the good fight.)
Every time I see her I say, ‘We have to talk about Donald.’
And then we stare at each other in astonished
silence.
Sometimes, I make a few spluttering noises.
Occasionally she lifts her eyebrows into her hairline. I wave my hands about.
‘But,’ I say, ‘what, how, who, what?’
At the beginning, all the armchair jockeys
had an explanation. He was an extreme narcissist, he had borderline personality
disorder, he was a raving misogynist, he had the first signs of early onset
dementia. Someone actually went and studied his sentence patterns and worked
out he had the vocabulary and syntax of an eight-year-old. I think that’s being
quite rude to eight-year-olds.
Now, he has galloped far, far away into the endless prairie
of the inexplicable. I have started to think that he may simply be
catastrophically, operatically, heroically stupid, but that is not quite an
explanation either.
Here is what an eight-year-old knows. Nazis
are bad. People who love Nazis are bad. Running cars into crowds of people is
bad. The leader of the most powerful nation the world has ever seen does not
appear to know that. How can anyone not
know that?
As I look at the pictures of the Nazi rally
in Charlottesville, at the clean, shining faces with their rictus of
undifferentiated rage and their glinting, fanatical eyes, I wonder what it is
that they do love. Is it the flags? Is it the uniforms? Is it the strange salutes? Is it the swastikas? Hitler, like Donald Trump, turned out to be catastrophically stupid. He could
have wiped out the British army at Dunkirk, but he made his tanks stop so the
little boats came in and the Royal Navy raced to the rescue and the BEF, which
was lost, was suddenly found. He
could have wiped out the British Air Force, but he suddenly turned the
Luftwaffe on London, so that the cratered airfields could be rebuilt and the
courageous new cohort of pilots trained. He invaded Russia, even though he was a student of Napoleon.
I could have told him not to do that when I was fifteen. Anyone who has read
about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow knows that there is one golden rule in war
and it is: Don’t Invade Russia. Just don’t do it. Have a nice cup of tea
instead.
He screamed and raved and popped pills and
never took responsibility for his actions and trashed his country and let his
people starve, in the end, and then killed himself because he couldn’t face the
consequences. That’s before one even takes into account one of the most
monstrous mass killings in history, as millions of Jews, Roma, gay men, and
people with mental illnesses were herded into camps and shot and gassed.
I don’t see what there is to admire. I don't know why American in 2017 are saving those flags. Even on
his own terms, Hitler failed, as the Master Race turned out to be a crashing disappointment.
He blamed the Germans themselves at the last, for not being the Ubermensch he
wanted them to be. His fantasy of dominance crumbled to dust. So what are those
fanatical marchers marching for?
Complete and utter failure and infamy on every level? I genuinely don’t
understand.
And when Trump looks at them and refuses to
condemn them in terms – ‘many sides, many sides’ – what does he see? Something
that speaks, in a way I can’t comprehend, to his reptilian brain? His new moral
equivalence is perhaps the most baffling thing of all, this bonkers invention called the alt-left. The only moral
equivalence would be if there were squads of devoted Stalinists marching in
opposition, dreaming of the show trials and the purges and the gulags. Does
nobody, from the White House to the street, read any history?
Living with the inexplicable is unsettling,
for most humans. The reason that people love fiction is that novels and plays
give shape and meaning to the random happenings of life. There is Chekov’s
famous rule: if the gun goes off in act four, you’d damn well better see it
being loaded in act one. One of the first questions very young children ask is: ‘why?’
I don’t think one ever grows out of that question. If I can see a reason for
things, then I can deal with them, even if they are bad and sad. But what is
happening now is so far out on the wild shores of the unexplained that I can’t
see any form or meaning to it. It is the abyss of meaninglessness and it makes
my brain ache, and my heart too.
Why? I mean, really, why?
