The God-King Can Bleed

 

The God-King Can Bleed

I was eating dinner with my sons the other night discussing President Trump when my eldest son said, “Maybe his real purpose is to let us know that the god-king can bleed.” 

I was interested.  “Go on,” I said. 

He paused, “It’s like in the movie 300 when Leonidas told Xerxes that ‘we may all die but at least we will show the world that the god-king can bleed.’”

Pretty cool metaphor. 

For the most part, I am less interested in Trump’s personal flaws and his outrageous twitter behavior.  What does interest me is the corrupted system within which we live, and the fact that he seems to be the only person willing to talk about it.

His rise is not surprising to me at all, and the handwringing about how he has garnered such support makes me laugh.  Of course many people want to vote for him.  I mean, who in the heck wants the alternative?  To vote for people who denigrate you and your beliefs, call you names, vilify your nation and, if you don’t exactly adhere to the approved set of woke values, cancels you? 

Most Americans are decent, hard-working people who are not racist, who love their county, their families, and their communities.  They don’t believe their country is evil and they don’t believe they are bad people.  And it is not weird to think that people would gravitate to someone who tells them their history is not defined by evil; and that they themselves are not evil.  But rather that we represent a sharp deviation from a history of humanity doing really bad things to one another.  As a nation we self-reflected and said that we want to live differently. That we want to treat each other differently.  And then we actually did so.  It is rare in the history of the world that a nation has gone to war to free people rather than enslave them.  There is always work to do.  But our moral arc has consistently been one that bends towards the good.

To many people, Trump has been the big fat middle finger to all the know-it-alls who condescendingly look down upon many of us with wagging fingers of disapproval.  He represents the opposition to the rigged and corrupted system; and those who pull the strings - the metaphorical ‘God-King’ of government, corporate greed and woke ideology.   He’s a thumb in the eye to the billionaire Davos crowd whose primary concern is the buying and selling of tax code, labor law, trade agreements, and regulatory policy that allows them to retain and expand their wealth and power.  All at the expense of vast tracts of an economy that once supported a working class with dignity.  Trump threatens the status quo that they have so laboriously built.  He’s the ugly fighter who knows all their dirty secrets and potentially knows how to dismantle some of it.  And he was asshole enough to try.  The more frantic the establishment got about him, the more intuitively people sensed that he was be on to something.   And who could deny that Biden, Kamala, Pelosi, and even many mainstream republicans, on the other hand, are the quintessential emissaries of the system?   Hence the clear collusion of the mainstream media with the establishment on their campaign to destroy the Trump Presidency.

The rigged and corrupt system (the metaphorical god-king) would have you believe that its wishes are inexorable.  And that if they cannot distract you with the false dichotomies of black vs white, men vs. women, gay vs. straight, pro-life vs. pro-choice, pro-gun vs. anti-gun, then they can at least design a system that ensures you believe that you are powerless to fundamentally change anything important.  While we run around arguing about abortion and who can use which bathroom, they continue to ensure that their power and wealth are intact and growing.  They could care less about the crime rate in your urban neighborhood.  The only thing that really matters to them, as far as your life is concerned, is that poor black people and poor white people continue to hate each other, that pro-life and pro-choice hurl insults, and that the LGBT community wages war against the pious.   These are powerful distractions which serve their purposes perfectly; and help us to believe that the system is impervious to real change.  That it cannot bleed. 

Imagine what would happen if poor black people and poor white people realized that they have a common enemy and joined forces against it?  Together they could affect real change.  They could rally to ensure tax laws, trade agreements, regulatory policy and labor laws actually benefit you.  But that could not be tolerated.  Because, of course, they know better than you about how the world works and should work. They know better about how to create a system that wholly benefits their interests.  Think about it, does anyone really believe that trade deals are primarily designed to enrich your life?  If that secondary outcome happens, then great, but the primary reason they are created is to enhance the wealth and power of the few, and if you get lost along the way to urban crime or an opioid addiction, so be it.  We all intuitively understand this.  But the God-King can brook no hindrance to its goals.  And it will stop at nothing to ensure that we believe we have no power to do anything about it.

And so, while Trump is imperfect, at the very least he showed us that the God-King can bleed.  Perhaps, in the near future someone who is less coarse in how they articulate themselves will come along.  Someone a bit more coherent who will unite us against a God-King that we now know is vulnerable.  Perhaps, to paraphrase another movie quote, “We are starting to believe…”