Alfred Jarry was a wild little man — very wild and very little, barely taller than Toulouse-Lautrec — who rode around fin-de-siecle Paris on a bicycle, charming café society and drinking all the absinthe he could afford. Known for his wit and for carrying a loaded revolver, Jarry was a poet and dramatist who described his work as “pataphysics,” which he defined as absurd irony in pursuit of symbolic truth. Absinthe and tuberculosis killed him shortly after his 34th birthday. But not before he had become a kind of folk hero of the avant-garde, best known for his play “Ubu Roi,” an absurdist parody of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” that scandalized Paris in 1896 and liberated the subversive anti-rational spirit that animated Dada and Surrealism in the next century.
Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” was profane and grotesque beyond anything the 19th century had ever seen on the stage. Its unforgettable protagonist is Ubu the King, a monstrous buffoon who, like Macbeth, gains a throne through murder. Unlike Macbeth, Ubu represents everything loathsome, shameless and repugnant in human nature: “Fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil,” as one critic describes him. “The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with the world,” writes the South African scholar Jane Taylor. “Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification.”
By now no reader will have failed the test of recognition. Jarry meant his dreadful Ubu to symbolize modern man as he saw him, with all the worst vices — creatively exaggerated — of a soulless predatory bourgeoisie. Ubu has endured as a symbol of the worst mankind has to offer. He even spawned his own adjective, “Ubuesque.” But rarely, in 124 years, has any flesh-and-blood political figure achieved a truly Ubuesque level of absurdity and viciousness combined. And now, God help us, we have a candidate. Donald Trump, ridiculous and terrifying, is Jarry’s Ubu made flesh — all the flesh you could ask for, if you wanted an actor to play Ubu without padding or makeup.
For a few hours after I made the connection, vanity whispered the possibility that it might be an original thought, but that’s a whisper you should always ignore. Researching, I soon found an essay published in the online Weekly Hubris by a West Coast writer, Helen Noakes, in 2017. Titled “Smile and Smile and Be a Villain” (from “Hamlet”), Noakes’ lament refers to Donald Trump as “The Behemoth” and even comes illustrated with a wonderful cartoon poster of Trump playing Ubu, with a tiny crown on his bouffant and a golf club in place of a scepter.
“But now, alas, I’m stuck in the theater of the absurd,” she writes, “where The Behemoth makes Ubu Roi seem like a rational, enlightened being.”
My respects to Helen Noakes, then. And to Shakespeare, where most modern ideas seem to originate. After more than a century as a mere phantom of the stage, Ubu, his hour come round at last, has found his place in the halls of power. The US president’s chair in the Oval Office is as close to a throne, in terms of authority, as any individual is likely to achieve in our time. But for all their similarities, there is a huge and frightening difference between Ubu Roi and Donald Trump. Ubu was never meant to be interpreted as insane. He’s a cartoon figure, a puppet theater villain whose outrageous boasts and crimes are orchestrated to make a playwright’s points and beguile a playwright’s audience. Cartoon characters don’t need psychiatrists, and actors who drop dead onstage rise again when the curtain falls.
If only Trump’s performance as Ubu Roi was a play only, a farce we could hiss or applaud or walk away from, and discuss in the lobby afterwards. If only the show we are watching made any sense at all, if only it proved anything besides the rapid deterioration of what was a poor and disfigured mind to begin with. Halfway through the month of May, as pandemic deaths mounted, the economy crumbled and his polls began to sour, Trump staged a new show of belligerent feeblemindedness that none of his sycophant handlers could hide or explain. By claiming to protect himself from the coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine, a quack remedy favored by crank media, he boosted sales of the drug to the gullible and condemned any number of them to serious illness or death. In the next breath, he denounced “Obamagate” — “the worst political crime in American history” — a paranoid fantasy so far adrift from any known reality that even Fox News flashed a red light. When some of Fox’s less Trump-intoxicated personalities confessed their bewilderment, The Behemoth castigated them and called upon the ghost of their late boss Roger Ailes, the infamous propagandist and sexual predator, to return from the dead and restore order.
It played like an absinthe dream, a drugged vision of primal chaos that Alfred Jarry would have applauded. In the midst of this madness, with the pandemic raging in America and Trump all but crawling naked down the National Mall, foreign journalists began — possibly for the first time in history — expressing sincere pity for those of us who carry American passports. “There is one emotion that has never been expressed toward the US until now: pity,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times. “However bad things are for most of the rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans … The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.”
O’Toole’s condolences are eloquent and heartfelt, but the British journalist Mehdi Hasan, who works for Al Jazeera English in Washington, cuts closer to the heart of our national crisis when he cites eminent authorities for Trump’s accelerating descent into madness.
“These are psychiatric symptoms, not simply boorish behavior,” tweeted John Talmadge, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas, after Trump flew into an inexplicable rage at an NBC reporter who asked a harmless question. “Trump is mentally ill, cognitively compromised, brain impaired. He can’t even recognize a softball question tossed his way.”
“Trump dangerously lacks mental capacity, which he exhibits through his inability to take in information and advice, to process critical information, or to consider consequences before making impulsive, unstable and irrational decisions that are not based in reality but in fight reality,” Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale, told Hasan. Trump’s “delusional level distortion and disinformation,” she said, is “more harmful than if we had no president.”
Hasan also quotes Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology, who heard Trump threaten to “destroy and obliterate” the Turkish economy. “Am I the only psychologist who finds this claim and this threat truly alarming?” Gilbert asked. “Wouldn’t this normally trigger a mental health hold? Right and Left must set aside politics and agree that there is a serious problem here.”
When “Right and Left set aside politics” in this ruptured democracy, the heavens will open and flights of angels will descend on Washington, D.C. Hasan surely knows that, though his essay for The Intercept, “Dear Mike Pence,” pleads with the vice president to invoke the ‘incapacity clause” of the 25th Amendment and remove Trump forcibly from office. In our wildest dreams. But the focus on Trump’s dementia is critical now, because it conditions our response to the president’s behavior. Gail Collins of the New York Times calls him “one of the most awful people in American history,” perhaps an understatement. On the best day he ever saw — so long ago — Donald Trump was a colossal jerk (a certain anatomical synonym tempts me here). If we still regard him in that light only we’re obliged to hate him so intensely that it clouds our judgment. If we see him primarily as an aging mental patient there’s room to pity him, or at least to set aside our loathing and address him, like the coronavirus, as an urgent threat to our public health.
I may not have been the first to envision him wearing Ubu’s crown, but I think I was one of the first to quote psychiatrists in my coverage of Donald Trump. It’s not just the malignant narcissism the doctors diagnosed from the start, a condition that has crippled him all his life. We need to understand and agree that No One has ever behaved like this — no president, no public servant, no sane responsible adult. This is a man who paused during his “Obamagate” rants to suggest that Joe Scarborough, an MSNBC host who has been unkind to him, is a suspect in the death of a staff member 20 years ago. “Did he get away with murder?” tweeted the idiot-in-chief. “Some people think so.”
Is this the President of the United States, or some drug-dazed lunatic who just escaped from a locked ward? He picks up all this rancid gossip, these wild crime and conspiracy theories, by cruising the fever swamps of Far Right social media and talk radio. Incredibly, he calls Scarborough a “Nut Job” as well. Respectable journalists, even those who criticize Trump harshly, waste a lot of time and newsprint trying to discern the method in his madness, the mystery of his success, the nature of his appeal. Trying, in other words, to apply reason where reason has never played a role. Trump’s current fits and seizures have closed off every avenue of analysis except the psychiatric. The clinicians have handed down their verdict.
But agreeing that the president is mad — even key accomplices and enablers like Mike Pence, Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell are acutely aware that he’s off his rocker- — brings us no closer to getting rid of him while the ship of state is still above the water line. This November election, considering the four years of comedy and tragedy just behind us, should be little more than an empty formality and a national sigh of relief. Final tally: Trump 0, any grown-up with a pulse 100 million, right? If you’ve been awake at any time since 2016 and you see nothing wrong with Donald Trump, there’s something terminally, incurably wrong with you. And still there’s little evidence that a substantial percentage of the 60 million who voted for him then have abandoned him now.
The mystery of Trump’s irreducible “base” is inseparable from the agony of a once-vigorous democracy on life support. Unlike Ubu, he didn’t have to kill anyone to seize power. He was elected. But sounding the alarm, warning the people who elected him that he’s a deranged monster, is like standing on 34th Street, pointing and screaming that King Kong is climbing the Empire State Building — and getting the response, “What 40-foot gorilla? Maybe that’s a window washer,” from people passing by. Denying Trump’s insanity seems as impossible as denying the Holocaust, while there are still 40,000 death camp survivors in the New York City area alone. This is denial with the brute force of psychosis. What has blinded tens of millions in Trump’s new kingdom of the blind?
Begin with the Republican Party, which since it swallowed the Old Confederacy has become a White Power party, morally bankrupt by any measure we choose. In the words of the novelist Joseph O’Neill, “The Republican Party is now visibly and authentically aligned with racism, vulgarity, sexism and brutality.” Long before it found a clown prince who can neither tell the truth nor recognize it, the party was seduced by gang bosses like Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich, who preached and practiced the dark heresy that truth is malleable. Donald Trump was an outsider, a curiosity. But GOP recruiters, trolling for votes among the usual bottom-feeders, discovered his strange hypnotic effect on the least and worst of white Americans, the gullible and bigoted and semi-literate. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. A poor or working-class American who votes for any right-wing billionaire, far less an insane one, would figure to be too stupid to reproduce, far less fill out a ballot.
And, in a way, it pains me to write that. I live in the South and I hail from the Appalachians, and stereotypes of certain citizens from those regions — now notably Trump-blinded — have always offended me. When gangs of armed yahoos stalked downtown Raleigh, N.C., to protest the governor’s pandemic lockdown, cartoonist Kevin Siers caricatured the marchers for the next day’s paper. The man he drew, wielding a giant coronavirus like a weapon, was exactly the stereotype you’d expect and resent if you’re from around here—-a bearded Joe Six-Pack with his six-gun, his T-shirt and baseball cap and his beer gut. Unfortunately, most of the men in the news photos were close matches for the image in the cartoon.
I’m afraid that’s exactly who they are, from the same tribe of white morons who marched in Richmond, who marched to intimidate the governor of Michigan with assault rifles, with Confederate flags and even swastikas on display. They look very much like the retro white thugs who shot the black jogger in Georgia, much like a lot of people who refuse to wear face masks as a political statement. Defiantly ignorant and belligerently stupid, these white men are essentially terrorists — a word used by black journalists imagining the authorities’ reaction if those were black people marching on the statehouse with AR-15s, or if a white jogger had been murdered by black vigilantes. And I’ll be damned if the white terrorists don’t look a lot like me, an old bearded white guy under a baseball cap, currently one with the letters MMA (Maine Maritime Academy) that I hope are never mistaken for MAGA.
In the whole cruel carnival of human folly, which prejudice has caused as much pain as skin color? No one should have to apologize for his color, not even an old white man. But some people keep giving the color “white” a bad name. They’re a malignant tumor the body politic may not survive. They gave us the ludicrous four-year reign of King Ubu II and they hope to double it, even as the worst health crisis in a century cries out for a leader with a healthy brain. The nations of the world are watching —- some laughing, some pitying, some gloating.
There is no vaccine for stupidity.
Hal Crowther’s latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards. His essays were awarded Pushcart Prizes in 2014, 2018 and 2019. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2020
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