WEAVE

So last night my new flatmate and I were winnowing away our precious leisure time by watching yet another piece on the latest scatological gaffes that Donald Trump had deigned to foist upon us that day.

These pieces appear with such regularity now that they merely blend into the psychic wallpaper of our day-to-day lives. No longer shocking. No longer worthy of dissection because we can ill afford the bandwidth lest the next atrocity demand our impotent commentary.

Amidst the torpor of this ongoing enchantment, he dared to break the spell by muttering an earnest and bewildered “how did we get here”?

It seems obvious enough a question, and a pertinent one too, for the situation is so very, very abnormal. Yet the sheer volume of discourse over the minutiae of his daily outrages seems to have somehow legitimized the situation to the point where the obvious answer has been obscured, even rendered oblique.

But the obvious answer is this- Donald Trump is the absolutely logical conclusion to a willed manifestation that has been bubbling and building since puffy sleeved colonial ambition first spilled itself upon Plymouth Rock.

He is the absolute archetypal icon of a nation’s Id made flesh.

A successful summoning.

A literal demon.

Tatagatha Buddha told us “with our thoughts we make the world”. Zen masters exhort us to recall that it is “we who make the grass green”. Oprah Winfrey and her army of aspirational cohorts celebrate ‘The Secret’ of manifestation and studiously construct their vision boards in the hopes of desperately aligning the waking world with the banality of their dreams and desires.

You see where I’m going with this.

In a nation where everything is bigger, louder, and covered with more cheese.

In a nation where any notions of collective responsibility have been subsumed by the deification of the rugged entrepreneurial individual.

In a nation where unfettered neoliberalism has been embraced so unflinchingly that even the church preaches a gospel of ‘individual prosperity’.

In a nation whose ‘erotic arts’ reflect a diseased libido tuned to a 24/7 pipeline of degradation and child beauty pageants.

In a nation that abhors self-reflection, lest it spook investor capital.

Well, in nation like that – a lot of very particular psychic energy is swirling about.

That energy manifests itself in myriad ways of course. In cultural malaise, in staggering inequality, in rapacious environmental devastation, in a litany of cruelties- both causal and performative, in a diminished capacity to even imagine an alternative.

Now bind those many outcomes into one lumpen ball. Feel it squirm and pulse in your clammy palms. Wax a figure in its image. Drape an audaciously long tie about its neck.

Now we have the spirit of a nation embodied. Summoned, manifested, and made flesh. The answer to a people’s most fervent prayers.

Perhaps this is why he seemingly can’t be killed. For to unmake him would require of us another summoning. One that even we, in all of our pinched and bloated desperation, dare not even countenance.

With our thoughts we make the world.

And we get what we deserve.

Andi Lennon