#52  EVEN RUDRA IN THE WHITE HOUSE MUST DIE

Not to put too fine a point on it, but…

I haven’t posted here in a long time primarily because I’ve been trying to finish this book-length poem, I’ll Begin in the Middle, that I’ve been writing for the past year plus.  That’s eaten all my literary time and disposable mental bandwidth.

Meanwhile, I have continued to drink my daily cup of poison that is the daily news.  Sometimes I just crawl off into watching the NFL and NBA for extended periods because at least America seems normal there.

I remember being at a Gary Snyder poetry reading in 1992.  Bill Clinton was running for president after 12 straight years of Republican administrations.  Snyder took questions, and someone asked about Clinton.  He said, “If Clinton wins, your life will be different.  I don’t know if it will be better or worse, but it will be different.”  I took him to mean that we’re not isolated from our leaders but interdependent with them, and their personalities and choices end up resonating in one way or another throughout the lived lives of the citizens.

Which of course brings me to Trump.

What evil did I do in past lives that have left me chained to the wall of this idiot’s mind for the past ten years?  And now, like it or not, I get to watch as he progressively bulldozes a whole lot that’s good about America for the sake of his giant ego.

He’s not a normal person in this sense.  There’s nothing but ego there.  His basic human goodness lies buried under a mountain of self-regard, poverty mentality, and aggression.  Tantric Buddhism calls a mind that’s gone over to a complete solidification of ego “Rudra.”  This is from my long-in-process book on vajrayana:

“If we penetrate down to the root implication of the vajrayana cycles of the Rudra myth, it examines the worst case scenario of a mind that splits from the basic space into dualistic clinging, inflating ego to a cosmic dimension by seizing spiritual methods & powers in the service of an abject wallow in the afflictions of arrogance, rage, & lust.  This gives birth to an epic display of delusion & suffering in all directions, the very epitome of samsara.”

Well, fortunately, Trump doesn’t seem to have a spiritual bone in his body, so he can’t attain spiritual power, and yet…as I’ve described in earlier posts, he has some magic or power of charismatic speech such that people get sucked into the con.  He’s ridden this all the way to the most powerful position in the most powerful country in the world, and seated behind the Resolute desk, he uses that speech to cloak himself as savior of the little guy as he actively now works to tear it all down and set himself up as Overlord.  That’s what Rudra wants: total power and total obeisance, crushing us all under his big, fat, pasty ass.

He does have an excellent perch from which to vacuum up any available cash; he thoroughly corrupted the “Justice” Dept. in the name of vengeance on his enemies (at this point, people who have successfully exposed or actually prosecuted his malfeasance); he’s ripped away any government oversight that would enforce legality and fiscal probity; he’s dumped out as much government expertise from its areas of oversight and service to the citizenry as he possibly can, including with the military; he’s actively attacking foreign-born people of color, aggressively handcuffing children, imprisoning and deporting them; and he’s striven to employ the National Guard, ICE, and the military as a tool of personal and political violence against American citizens.  Though he and the rightwing inveigh incessantly against DEI policies, he himself hires only sycophants who obsequiously fawn over him in cabinet meetings sans any real credentials for their jobs. There’s more, but you get the idea.

Literal and quintessentially symbolic,  he tears down the White House east wing based on whim and no consultation with anyone.  He literally seems to think it’s his house, just like it’s his army and his justice department and his ability to control even what late night comedians say about him.  Are you picking up on a theme here?

The Democrats, from a position otherwise of great weakness, took the Republican playbook and shut down the government for a record stretch of time by refusing to go along with their budget that threatened to strip millions of health care and blast insurance costs through the roof.  As political positioning, this has worked, and for once, the Democrats managed to get the populace on their side.  Meanwhile the No Kings protest drew 7 million people, enough to start to rattle the Republican cage, whose talking point was to call it the “Hate America” protest.  Then the off year election came, and Democrats ran the table on every important race or bill, and many smaller local ones, including in red states.

ANTIFA terrorists at the No Kings protest

At this moment of triumph, a few “moderate” Democratic senators cut a deal with the Republicans to end the shutdown, and just like that, threw the Democrats back into disarray.  This landed a kick in the stomach.  Where did that come from?  I thought you were united against this?

Well, it’s been the usual story that the Democrats are fractious and the Republicans fall in line.  But then…maybe not.

As disappointing as this was, I’ve spent some real time trying to understand why they did this.  Of course, all kinds of people were suffering.  The Trump administration seemed absolutely intransigent about giving food benefits to the poor, despite being told repeatedly by judges that they were legally required to.  Many government employees still had to work or simply give up their jobs because they weren’t getting paid.  Airports massively cancelled flights.  Since the Trump administration categorically refused to negotiate with the Democrats at all, the moderates saw the shut down as failing and not going to improve.

Hmm.  Trump himself, who never admits defeat, commented that the Republicans were losing that fight.  Would he finally be forced to the table?  We’ll never know.

But here’s what I’m inclined to think.  Maybe the Democrats could have gotten more out of this.  Maybe they would have saved the Obamacare subsidies and protected health care for millions.  That’s the main loss, really.  But in colder political terms, subsidizing Obamacare would have given some protection to the Republicans.  Now they fully have to own what’s going to happen.  That blood will be on their hands.

And they aren’t very popular right now either.  Trump’s approval rate hovers around 41%, but it’s starting to dip into the 30s.  The recent election augurs ominously for the Republicans, even in red states, and you can start to see the senate come into play.  Everybody now can feel the costs rising and what had been high employment weakening.

In this poem I’ve been working on, I took time to explore forms poets used to write but don’t anymore, like proverbs.  I managed a couple on politics.  Here’s one:

Which the deeper ignorance:
the man who lies with every word
or the one who votes for him?

Could it be, finally, at long last, the spell has started to break, and the deeply ignorant Trump voter has started to get, at least a little, that Trump doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing?

All along this guy has acted like he God’s gift to America, while he’s a reached a point where he often can’t string intelligible sentences together.  But ask yourself, what compels the average citizen?  What’s the most burning issue you want to see the president address?

War with Venezuela, of course!  Surely that colors your days and nights?

Or a ballroom at the White House?  How many times have you wished they’d build one?

But that’s how democracy is supposed to work.  The president serves the needs of the country.  Autocrats don’t think that way.  The country serves their needs.

However, Trump has started to check out.  He’s more enamored with his bathroom remodeling than his governance strategies.  It’s amusing watching the press shout for Epstein quotes as he walks passed them.  His military vow ceremony at the Washington Commanders game drowned under unrelenting, crowd bellowing; that’s what happens when you take him out of a controlled environment and put him in contact with a large number of regular Americans.

He has had amazing chi, an enormous life-force, but at 79, obese consumer of an unhealthy diet who probably doesn’t sleep much more than four hours a night, with  various ailments starting to show through, he’s looking more rickety.  While his name is on anything his administration does, despite his well-worn tactic of blaming others for whatever goes wrong and denying he knows anything about it, sometimes his denials seem genuine.  It’s Steven Miller’s job to harass immigrants and Russell Vought’s job to tear apart government departments.  How much does he actually pay attention to any of it at this point, beyond dismissively wanting to shed government workers, attack his enemies, and take food out of poor people’s mouths?

Well, why would he care?  He’s never taken responsibility for anything that went wrong in his whole life.  He’s got all of the rightwing media and MAGA and the Republican party standing behind him and covering up or explaining away anything he does.  But even that’s finally showing cracks—pay attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example.  She, surprisingly, seems to have good enough political instincts to sense when the Trump gravy train has started to lumber toward the cliff.

In a crystal clear summation moment, Trump held a lavish “Great Gatsby” party at Mar-a-Lago on Halloween. He could never be bothered to care about children going hungry because he won’t release the government funds to feed them, but he’s happy to feed his glittering little world of rich sycophants, incisively described by Jon Stewart: “Donald Trump doesn’t give a fuck about looking like he gives a fuck.”  And there, he is living his perfect life.  That it’s not going to go on forever, that his health has started to teeter, that he can’t pay attention to details, that quite possibly the larger country has started to see how damaging and irrelevant his policies are, and what happens when he confabulates a distraction (from, say, Epstein), and it simply doesn’t work?  When the house of cards finally falls (because everything does, sooner or later) and no one buys the bullshit, how strong is Rudra then?

But he was never truly strong.  He’s always been more of a shadow real light destroys.

Making America great again