.

In the election of new President of the United States of America Donald Trump, we have the first ever American instance of an elect not having any political experience whatsoever. The only even remote comparable would probably be Ronald Reagan, who, although enjoying a measurable career as a Hollywood actor, did at least serve as governor of California. Wikipedia also outlines a sort of vague “political history” tied to Reagan part of which mentions an appearance on stage with Truman, during that presidential candidate’s campaign. He also served in the military.
Indeed, the election of Donald Trump eliminates what would seem to be an unwieldy slew of precedents in the department of values and ideals for politicians, and one would certainly be military experience, or at least acknowledgement of the military. I say that those in power should at least VALUE the military — Trump has gone on the record as comparing his schooling to being in combat, and is also, according to numerous prominently arranged websites, a documented draft dodger. Typically, in recent history, the issue has at least been leveled as a way of judging politicians’ credentials; with Trump, I have not heard it come up at all.
It seems to me, with the almost non-existent ability of people to hold Trump to any moral or professional standard, and the unexplainable support of such a disrespectful person who would refuse to talk to Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, and visibly make fun of a handicapped journalist, that there must still be some all-encompassing strain of perfection people see in this guy. Indeed, he is an American success story. [1] He owns a bunch of stuff, including casinos — the stuff he owns tags with it elements of fun, carelessness and wildness, exactly what everybody wants to do when they get off of a long day at work (along with the whole winning money on doing nothing thing).
So Trump has a lot of money. For this reason, since he didn’t really have to borrow in order to run a campaign, you could in a way make the case that he is less affected by Wall Street than his opponent was, Hillary Clinton, and I guess that is the case to an extent. This is a point one Trump-supporting acquaintance made to me in a discussion: Trump’s plan to penalize outsourcing. Also, to an extent, capitalism still runs our country. Even as I read my favorite article, the New Yorker one about Atlantic City, I’m bombarded with an audible pitch for a car, something that obviously does not have thematically to do with the article’s subject material. Maybe the election of Trump is just a political denouement of an already functioning rule in America: ownership of money is the foundational way to convey messages, and to assume power. Advertisements dominate our consciousness, whether we’re on the subway, watching TV, or reading online, and they have the sole objective of fetching funds.
Troublingly, another theory on why the public has so faithfully befriended Trump has to do in a way with racism, and in a way with just traditionalism — the idea of restoring American power to male whites, as a demographic. So Trump happens to be the TYPICAL, ARCHETYPAL male white, having other people do the dirty work for him, treating others demeaningly and reaping benefits and spotlight? All the better. Maybe we’ll make up for it next election — find an Australian redhead woman with Down’s Syndrome and elect her.
Trump’s continued habit of actually embodying a comedic persona, making unscrupulous comments and lacking defense for his delinquent commentary, should illustrate more than adequately that politics, today, doubles as entertainment. Dating back now for some time, it seems, every candidate we’ve prized has had some STORYLINE behind him, whether it be first-black-president, Texas ranger, pot-smoking sax player, or Hollywood actor. It seems we’re at the point where so furiously do we want to avoid being “boring” as Americans, so deep is the obligation to constantly entertain and assure people that they will not be judged on merits of their intelligence, that now we’ve come to expect the same thing from our president — his attributes are judged as if he were a sit-com character, or a movie star. If he lacks experience on the job, if he acts like a jerk pretty much all the time and respects basically nobody, it’s all overlooked provided that he does so with a sort of bad-boy, charismatic smoothness, and that he’s a success story at large in his own life.
So we hired Salma Hayek as a brain surgeon. We’ll see how this bed feels four years down the road, I guess. We’ve gone from RELIANCE on Wall Street, to all-out COMPETITION with Wall Street — so to the extent that profitable companies embody a praxis anatomy of America’s true identity, we are in a sense now fighting against ourselves. It’s as if one cancer cell has grown prominent and engaged in battle against its peers, with the help of a whole lot of chemical input — voters.
Getting back to these voters, I’d originally intended on depicting them as basically afraid of losing military power (Clinton ran on a platform of diplomatic placidity, and we see where that got her), or just generally afraid of losing a holistic sort of power (many voters likely white males in extolment of the American white male quintessential)… if a country does as its president does, then voters from sea to shining sea are certainly not ready to loosen their vice grip on what they have, and let in some global capital rearrangement. In fact, along with wanting to build the wall, Trump’s tariffs will discourage importing. Remember, one cancer cell is eating its peers.
Ultimately, any discussion like this gets into what’s good, and what’s bad — what’s commendable behavior, and what’s negative, or sultry behavior. Or maybe everything is OUTCOMES based — what are our goals, what do we want to avoid. I personally would have liked to avoid seeing Samuel L. Jackson, once featured in a minor little film called Pulp Fiction as having a “Bad Motherfu**er” wallet, asking us “What’s in your wallet?” for a Cap. One commercial.
What do the election results tell us about the voting public? My home state of Indiana is going to take a hit for this one big time, but surprisingly, so are Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, typical endorsers of the blue collar working man, and social programs to help him. Such a nod in favor of gratuitous wealth, then? This just shows that somehow Trump was able to capture the spirit of the blue collar, maybe a certain antipathetic disposition to the government as we know it, and some purported miserliness on its part.
Or, maybe they’re just a bunch of sexists. I remember reading a recent case about an instance of a policewoman shooting a black person after an altercation, and immediately getting charged, whereas the guys who were in on the killing of Alton Sterling had their episode just “investigated” by the district attorney or whatever. This is despite there actually being video footage of them using excessive force on him, from what I remember. Either way, all signs point to the next four years in America (fingers crossed hoping it will stop at that, maybe we’ll get Chuck Liddell running or something) seeming longer than they are, and I am fostering a severe concern that we will only drift farther from diplomacy, and from harmony with the rest of the world, at this time. Perhaps this entire notion will have to be rediscovered in due time, lest it be extinct entirely.
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[1] Although as anyone reading The New Yorker will know, even this is now debatable: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/the-death-and-life-of-atlantic-city

A drapery of vast gray
Cloaked the late November sky.
The people moved around rapidly,
Without talking,
Edging toward a sterility which
In their minds was the right thing to do.
The goal was to avoid noteworthiness —
To avoid disaster,
To avoid a news story,
Avoid anything that would be memorable,
Because being at work should not be memorable.
The man was dressed in nice, expensive clothes,
But had a tattoo on his neck,
And seemed wary of interaction,
Seemed wary of truth.
Wealthy men
Filed in and out,
Enjoying lunch on days off,
Making the usual humorous,
Desultory mention of their particular situation.
I’d stopped in to indulge in my religion,
College basketball,
And to get lunch.
The lunch was better than average,
The staff less interested than average in this fact.
Very urbane.
Come enjoy our un-famous buffalo chicken sandwich.
The Irish bar overlooked the town’s minor league baseball stadium.
This was where the neon signs and lights precipitated the smiles,
And amidst the bevy of empty fields
And stomping transients,
That,
In a sense,
Is the true miracle.
Rolling back up home,
Where I would eventually sleep 12 hours a night
And then leave from,
We glided back through the crack head towns,
Where every little
Person peers as if
Into the American Eiffel Tower
Out of a systematized quagmire
To which they’re born in,
Splaying animal intuitions
Onto endless school days
Before entering careers of
Third grade arithmetic.
You ride past these towns
Looking down at your wrists
Thinking,
I hope to God,
By God,
I didn’t just see that,
And then you see it in your wrists too,
Which of course explains why rich people are never happy,
Just a little special…
I had to get out of there again,
But I wondered at the perfection of that little
Christmas Carol juke box,
One allotted,
Compartmentalized section of the calendar year,
Just like everything else,
When you think about it.

There,
Every day,
We’re faced with ourselves —
The limitations of our bodies,
The excessive aspects of our bodies,
And over and over
We can choose to shun the ordeal
And to accept light and faith —
.
To let
Go
Of
.
The self and accept love
If the love is truly there
And now you know that it is
The next time you sparkle chartreuse

I came back home
Again
Like a diseased,
Leather-made urchin
Pining for the crows
And knowing only the next
Skin waste depot
For his shameful transcendence
Opening up any shout spot,
Turning any key
To view the euphoria
Of yesteryear,
Things people were willing to give away
In sludge wells,
Dark, smoky rooms where
Pigeons fly as eagles…
I waited for night,
Falling in love with the new green paint and
Chipping it off every molecule of time.

My sister, when I went out and visited her, used to drive to 7/11 every morning and get me a Big Brew, the 24 oz. cup of coffee they vend at that fine merchant. I never got why she did this, and I also never knew how she was so aware that I was deathly addicted to caffeine, even at 19. She just did, but sometimes I’d catch her taking sips out of it before she gave it to me. That’s only 23 oz. left.
I find myself doing things like this, and not minding — like I’ll walk into our department building and go see the chair, and if he’s not in there and I have to come back later, or if I just wasted a trip, it’s no big deal. The campus where I go to school is beautiful, lined with plenty of trees and intricate, unique architecture, and within the building there there’s scraps of multitudinous book covers, one of which is Raymond Carver, which I discovered that very way.
I always, in this way, feel like I’m working toward an idea — but hopefully life in general is like this, anyway. There’s a natural, gushing enthusiasm informing the things we do, and it’s not even explainable, it’s like a butane fire has been lit under our chins, pushing our faces into smiles and our bodies into motion, and we don’t even think twice of it. This can happen on the job, I think, like how I happen to genuinely enjoy my cooking job regardless of pay, but it can also just be part of living life — part of walking, reflecting, bit**ing about the weather, hungering, painting on the outside, painting on the inside. This is the opposite of anxiety — this is the blackboard mortar on which we hew out our visions of the world, and our opinions on who we are, like a deep, blazing inferno, taking anxiety and replacing it with constant, endless, miasmic reflection, and always knowing you just a little bit better than you think it will.

I moved down here to Terre Haute, Indiana (a city which yes, has correctly predicted the presidential election winner every election since World War II) three months ago, from my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, and in this entire three months, I have yet to have a day whereupon I had nothing to do. Every single ascension of the sun has begat at least ONE obligation for me, whether it be work, school, my other thing I’m doing, LOOKING for a job, finishing up moving, cooking for my mom and her boyfriend… it’s been all obligations all the time.
This, of course, has spawned a lot of drinking. Ironically, on election night, I just FELT like an alcoholic: it was like there was a beer-bottle-shaped-hole swimming around in my blood. I’d spent the obligatory eight or so hours doing school related things, soon to do the same thing the next night, and I just had to duck out to the bar two blocks away from me for a beer, which turned into three, sitting there.
But hey, it was election night. There’s this vaudeville clown on the TV, Donald Trump, whom, I’ll admit, I’ve never actually heard talk in my entire life, and I still don’t plan on it.
But one day I SAW him talk. I saw the crow’s look in his eye, like an animal in furious defense, I saw the jaundiced expression, everything all mummified over from years and years of desensitization to the needy, to minorities, to America.
Well, as many of us know, or anyone who reads The New Yorker, Trumpie hadn’t been doing so great in recent years, starting, at the latest, in 2014. He’d lost almost all of his casinos in Atlantic City, maybe from people actually waking up and prioritizing what they do with their money, who knows. Or maybe they just got sick of the SOUND of casinos — all that clanging, all those inane, robotic exclamations from machines, the veritable noise machine right before you, the crowds of pickpocketers, the whole thing one big luck of the draw. It’s dark in casinos, so people can go there and hide their embarrassment from the rest of the world.
Well here it is. At 11:30 pm, 11/08/2016, Trump still to me is just a joke, and this election is just a comedy act, which is why I’ve spent the previous year reading things like Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Rob Sheffield’s On Bowie… I’ve pretty much abandoned looking at my New Yorker subscription, which seems to depict this money hoarding oaf on every cover. How many times can we beat a dead horse?
I get done with the one bar and decide to walk over to wear I work, which is just two more blocks down. I’m gonna bit** to my co-workers that the Carolina Panthers aren’t even in the top 20 in the NFL power rankings. This is what I’m pi**ed off about, at the moment.
I get in there, and boom, there’s Fox News on every single TV. We’re talking 12 or so TV’s. I ask for them to put sports on one of them, they can’t.
I see strange people everywhere. I see this dude who doesn’t look like an everyday working dude… he looks like somebody who should be on The Big Bang Theory. Everybody seems baby-faced, and dismissive of me when they see me.
I end up making friends with a couple dudes from town, taking a shot of Fireball and doing a weird “Fireball” chant I just made up… but slowly the whole thing’s sinking in. The results keep trickling, Donald Trump might actually win this thing.
Something inside me dies. I feel one day closer to my funeral, when they will bury my body underground, my heart no longer beating. I feel that this thing in my hand, this burning drink that makes me forget, that gives me an escape from reality, is my greatest asset.
The people are assembled there as if they are watching sports. It’s really no different. I do not hear anybody going on diatribes about how great the candidates are going to be. It seems mainly a matter of bracing oneself against the inevitable conflict of life, and piling up hidden facts by way of subterfuge, to unleash in a monotone upon whatever sucker is dumb enough to actually talk to you. The guys I was drinking with were bit**ing about the school board… why the fu** not? Maybe they made it so you can’t skateboard down the school entrance, I dunno. I dunno why anybody would care about the school board, when we’re about to have a failing casino tycoon with no political experience as our president.
Walking home later, I’m a little less pi**ed off about the Panthers not being in the Top 20. I stop to pi** behind a building, trying to stay free of all the night perverts, etc. I get home and get a craving for Casey’s, a place I used to make fun of for being like “country pizza,” but which actually bangs out some dope late-night drunk munchies to rival all. I get there and it hits me — this really is a uniformed existence. These people working in here, they’ve got uniforms on, and this Casey’s is exactly like all the other ones… at least, its GOAL is to be exactly like all the other ones. And now me, walking out, I’m just a man. I’m just like the dude on American Psycho, or Saw. If I smoked weed, I’m even crazier. I’m just not like everybody else, and that’s all that matters. The climb to the top, something we all might have thought about a time or two, is so long and convoluted that many, many times, you just come to pity people — the workers, the killers, the misfits that grace our streets in this fine nation, in the heartland — people who would gouge out your eyes given the legality of that act, the stomped-on, and the stompers. Get ready to know that with more pristine certainty than you ever have before, America.

It is the final surrender of government to money.
This ultimate control comedy show has given birth to a perfect epitome of America —
A sneering “cool kid” with no compassion,
A biting incisor to exact on the world,
In the minds of millions of helpless, cloistered,
Overworked voters,
Every bit the anger they feel about their predicament —
He hates the world as they do.

Ears to pleas have fallen deaf,
Hearts to humanity have crusted,
Developed spores,
Developed teeth and ganglia
With which to face
The next tedious day.
In the sky today, I saw a dark cloud.
I’m not sure if it was trying to tell me something,
But I batted it down with my hand and started kicking it down the sidewalk.
I just had to make something hurt,
Hurt like that handicapped reporter the butt of mockery,
Hurt like that Hispanic anchorman the victim of cold, unfeeling dismissal,
Hurt like people’s consciousnesses,
People’s pride,
People’s manhood and womanhood
Before the constant drudgery,
The repetition,
The lies that said they would get an “American dream,”
That they’d become the star of their own movie,
Movies that never got written
Because wielding that wine and knife isn’t for everyone.
It’s for our leaders.

I want to grab this mouse that’s running around in my apartment and throw it out the back door into the yard, like I did with one a month or so ago, but it looks so cute. The particular moments at which it looks so cute are when it’s scared witless of me catching it, and throwing it out into the back yard, like I did with one a month or so ago.

Just once I’d like to see you,
Instead of going into that computer lab and checking that e-mail,
Go out into the parking lot
And do that dance where you’re climbing up the tree
In your sports jersey
Like one of the antiquated rustic men
We see in our dreams
.
But I know,
This is your squall,
This is your death —
Beaming out onto the sun
With everybody knowing you and throwing eyes
Into the side of your skull,
Vengeance, sweet vengeance.

Eventually you just get used to it. The life becoming a nonstop reality of checking e-mails and waiting, the passing endless empty, nondescript and ominous buildings, the girls walking around in the tight pants and acting as if they are wearing actual clothes — it all gets tucked away, and like a squirrel, you get your little acorn of truth, your mission of the day. And you missed things — you missed opportunities, you missed achievements and you missed groups of people getting high, expressionless faces like the one you always wanted to have. But this is just part of life. And maybe the “missing” is the true essence of the situation anyway, like how if you pick up a petal and it’s too heartbreakingly beautiful, it crumbles in your hands.