If Donald J. Trump, by some lapse in cosmic reason, should triumph on November 5, will he do as he has promised and Make America Great Again? And which America? The one he aimed to Make Great Again back in 2016, or the one he restored to greatness during his four years in office up until 2020 and which the Democrats have since wrecked?
Or is it both or neither? Or, more confusingly, both and neither?
America is a funny old place. If famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady were still alive and had a femto-camera instead of one of those daguerreotype deals on sticks, and could capture every single moment of America’s storied history at once to make a giant flicker book that we could all watch in a single second, the retinal burn left on our brain would be that of a jewel-toothed hillbilly in a billowing night-shirt standing over a New York subway air vent, liberty torch aloft in one hand and recently fired telescopic rifle in the other.
Most of us know of America only through the widescreen VistaVision window of Hollywood, that mythical place set among the back-suburb orange groves of southern California, created by immigrant belt-buckle salesmen in the early 1900s to peddle the fiction of assimilation: that anyone can make it in America regardless of race and creed, no matter how poor or hungry or wretched or huddled you are.
America’s greatest invention is not the lightbulb or the telegraph or the Post-it note, but fame. The American Dream is the fantasy of everyone watching you, of knowing who you are, of envying you, of wanting to be you. All while your gnawing self-doubt, held at precarious bay under a mountain of benzos, threatens to escape at any moment and give the game away.
It’s Narcissus and Caliban fusing themselves in a telepod accident gone wrong and then dancing the night away at Studio 54. It’s Horatio Alger in Ron Kovic’s wheelchair. It’s a face-tattooed Cinderella walking an overly botoxed ugly duckling on a leash along Hollywood Boulevard. It’s OJ Simpson’s zombie and a choir of radioactive school-shooting victims waving at the paparazzi and then slipping into Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to watch the premiere of a film starring them all.
Logo, Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”, the title in blood-red Helvetica: AMERICA.
Iris in, a grassy knoll, apes banging on a monolith, a shot rings out. Another president bound for Arlington. Cut to Congress shrugging. Audacious whip-pan to Jasper Johns’ painting of Old Glory flying half-mast atop the Capitol dome. Tilt down as the mob attacks. January 6th? No, ‘tis August 24, 1814, and the British are comin,’ the tang of musket ball in their nostrils from their recent blooding at Bladensburg. ‘To Brookeville!’ cries James Madison, grabbing the half-finished painting of George Washington.
‘Have you no decency, sir?” BANG! Smash cut: Lincoln grabs his chest, the crowd gasps, Babe Ruth knocks another hunk of cowhide over the border wall. A small Mexican boy catches it, races home through the streets of Tijuana and proudly shows it to his mother… ‘Este huevo de fiesta está delicioso, madre!’
That boy will grow up to be either Tito Fuentes or Tito Puente. Dissolve to the trundle of a Conestoga wagon making its way across the prairie. It turns Transformer-style into a spaceship. “Hail to the Chief” wells as Washington, Lincoln, Madison and Kennedy climb aboard and strap themselves in. Ben Grimm is at the controls. ‘It’s clobberin’ time,’ he announces.
Reed Richards and the Human Torch hand out peanuts and Invisible Woman does the safety demonstration. They rocket into the sky and disappear with a sonic boom, an infinity symbol left sparkling in the air in stardust. Roll end-titles.
Post-credit sequence: Virginia’s Mount Rogers at sunset. A newly born black child is held skywards by a silhouetted figure. The outstretched arms belong to Thomas Jefferson. He turns to the camera and winks.
Jefferson had a lot in common with Trump. The third president was a hedonist slave owner, a voluptuary who never paid his bills. The 45th, too, grabbed whatever he wanted, had lickspittles at his beck and call and stiffed contractors left and right. Jefferson was an indiscriminate racist and power-mad proponent of the proto-Nietzsche Superman; Trump was more calculating with his bigotry and even more focused in his delusions. Tom rained war down upon the Moslems of the Barbary Coast with one stroke of his quill but refused to sign the emancipating birth certificates of the bastards he was siring at Monticello with that same ink. The Don wanted to ban Muslims from entering the country and pressed his children and in-laws into service as vassals and handmaidens.
Both though were driven by the wild-eyed pursuit — as guaranteed by the US Constitution — of Happiness — Jefferson through a hemp field, across the family graveyard and up a tulip tree if necessary; Trump the only way he knows how.
The only real difference between the two is that the author of the Declaration of Independence thought nothing of travelling to Paris to deflower his dead wife’s underaged half-sister, whereas the closest the non-ghost writer of The Art of the Deal got to dishonouring anything from France was the faux-Beaux art furniture he chose for Mar-a-Lago.
And with Jefferson at the helm of the nascent nation and Trump jumping from one foot to the other in anticipation at the aft, it’s little wonder that America has become what it is: run amok with impecunious fools and dreamers, scrambling over each other in search of the next quick fix — a country of ill-dressed simpletons, deaf to reason, blind to truth, numb to the human condition, gratifying themselves in the shadows at the dead end of a garbage-strewn back alley called hope. Probably eating a cat.
Still, I don’t want to be thought of as partisan in all of this. Even if it’s Kamala Harris who kicks the field goal on Tuesday, I think the only way for America to be truly great again is for the British to reinvade and make America what it once was: 13 separate colonies that produce mainly tobacco, rice and indigo.
Has the American experiment failed? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
