Everything’s Trumped-A Poetic Reply:

Among my four or five readers is an extraordinary woman named Jillian (not sure if she’d want me to disclose her last name here), whom I met while she was, like me, misplaced inside the dank and unfriendly chambers of a Great Big Bay Street Law Firm, may it one day be swallowed by a vengeful Earth. She worked in the marketing department, and was a writer and editor. She’s brilliant, and artistic, and is now a published and award-winning author, and now and then she sends me kind words about something I’ve written, which praise, coming from her, is precious beyond words. This time, in response to my last post linking the Don Colossus to Shelly’s Ozymandias, she sent me back a typically moving and insightful poem of her own, which she’s allowing me to share with you here.

Maybe It’s All Trumped Up

I feel like we’re listening to a Ray Bradbury radio play and all the stations are playing the same thing and the on/off button got stuck on “on” two years ago 

but no one could be bothered to fix the set 

or throw it out

and one day some brilliant kid will come along and say, Why didn’t anyone just unplug the thing, and then lean over and do just that

 – tug the cord out of the wall – 

and in the sudden silence we’ll blink and look around and realize that some of us are missing, 

because while we were listening to Don Colossus, we missed the fact that the sun rises and sets and time passes and we die, 

and the real truth social of it is that some of us died a long time ago 

but we missed it, 

or misunderstood it, 

because our thoughts were elsewhere. 

Or nowhere.

Everything’s Trumped.

Everything’s Trumped. That about sums it up, wouldn’t you agree?

I don’t know where she finds even the faint optimism to posit a brilliant kid who someday puts a stop to it. My sense of it is that he isn’t coming. Nobody’s going to pull the plug; we’re not going to snap out of it; we’er going go stay Trumped even when Don Colossus himself is dead and gone, because now they know what they can do, and the scope of the absurdities they can make a majority believe, and they’re no more likely to jump off their autocratic gravy train than the American people are to smarten up.

Don’t listen to me, though. Jillian sees farther than I do.