My older brother, in his graduation uniform from McDonogh Military Academy in 1947, after winning the academic achievement award for the sciences, breaking the record for the fastest mile in the state of Maryland, and finally scoring the highest score on the entrance exam for West Point.
Now I mention all this not because of my brother’s remarkable achievements per se, but rather because of the obvious coincidence of his name and, yes, a different time and a different era ironically lauded by a “man” who is the antithesis of all that era stood for. A man so craven as to announce his joy at the death of that man of the same name as my older brother (separated by a generation).
A man he claims has falsely accused him of what we all know was true. I cite all this merely as a study in contrasts. Not just the man (or men – a word I hesitate to use for one of them), but the eras they both represent. Because can anybody honestly say they’re proud of a man like this? A man who represents the country of men like George Washington (for all his faults), Thomas Jefferson (and his faults), Abraham Lincoln and you get the idea, but do we? Really? A man who actually is convinced he’s better? And yet we’re not appalled? By a man so craven as to disrespect all the qualities he so blatantly lacks? (a five times draft dodger versus a man awarded the Purple Heart, two Navy and Marine Corp Commendation Medals, Combat Action Ribbon, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal, and a Bronze Star). Not to mention McCain, and all those “suckers and losers” who gave their lives on the Beaches of Normandy, that beach he opted out of going to for a memorial service because it was too windy to risk his comb-over in? Not to mention what rain would have done to his makeup? This is the man, America, whom you’re banking the future of our country and our children’s country on? A man who has it in his power to destroy the world at worst? Or start World War III at least? And all for what? One more distraction from the Epstein Files?
And yet a man who doesn’t even deserve the title of “a man” is our President. A title I could never confer on such a creature I can’t even confer the title “man.”
“An Ode To Ipecac” is an understatement to the genuine revulsion this man and his enablers create in my mind and I’m sure more than half the world and yet there are enough to still keep him and all he stands for (or doesn’t) in power?
You really think he’s going to save us? Because you act like you do. Why else the carte blanche on such obviously craven behavior? And insanity? Can anybody imagine ANY President in the past behaving this way?
Oh that’s just Trump being Trump, you say? Precisely! And THAT’S what’s so disturbing! Because it’s NOT disturbing.
Almost half the men I trained with in Ft. Benning in 1965 died in Vietnam. My wife’s father died of a wound received in World War II escaping from a Japanese POW camp. I had a cousin who fought in the Battle of the Bulge after the loss of his wife. An Uncle who fought and was gassed in the trenches of World War I when he was only 17. And this “man” wants us to make the same sacrifice he never would all to distract from the Epstein Files?
No? Then why not let us see them and show us how he’s innocent? The obvious response of an innocent man. But then again, he isn’t, is he? Innocent or a man.
The subject of both my trilogies: Confessions of St. Augustine and The Donnie Diaries. The former, a quest for innocence and the completion of personhood, albeit initially in a young man’s search for an ineffable drive he doesn’t understand that takes the form of finding his long lost older brother – a MacGuffin that is the driving force in the first book of the first novel of the trilogy: Portrait of an American Wiseguy.
In the latter, The Donnie Diaries, it’s the opposite. Instead of a bildungsroman of a St. Augustine-like anti-hero who eventually comes to the same conclusion as his namesake – that he needs redemption – it’s the corruption of everything America once stood for. The personification of a man who claims he needs no redemption.
Consequentially a country divided by their opposing views of redemption. Man made in the image of God? Or God made in the image of man? And what man? Trump? Or the god Trump and his followers claim to believe in? Or the opposing side? Or neither?
And THAT ultimately is the subject of both trilogies.