The Evil Asshat Stuck in a World of Shit, or the American Inferno’s Malebolge’s Second Bolgia

With the astounding April 13th presidential-pandemic press conference, this absurd all-American monster may have reached a personal nadir, a moment of surreal and revelatory public spectacle that makes it impossible, you’d think, absolutely, quantitatively impossible to have any faith in the fact that this man has anything on his mind except wrangling power and cash in the nakedest way he can think of, which is very naked indeed, and that he wouldn’t, under regular circumstances, be trusted by any of us to give a child change of a quarter. Which brings us, again, to the problem at hand: not the slavering clown at the podium – whom many of the biggest news outlets freely cut away from at this point – not the sinner wading in Dantean shit, but the shit itself. That’s should be our concern: how and why we became, as a nation, the sea of shit around this douchebag, torturing him perhaps a bit but also keeping him erect and sustained and primed for more venery. In Dante the second Bolgia, the bay of human excrescence in which bullshitters are condemned to wade forever, is payback for a life of bullshitting. In America, bullshit is a way of life, from pro sports to church piety to politics to advertising to medical-industrial practice to nationalistic bigotry and patriotic mythology, and as we all know in our hearts, any solid gold bullshitter thrives the more he or she is surrounded by endless bullshit. This is the problem we’ve got – our own dreadful excess of bullshit isn’t punishment for Trump so much as a source water, a hellish mire of stink and rot that only fuels his own stankful, rotten metabolism. Not that I want to get epic-Biblical about it – Trump is nothing if not a petty loudmouth who stands as proof of America’s love of bullshit, and nothing more. It’s a rather fantastical frame of culture, going back millennia, that pictures evil, massively destructive men as larger than life, when in fact they are most often drearily small, dumb, childish and bullshitty. But we love the bullshit, because we are the bullshit – how many aspects of American life and the American psyche can you name that are simply 100% bullshit, and how long could you go on naming them until you realize there’s virtually nothing on the other side of the blotter? Alright, the scientists, when they’re left alone. We are the sea of bullshit that spawned and feeds this outsized parasite, and when he dies (toes crossed, any moment now), we will still be here, fuming and churning and looking for smirking bullshitters to tell us how great we are, and therein to boost into power. Other nation-cultures are full of shit, too, in different ways (Russia, Israel, China, India, Iran), but many aren’t (take your pick of idyllic northern European states, plus New Zealand and Canada), and the people of those countries (the population densities seem to tilt emphatically toward the bullshitters, chillingly) largely suffer for their own prideful ardor for a life and identity defined by bullshit. And so they dredge up more bullshit to mollify their misery. And so it goes. What must be done – rewrite the American sensibility, and make it allergic to undue amounts of bullshit – is probably impossible, as it would require nationalizing and revamping the entire educational system, on maybe the Finnish model, making it adhere to real pedagogical strategies and insights, and then waiting a generation or two for the effects of reason and erudition to take hold on society at large, as the dumbfucks and bullshitters die off. The first step would be to accept responsibility for our own bullshit, which is like asking a stone bird to fly.