HONOUR
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honour.
-last line of the Declaration of Independence
Falstaff: Hal, if thou see me down in the battle, and bestride me, so; ‘tis a point of friendship.
Prince: Nothing but a colossus can do thee that friendship. Say thy prayers, and farewell.
Falstaff: I would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well.
Prince: Why, thou owest God a death. (Exit)
Falstaff: “Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ‘tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how can honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he hear it? No. It is insensible, then? Yes, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it: honour is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism.
-Shakespeare, Henry IV, part 1
Honour (or honor, as we spell it today in the Untidy States) is a highly flexible concept. The signatories to the Declaration of Independence thought of it as the innate and deep-rooted decency that separated honest, decent people from liars, thieves, murderers, and traitors. Sir John Falstaff was a knight, and he enjoyed the perquisites that came with his title. But he had no use for its responsibilities, which involved, first and foremost, fighting in King Henry IV’s war against the Welsh rebel Owen Glendower and his ally, Harry Percy. It was because the Fat Knight was dishonorable – a coward, a lecher, a boozer, and a glutton – that Prince Hal, who had been his bosom companion, and had shared in his debauches earlier on, renounced him when he succeeded to the throne.
But Falstaff has left the realm of fiction, emigrated to America, and taken up residence in the White House, thanks to a mob of aggrieved, bigoted know-nothings, and the absurdities of the Electoral College system, in which conservative Wyoming, the state with the smallest population, ranks equally with liberal California, the state with the largest. I find it sourly amusing that the Electoral College was devised by the Founders because they thought direct representational elections might lead to mob rule.
We’ve had inept, stupid Presidents: Harding, Coolidge and the second Bush spring to mind. We’ve had a sneaky, crooked one: Nixon. We’ve had traitorous ones: James Buchanan supported southern secession; Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, a drunk, dismissed Secretary of State Stanton and tried to turn the defeated South over to a passel of unreconstructed Confederates, overriding Congress – the House of Representatives voted to impeach him, but the Senate, dominated by Carpetbaggers, refused to follow through.
But at least Nixon ended the Cold War with China (Trump started a trade war with the Chinese which may yet result in open warfare), and created the Environmental Protection Agency (now gutted by Trump). Dubbya Bush passed the Medicare Bill (something else the Trumpsters want to eliminate) and set up an emergency plan to provide, if not a cure, at least an effective medical treatment for AIDS (Trump still thinks AIDS is the “Gay Plague,” and he loathes the LGBT community even more than he loathes African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians).
Trump has done nothing positive during his two years in office. Pandering to his misogynist, white-supremacist, neo-Nazi base, he has promised to Make America Great Again by undoing all the legislation that made it great to begin with, and because he can’t open his mouth without lying, even that promise is false, for of course he can’t eliminate a law without consent of both houses of Congress.
But it seems he’d like to get rid of Congress altogther, and reign supreme. There’s an anecdote about George W. Bush flying over the neo-classical buildings of Washington, D.C. in the presidential helicopter after his inauguration. He joked that the city looked like Imperial Rome, and that America ought to be an Empire, but only if he could be Emperor. There was a minor flap in the liberal media, and he said he’d been joking. Not a very good joke, but Dubbya did have a sense of humor, even about himself.
Not so the Mango Mussolini. It’s been remarked elsewhere that he’s never been seen to laugh, and his smile is a nasty smirk. His default expression is the pout of a cranky three-year-old, and his voice is a whine. In all these respects, he differs from Falstaff, whose laughter set the taverns on a roar, and whose zest for life was as large as his appetite and his girth – the last being the only thing he shares with the fat toad squatting in the Oval Office. Trump claims that he doesn’t drink alcohol (something that would have appalled Sir John, whose thirst for sack was monumental), but I’m not sure I believe that: surely his bloated red face is not merely the product of his tanning bed. Falstaff loved the ladies, but he never forced himself on them; the Fat Führer bragged about grabbing women’s pussies and getting away with it because he was “a star.” He’s even been photographed cupping his own daughter Ivanka’s ass, which may explain why Melania wears such a grim expression when she has to appear with him in public.
Trump is utterly without honor, or even common decency, and he’s proud of it, because honor and decency are for suckers like the investors he cheated during his mobbed-up real estate career. Now he wants to be King of the United States of America, and unlike Bush II, he isn’t joking, because he has no sense of humor. He seems to have forgotten, or never knew, because he’s entirely ignorant of history, that we once started a revolution to rid ourselves of a king.
As I write (22 December), the government is still shut down, resulting in devastating hardship for tens of thousands of people across the country, because His Royal Petulance can’t get the funding for his anti-immigrant wall from a Congress whose House of Representatives went Democratic during 2018’s election. Even certain Republicans in both the House and Senate are crossing the aisle on the wall issue. But Trump can’t give in (even though in a rare moment of candor he acknowledged that he was getting “crushed” by the general public’s disapproval of his stance) because it would make him look weak.
Of course he is weak, like all bullies. He’s a coward and a hypochondriac, and despite his bulk, he’s physically soft, because he never engages in serious exercise (Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York Magazine, recently called him a “walking blanc-mange”). He does enjoy golfing, because it only involves getting out of his cart and swinging a club from time to time. And he cheats, changing the lies of his balls without taking mulligans, and undercounting his strokes.
During Trump’s Presidential campaign in 2017, Kerry O’Grady, a Secret Service agent assigned to him, resigned her post and gave up a career to which she had been proudly dedicated. Members of the Secret Service must swear that they will sacrifice their lives, if necessary, to protect the President. Ms. O’Grady could not in good conscience keep that oath, because she thought Trump was a crook involved with the Russians, and because of his repugnant attitude toward women. She said she’d do jail time rather than take a bullet for him. At present, her case is “under review” by the Secret Service, but she hasn’t yet been charged with any wrongdoing, and she is regarded as a woman of integrity by everyone who is appalled by Trump’s dishonorable behavior.
Unfortunately for the nation, when it comes to bad presidents, Trump takes the cake, or at least the double bacon cheeseburger. Yes, the Mueller investigation grinds on, and there’s a chance that Trump may not complete his first term if enough evidence of his high crimes and misdemeanors turns up when Mueller’s report is finally issued. But the report can’t be made public without the consent of the U.S. Attorney-General, and Matthew G. Whitaker, who currently occupies that position, maintains that he is under no obligation to reveal its contents, even to Congress. Whitaker is a conservative Republican, and I have no doubt that the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has prompted his stone-walling.
For the worst thing Trump has done to the country is to split it into two irreconcilable factions whose mutual hatred is almost as deep-seated as the animosity between the northern and southern states in the years leading up to the Civil War. And he revels in the rancorous division, because creating havoc is his only skill. He practises it by using his “very good brain” (sparingly, to be sure; it doesn’t seem to get any more exercise than his suety body does), and “all the best words” (a short list, mostly insults, which he repeats over and over again). He’s been a godsend for comedians and political cartoonists, because they don’t have to invent their material. Trump supplies it to them every time he opens his pursy little sphincter of a mouth, and all they have to do is quote him.
But the poison he spreads is insidious. His run for president was based on hatred of anyone who wasn’t white, male, and resentful, and hatred is as contagious as a virus. As I read back over what I’ve written so far, I realize that I’ve caught it myself. In describing him, I’ve spewed the same kind of venom he spits at those who oppose him, as if he and I were two children squabbling in a school playground.
“You stink!”
“You stink worse!”
“Nyah, nyah, I’m rubber, you’re glue! Everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you!”
The subtitle of this blog is “Opinionated Observations,” but this essay is going beyond opinionation into blind rage. I’ve let Trump provoke me into sharing his own paranoid mind-set: anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. By allowing myself to be provoked, I am acting as dishonorably as he is. So for the sake of my self-esteem, my blood pressure, and the reader’s patience, I’ll get the twist out of my undies and calm down. Whether or not Trump serves out his term, he stands little chance of being re-elected, something Republican politicians evidently realize, for they are hastily distancing themselves from him. Only the hard core of his base is standing by him, and even their numbers are dwindling, as they begin to realize how thoroughly he has sold them out.
His tweets indicate that he’s falling apart, alternately railing against his enemies and wallowing in self-pity. For years he’s been a heart-attack waiting to happen, because of his obesity and the strain his fits of rage put on his ticker. It would be convenient if he just dropped dead, but that’s too much to hope for – and we’d wind up with a fundamentalist religious maniac running the country. Pence is as clueless as Fatso when it comes to foreign and domestic policy, and if anything, he’s even more hostile to women. But he’s in better shape, and would have another year in which to wreak havoc before being turfed out of the White House. The only thing to be said in his favor is that he doesn’t appear to be psychotic. It’s possible that he’ll see reason, tone down the rabble-rousing rhetoric, and settle for being a place-holder president like Gerald Ford. It’s also possible that the Illuminati will emerge from hiding and reveal that Thomas Pynchon was right about who’s really running the world.
So I’ll stop pissing and moaning. The nation will survive the Trump administration, as it survived the administrations of other rotten presidents. And we the people might even learn to follow our better instincts and try to get along with one another.