Election 2016: Trump as Performance: Operas Buffa (Falstaff ) and Tragedy (Lear) With Some Gatsby Thrown In - Starring Villains and Buffoons, and Wolves and Lambs, and Despots and Martyrs.....but Few Genuine Heroes (Except Warren and Sanders Who Were Squeezed Out Like Good Money)

I've found a new style device for lazy bloggers - repeating at the beginning of a post, the post's conclusion after stream-of-consciousness drafting (because I'm not a professional writer).

Is it appropriate to say that Donald Trump is a 'retro-1920s-Gatsby ala F Scot Fitzgerald'?

I kind of buy into this comparison. Trump can sometimes seem a 'modern' Gatsby because of his 'flash' and glitzy 'armament' which he is not shy to boast about. But this 'retro-ness' is not a true synthesis of current and Gatsbyan types because he has carried out the Gatsbyan charade for so long without crashing. (But Trump's financial reality might reveal that DT is indeed a reincarnate Gatsby, who knows?)

But where DT does resemble Fitzgerald's 'Gatsby' is DT's quality of 'superfluosity ....an even exaggerated superfluosity marked by glitzy, overdone tastes in material possessions (large, 'neo-pharonic' buildings) and blonde, superficially adorned, physically endowed women who he touts for all to hear about... even when he is describing his own daughter. Yet all these outward signs of success carry with them, or emit, a somewhat 'off' fragrance like a person wearing a not-quite fitted suit, purchased bespoke from a good, though not top tier, tailor. Also, a person wearing a strange, ill-fit, badly dyed hairpiece that turns out to be real hair!

This might sound unfair and a bit unkind so I will end this introduction to the Preface by saying, 'Just as some complain about the seeming plastic, impervious surface Hillary presents and compare her lack of projection with Trump's 'out-there-for-all-to-see', we don't really know who lives inside Trump's bluster and energy...but from what is implied, if there is something beneath Trump's flash and glitz, there might not be much to like...and much to run from in abject fear. DT might make for good literature but let not him become President...that's too real for comfort.

And, just as, for some, Hillary appears to be emotionally monochromatic, Trump appears to have successfully substituted money for morality...or maybe, just as likely, Trump didn't have to substitute for morality because morality was maybe never there.

All of this is to say that this election, taken willy-nilly with no regard for consequences, is highly entertaining like a retro Louis-Schmelling heavyweight boxing match of the 1930s. But this election also seems simultaneously vacuous and lacking in substance - this election lacks an energy of vision that a thinking person can bite into, and yet the stakes are so high:

we can't seem to free ourselves from special interests (profitable status quo corporations) to tackle global climate warming with threat of rising sea levels flooding significant portions of all coasts; America's up-to-the-neck self-entrapment in an out-of-date and endangering oil economy (and energy base), our racial impasse, our Congressional paralysis left-over from the Civil War (no, from the pre-Civil War, Clay-Calhoun states' rights debates that were never resolved, etc.

It seems that after 160 years America hasn't been able to shake off it's demons that caused the Civil War and has prevented America from moving on. Kindly speaking, Trump represents going back to the 1830's and reclaiming states rights (embodied in the 'Alt-Right' catch-bag of neo-confederate, hooded thug, revisionists who have glombed onto Trump like roaches around rotten meat).

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton seems to represent continuing 'partnering'('coddling'?) of government cozying up to big banks and big corporations - just about anything big and making money. Let's hope a 'mandate'election win for her will free Hillary from these chains.

Meanwhile, the interests of working America are stuck in a no-man's land yet America has little time and maybe no remaining chances to resolve this problem.

PREFACE:
First, I am an opera fan and despite my 'run-now!' aversion to TD (Tricky Dick), "Nixon in China" (Adams, 1987) is an opera I like very much. (My fav operas are "Norma" (Bellini, 1831) with of course Joan Sutherland, and Mozart's (1786) "Marriage of Figaro". In a good year, I can enjoy a 'Der Ring..')

But to the point of this, I see real opera material in the tragi-comedic figure of Donald Trump. What might be a title for an opera about Trump? Hmmmm, maybe ...'Vice is Nice but Retribution is like a Tidal Wave', ...or something. Trump will someday be an American literary tragi-hero, if he is not elected, or if elected, an American icon of a post-modern monster...as his hypothetical Presidency will so f...k up the world... (that's just the way Trump rolls).

So on to this 'thing' ("Thing' being a memic, Bush I word that this 2016 election process seems to have resurrected from the '80s).

So, here it is, the repeated 'finale', and of course it's all about Donald Trump who this blogger feels is an iconic, living fossil, example of 20th Century Americana at this stage of its decline, or at its cusp of a needed self-transformation whose occurrence is yet to fade away unconsummated. Note: this blog post has lain in draft form for more than a month because I felt it's premise, that Donald Trump is a genuine American comedic-tragedy - a Falstaffian Fool, yes, but more, a genuine 'American Psycho-Bright Lights- Ellisian-McInerny character flesh-rendered from the '80s,...and destined (doomed) to walk amongst us as a modern, living, walking, sniffin' (Debate #1) tragedy. And Trump is easily recognized - from his actual 1980s, days of sparkle and libido - as a shadow character in Tom Wolfe's, 'Bonfire of the Vanities' (1987). Trump is real, just 30 years out of date - he really believes his 'style' of 'courtship' is ....what ever he believes.

And if G.. is kind, 'It' will find the time and inclination to save America from a Trump Presidency.

This article's conclusion, post-Debate #1:

Trump (The Donald, DT, OD (Our Donald),'Scratch' (from Stephen Vincent Benet's 1936,'The Devil and Dan Webster') is a post-modern, but time-revisted Shakespeare-Quixotish-Rabelaisian-Shelley-Bram Stokerish monster-buffon ala Falstaff, Pantagruel,Sancho Panza and straight-man sidekick Don Quixote, Shelley's monster, Henry !V and V, Count Dracula,Philip K Dickian lamenting cyborg,and the all-time modern monster-tragedy icon - Richard Don't-kick-me-again-but-if-you-must-I-know-how-you-feel-I'm-such-a-fool-mama-said Nixon). Buffoonish and over-exaggerated but at the same time tragically out of date and worse, worth attention from our entertainment-warped culture that morphs serious sh..t with laughs.

Donald Trump, or should one say, 'Trumpism, (or maybe both) will be discussed and parsed for many years to come. One could guess that future times will look back on 'Trump' as the nadir of American or even global politics before the renaissance of government for the people, or 'Trump' will be seen as the peak of American capitalist-democracy, or democratic capitalism, before the Great Fall. Writing about the Trump phenomenon is as challenging a struggle as Trump himself is to 'see' clearly - he is this or that, seemingly changeable at a moment's notice ..or with no notice or logical pre-disposition. Trump is as close to an embodiment of the neither-here-nor-there 'Cheshire Cat' as anything yet seen outside of a theoretical physics construct.

So, after one of Trump's non-sensical detours from normalcy ('normalcy' being, relatively speaking for Mr Trump, only a bit less scary than full on psychotic), one is driven to ask,

'Is Trump real?'

To that self-posed question, one is also self-driven to respond,

'Trump is as real as I feel about him ight now, but I don't know how I might feel about him tomorrow,... but probably worse.'

So,after this preamble, this lead-in to what is almost universally acknowledged (despite harsh disagreements about the person) about Trumpism being a genuine and significant American phenomenon, this blogger comes to the nub of this post:

'Trump' and all the irrational trappings surrounding the person - the lore, exaggerations, psychological analyses and theories about him and about his supporters and his non-supporters-but-tolerators, and about his country and about his culture and about his political-economic backdrop,...Trumpism as embodied by Donald Trump the person, is and will be for a looo-ong time a fertile compost of 'guano' (a pile of bird shit for political satirists) or the highest quality 'Green Thumb Fertilizer' for the boutique gardener of the left (i.e., Ivy League scholars and psycho-analysts), or the rallying cry of the (cranially deformed, hmmm shouldn't say that), ecstatic-drenched extreme right. Take your choice.

There will be plays, songs, short stories, off-broadway pieces, and lengthy (serious) works created to express the inner wonderment many thinkers will hve for Trump the man and Trumpism of which Donald Trump is but one minor god's badly or well-done creative example, depending on one's point-of-view.

But only a few of future devotees and scholars will clearly understand how Trump and Trumpism is all of 'us'. 'Us' being the totality of America - our nation, our culture(s), regions and each person residing in America.

How every person residing in America, legal and illegal, contributes in deed or story to our collective esprit and body. As an example, it is fitting for a discussion of 'Trumpism' to mention illegal immigrants are demonized by Trump (supposedly demonized, if one is to go only by his words rather than by who he hires to do the gardening and cooking at his Florida mansion); yet these supposedly (in the Trumpian world) extraneous, worthless and demon-folk play significant and mostly positive roles in the portrayal of America's cultural memes, i.e., the illegal immigrants of especially Mexican origin have a somewhat 'uber' work ethic ...which in America is comical!

So, to the finale: Trump (The Donald, DT, OD (Our Donald),'Scratch' (from Stephen Vincent Benet's 1936,'The Devil and Dan Webster') a post-modern, but time-revisted Shakespeare-Shelley-Bram Stokerish monster (Falstaff, Shelley's monster, Henry !V and V, Count Dracula,Philip K Dickian's lamenting cyborgs ('Blade Runner' ex 'Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?',and the all-time modern monster-tragedy icon - Richard Don't-kick-me-again-but-if-you-must-I-know-how-you-feel-I'm-such-a-fool-mama-said Nixon.