By Don Jolly
Introduction
After the war, in the years of flood and famine, the profession of history was all but forgotten. Once the last of the universities were shuttered and the last of the great cables destroyed, the intellectual life of human beings retreated into the solitary dens of monks and archivists; there, the words of the past were preserved in archives and the works of the future undertaken by isolated hands. Such communes and cloisters served as home to the great scholars of those chaotic centuries, a mysterious and time-lost lineage of genius that includes such famous names as DannyBoi, Wolfpack10 and -=Da_Big_Fucker=-. To them, and to their anonymous supporters, the course of human civilization owes an immeasurable and eternal debt.
Obscurity and death are not at all the same thing. In fact, the former is, under the right circumstances, a prime defense against the latter. Freed from schedules and accreditations, the historians of the tribulation produced many interesting studies — and one work of legitimate greatness.
Written by a nameless scribe sometime in the middle of the twenty-third century, this magisterial achievement of art and scholarship provides the most lyrical and most well-documented account of the American empire’s decline and fall. In spite of its age, and the troubled circumstances of its composition, this seven-volume masterpiece remains an essential part of contemporary scholarship on the American epoch. It is grand not only in what it attempts, but what it definitively achieves — and in this author’s opinion, it shall never be surpassed. All of us who pursue the craft today stand meanly in its shadow. One Hundred Years of Solid ‘Tude: A Definitive History of North America in the Days of Trump is the best of the grand histories, and a monument to the tenacity of human achievement.
What follows is an excerpt.
Chapter For: No, Fuck You!
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the empire of the American States comprehended the fairest part of the Earth, and the least civilized portion of mankind. Its princes, their thrones diffuse and specialized, ordered the realities of almost every human occupation, defining by whim and accident the nature of the globe. This rulership, as was explored in the preceding chapters, was rarely recognized and rested on an infrastructure of circumstance. Few of America’s princes were conscious of the power they held, and multitudes of its serfs adorned their self images in royal silk — feeling, in a measurable way, responsible for the direction of the state.
This, as Bartman666 has ably explored in his .txt file “Anarchy Balls,”is the net effect of democracy, when its ideals alone serve as the central faith of a society whose practical functions have escaped control. The American States, in the years before Trump, held the globe hostage with such obtuse and unnamed powers that the greatest portion of their empire was allowed to pass anonymous and unidentified. To America, the Earth surrendered its stores of rare metals, its oceans of hidden slime, its blooms, its blossoms and the back-breaking labors of its most ignored inhabitants. This commerce, however, conducted itself without banners, and the princes who commanded it were allowed to operate as both merchants and secret priests. They advanced the interest of the nation without bearing its name or ideology, and amassed such vast reserves of lucre that the machinery of American government ground its gears according to their bidding, its operations unimpeded by the interchange of executive or congressional power. These true rulers, unnumbered and forgotten, were untempered by even the traditional concerns of tyrants. Insulated from detection by the mediating organs of a priestly press, America’s unspoken kings built great machines of trade and industry. And these machines, in turn, grew like fat amoebas, consuming and consuming until their bulk was so fantastic that no single ruler or council of command could hope to direct their initiatives in full. In this way, the true mechanisms of power slipped away from human hands — and America, imagining herself lean and ethical, began to decompose.
It was jacked up — just jacked up to hell.
November of 2015 arrived with a flush of new enthusiasm in the camps of the politically inclined. Donald Trump, not yet the American Commodus, was involved in the early stages of a contentious fight for the nomination of one of his country’s two major political parties. Careful analysis of voter attitudes, assiduously collected by a press fully indoctrinated in the democratic religion and wholly faithful in regards to the augury of statisticians, placed Trump in the lead of most contests, commanding something between 25% and 30% of the vote among the population’s relevant subsection.
Journalists themselves, and Trump’s opponents in the opposite party, were galled by this ascendency. For them, the rise of Trump seemed to be a refutation of reality and many articles of their cherished faith. To them, Trump could only be proof of the electorate’s stupidity, its re-emerging racial animus and its bloodthirsty disregard for the rules of political decorum. Such an interpretation, however, still relied on the basic faith to which the press was pledged. For Trump to be a brutal ruler, it must follow that he was contending for a post of rulership. Trump’s supporters, laughing to one another through the digital aether, were followers of a different and more modern God — to them, the joke of Donald Trump was, in truth, the joke of American power. They supported an unserious president because, from their perspective, the office was itself unserious, and the sacred franchise of their democracy was no more or less than an ability to minutely effect the content of television shows.
November delivered Trump his first true correspondent in the race. This rival was a retired neurosurgeon named Ben Carson, famous for his hand in shaping successful books of inspiration and his outspoken devotion to an ancient Roman crucifixion cult. Carson, too, commanded 25% of the vote according to most measures and, in some November polls, even more than that in Iowa. The achievement was particularly attractive, given that Iowa was a province noted for its evangelical character and prized for its position as one of the first of the voting territories. Carson’s lead in Iowa might indicate that the so-called “Christian right” was breaking away from Trump, and hampering his ability to translate popularity into electoral success.
Carson’s rise was trumpeted by the organs of the press, so anxious were they to conjure a narrative of the frontrunner’s decline. “For the first time since The Times and CBS News began testing candidate preferences in July, the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has displaced Donald J. Trump as the leader of the large Republican field,” wrote journalists Jonathan Martin and Megan Thee-Brenan in the October 27th edition of the New York Times, an outlet remembered today primarily by virtue of its dull and insulting videogame reviews. “The difference is well within the poll’s margin of sampling error,” they continued, in a note that was oft ignored in the weeks ahead. By virtue of this poll, and others, Carson became either “the” frontrunner or “a” frontrunner. As a consequence, he fast became a target of investigation.
Carson was, in truth, a candidate much like Trump. He lacked any experience in the political class, and his cult was, primarily, one of personality. Whereas Donald Trump was boisterous, parodic and immoral, Carson, however, operated within an affect of comfort, moral good and calm — at least to for his supporters. The groundwork of this personality was laid by a public combination of surgery and spirituality, which had been simmering in the media for thirty years.
Throughout the 1980s, Carson made headlines with various feats of brain surgery performed on imperiled children, and held onto them by the force of his virtuous personality. On 23rd of August, 1987, for instance, Carson commanded more than a full page of the “People/family” section of the Kokomo Tribune, the storied hometown paper of Kokomo, Indiana, a once-was town in the region known today as “the big taint.” Carson’s ministrations, the Tribune reported, saved the lives of “eight youngsters” through “the surgical removal of half of the brain.” In addition, continued Nancy Shullins, a reporter for the Associated Press, “Carson took no credit for his skill in the operating room. It is the unwavering belief of the 35-year-old neurosurgeon that a higher power guides his scalpel during surgery.” God, dissected brains, and a happy ending. Who could resist?
Carson, a black man, had grown up in Detroit — and the narrative of his life, as presented in the press, was a narrative of adversity overcome. Although Carson was plagued by the handicaps commonly attributed to his race in the American imagination, he had subdued them all — transforming anger into mildness and disaffection into discipline. “Carson’s first experience with sharp objects and divine intervention came at the age of 14,” Shullins reported. “In his inner-city Detroit neighborhood, he attempted to stab another teenager.” Luckily, a belt buckle blocked the blow, and Carson resolved to give his anger up to God. He became a surgeon, and cultivated an attitude that led to his earning the nickname “Gentle Ben,” which was also the name of a television bear famous for not killing Clint Howard, in spite of numerous opportunities.
This character arc, dorky and unbelievable, can elicit only crunchy lols from the modern poster. It should be cautioned, however, that such mutant narratives were shaped, in large part, by the limited media of the twentieth century. Winning press, especially in the storied outlets like the Kokomo Tribune, required a delicate admixture of uplift, moral certainty, and the grotesque. The pressures of natural selection, working on the numerous applicants for fame, shaped their stories in ways that seem parodic and alien to us today — but which may have seemed, to their original audience, more real and consistent than the lives they lived themselves.
“There are not a lot of role models for black children,” Carson told the A.P., to justify his presence in the paper. That was why he spoke so freely about his life, he said, and why he took his speaking on the road. Carson was a frequent fixture of school assemblies and religious gatherings throughout his thirty years in the public eye prior to his presidential run. He was,an enthusiastic evangelist of “the American dream,” the imagined capacity of that vanished nation to allow its citizens to reinvent themselves and achieve beyond the meanness of their upbringing.
Less than a month after his profile in Kokomo, Carson again made news — this time for removing the deformity of a pair of twins born with their heads conjoined. This supreme demonstration of skill, accomplished over 22 hours and as part of a well-populated team of surgeons, rocketed Dr. Carson to television, where he became the focus of an episode of ABC’s 20/20. His first book, Gifted Hands ghostwritten by the prolific Cecil Murphy, appeared in 1990 and offered, in expanded form, much of the same material that had been highlighted by Carson’s early press appearances. It reproduces the near-stabbing as follows:
“I was in the ninth grade when the unthinkable happened. I lost control and tried to knife a friend. Bob and I were listening to the transistor radio when he flipped the dial to another station. ‘You call that music?’ he demanded. ‘It’s better than that stuff you like!’ I yelled back, grabbing for the dial…In that instant, blind anger — pathological anger — took possession of me. Grabbing the camping knife I carried in my back pocket I snapped it open and lunged for the boy who had been my friend.”
The salvific buckle, in Gifted Hands, is depicted as a symbol of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, an archaic youth military organization with which Carson was intimately involved. Again, such buffoonish symbolism must be read in context — and taken as both a remnant and accusation towards a world that was rightly ruined.
Following this incident, Carson descended into a fit of trembling. “I knew that temper was a personality trait,” Gifted Hands reported. “Standard thinking in the field [of psychology] pointed out the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of modifying personality traits.” Still, the future Doctor had to try. “I sank down on the toilet, sharp mental pictures of other temper fits filling my mind,” the story continued. “At one point I slipped out of the bathroom long enough to grab a Bible. Now I opened it and began to read in Proverbs. Immediately I saw a string of verses about angry people and how they get themselves into trouble.”
Carson lost himself in the text, moving his lips to the words without speaking them aloud. “The words of Proverbs condemned me, but they also gave me hope,” Gifted Hands concluded. “After a while peace began to fill my mind.” Through the grace of God, and the elegance of language, he was delivered. Gifted Hands was meant to serve a similar function — its words, clunky and simplistic, are also a promise of transformation. Carson and Murphy expanded on the promise with many successive volumes, and won a multitude of souls. By November of 2015, those who believed in not just the events of Carson’s life but in the capacity of his work to inspire and encapsulate personal change were supporting his bid for president. It was a movement long in coming, but to the obtuse instruments of journalists it registered as a cold quarter of the electorate, indistinguishable from all the rest.
Soon, the press felt obligated to review Carson’s various narratives and appraise their factual accuracy. His standard of truth was found wanting, especially where the stabbing incident was concerned. What followed was a confusion of bizarre headlines, as the press followed up with those who knew Carson in adolescence — and who remembered a very different boy than the one upon which Carson’s redemptive fame was predicated. New York Magazine ran a story by writer Eric Levitz titled “Ben Carson Defends Himself Against Allegations That He Never Attempted to Murder a Child.” Gideon Resnick in The Daily Beast declared: “Ben Carson’s stabbing story is full of holes.” The Washington Post, in a play for long-forgotten dignity, opted for the relatively neutral “Ben Carson defends recollection of formative stabbing story.”
This public doubt proved an irritant to Carson, and prompted him to denounce the press loudly and often — even going so far as to decry their tactics from the stage of the fourth primary debate, which was held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 10th. “I have no problem with being vetted,” Carson said. “What I do have a problem with is being lied about and then putting that out there as truth.” The truth, of course, was that he had tried to stab that boy. It had been true all the way back to 1987, and the Associated Press’s writing in the Kokomo Tribune. Doubting that was tantamount to doubting all that followed from it — the salvation of the psalms, the transformative power of “hard work,” and the character of “Gentle Ben.”
For Carson’s supporters such conclusions were unthinkable. Carson had, for better or worse, come to represent more in their minds than just a man or a surgeon or an inspirational writer. His promise was tied into America’s promise and, not accidentally, into the promise of the press. For years, long before his flirtation with politics, newspapers and magazines and television programs had spit out Carson’s narrative verbatim, using it to score points of “human interest” and provide an uplifting thread of story to run between the advertisements which remain the truest and most advanced expression of American art. To many, the sudden skepticism of the press must have looked like an admission of guilt — another place where the friendly skin of Empire had worn away, revealing its inhospitable bone.
Donald Trump, regrettably, did not allow this grand mistake to run its course. Instead, he joined the press in denouncing Carson as a liar, and further compounded his mistake by doubting the Doctor’s religious convictions. By virtue of this rhetoric, a Trump rally held on the 12th of November at Fort Dodge, Iowa quickly ascended to a perch of public infamy — there, as the press reported, Trump mocked the physics of Carson’s belt buckle claim and had the audacity to ask “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” It looked like a disaster to many who witnessed it.
Trump’s error was the same as the error of the press — his doubts were not restricted to the intelligence of his audience, but to the legitimacy of their ideals. For Trump, of course, the revelation of illegitimacy was stock-and-trade. Carson’s brand of it, however, was sincerely held and cultivated by years of earned exposure. It was also, sadly, part of Trump’s pitch – his superficial appeal to American’s resurgence. It revealed Trump for what he was, but what he could not be if he hoped to win a majority of Iowa republicans — an American apostate. In the years to come, Trump would be freer with his thoughts. But 2015 was a time of transition, and his victory was not yet assured.
In the press, Trump’s performance was floated as a breaking point — a moment when the frontrunner had fatally overplayed his hand. Journalist Jenna Johnson, writing on the following day in the Washington Post, reported that as the night wore on ” Trump appeared to unravel on stage… Rather than sticking to his usual, tidy 60 minutes, Trump kept going and going,” his pronouncements sprouting odd shoots and leaves of psychopathic color as the clock ticked onward. “Those standing on risers behind Trump — providing a backdrop of Iowan faces — eventually gave up and sat down in a falling cascade,” Johnson concluded, poetically. In her mind, it seemed, the corner had turned — and Trump was on the wane.
Had the mechanisms of fate wound themselves in some alternate arrangement, there is a chance that Johnson’s line about the crowd sitting down at last might serve as the gravestone of the Trump movement, and a signal the perpetuation of the old style of American power. But this was not to be.
A recording of the speech uploaded to YouTube shortly after the event by Trump supporters, bore the proud title of “FULL Speech HD: Donald Trump BEST Speech EVER in Fort Dodge, IA.”
Trump arrived late in Fort Dodge, but conducted himself with an appropriate energy. America, he told the crowd, was in a state of decline. Its spirit was whipped, he said, and its military stymied by chaotic conditions in the Middle East. “We’re not proud of ourselves anymore,” he said, repeating a great canard of his previous stumps. “We’re embarrassed. We can’t beat ISIS. We can’t beat Iran in a trade deal or in a nuclear deal. We can’t beat China, China’s killing us…”
It was not, however, a hopeless situation. “How do we recover from things like that?” Trump asked. “You recover by getting smart people to make deals!”
“I love war in a certain way,” he continued. “But only when we win! We never win — by the way, when was the last time we won a war? Our wars are always politically correct.” In part, he continued, the fault was one of leadership. Trump, positioning himself in opposition to the mild wisdom of his predecessor, Barrack Obama, advocated for a new kind of American military man. “I need tough and mean and really really smart,” he said. “Like general Douglas MacArthur…General MacArthur was the number one student in the history of West Point…and he was a great general!” More important, the candidate continued, “He had the image! He’d get off the thing, y’know, the plane, with the corncob pipe and the hat — he loved it!”
This, Trump knew was the important piece. The image — like Carson’s quelling of his internal violence, or the credulous distraction of politics itself. The Age of Trump was, in truth, the age of the image’s perfection and liberation – the era of the full divorce between inhuman power and human vanity. Trump, in that moment, asked the crowd to imagine a better class of video clip – and admitted that it was all he could reasonably offer them.
Later, Trump revealed his plan for “beating” ISIS:
“They have certain areas of oil that they took away — they have some in Syria, some in Iraq,” he said. “I would bomb the shit out of them. I would just bomb those suckers. And that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refin — I’d blow up every single inch — there would be nothing left! And y’know what? You’ll get Exxon to come in there and in two months — you ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies? They’ll rebuild the sucker, brand new, it’ll be beautiful!”
The candidate then fanned his arms away from his body, standing in the spotlight like a witness to transcendent truth. “And I’ll ring it,” he said, of the oil fields. “And I’ll take the oil. And I said I’ll take the oil.”
The applause that night was lackluster.
Less than a day later, Paris was in flames, and the course of history decided.
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