Tyrannos

Donald Trump has no interest in fighting an invisible enemy. He likes to hurt things. Hurt people. He likes to brand and rebrand things and people. Nothing he likes more than to say such things as “she is going to go through some things” as he did about a lifetime diplomat, who’d served in places Trump wouldn’t step foot in, unless it was at a palace or a private golf club. It’s more than pathetic.

To the extent that he has an imagination, it is entirely oriented toward the visible. Beautiful women. Beautiful buildings and tourist destinations. A beautiful wall. By stopping (in a limited way) entry from China, he thought he could wall off the virus, in a manner not unlike his attempt to wall off Mexicans. In the latter case, it’s not just a matter of limiting immigration, not even a matter of believing one can, in this age, still live in a walled-off community, but rather primarily about putting walls around people, putting children in cages, throwing protestors in jail–always about buildings, in one way or another, over people. Here’s a guy who can admire a big, beautiful prison. (And executes people on the way out the door.)

When Trump sees North Korea he sees a place for development. Does he see the suffering of North Koreans? When he sees Greenland he sees a beautiful skyline. Does it even register that Greenlanders have a thousand-year-old culture? I remember my brother looking out at the vast Pima Indian Reservation many years ago and seeing vast development–which indeed has subsequently come to pass. And to some extent the Pimas are better off for it. Nor can we thrive without developers, inventors, builders…not to mention scientists. But if one is so dominated by a single sense, the visual, as he and so many others are these days (Fox News among the first to catch on to this); if one’s imagination extends no further than fantastical, masturbatory projections of triumph over schoolboy rivals, then one is doomed to ever go in search of an enemy, to ever see the world in but Manichean split screen. An invisible enemy won’t do. The thousands dying, away in hospitals, is no recognizable battlefield.