“A BITTERNESS”

I must admit that I had mixed feelings when I saw the helicopter lift President Trump off to Walter Reed Hospital on Friday, as the President suffered from symptoms caused by Covid-19.  I was sad for him and for Melania Trump, for his family, for the institution of the Presidency and for us as a people.  It has been a rough week for him – the disaster at the debate, the release of his taxes, and now to be publicly humiliated by being taken to the hospital by the very virus that he named as a hoax and which has now caused the death of almost 210,000 Americans.  

But, on another level, there is cosmic justice here.  The leader who could have saved so many lives, spared so much sickness and despair, but made a calculated, political decision not to do so – he has now been taken down by that very virus, which is obviously no respecter of ideology or political preference:  a host is a host is a host.  I don’t know how Trump will react to this devastating event in his life.  Perhaps he will “macho” up and proclaim that he has beaten it – why couldn’t everyone else do it?  Perhaps he will be converted and see himself and his life in a different way. 

As I pondered these things, I recalled a powerful poem by Mary Oliver entitled “A Bitterness.”  It helps to explain the loss of humanity of Donald Trump, and it helps me to have some bit of sympathy for him, which I recognize is always exceedingly dangerous with despots like him.  But, here is the poem. 

“A Bitterness”

I believe you did not have a happy life.

I believe you were cheated. 

I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.

I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.

I believe joy was a game that you could never play without stumbling.

I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.

I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.

I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as

     your bitterness.

I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and

     unassuaged.

 Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful

     flowers of the hillsides.

This poem helps explain to me the Donald Trump phenomenon.  He has bitterness as a deeply held core value, wound so tightly around his heart, that he has no room to grow, to use the great Grinch image.  Whether this explains Trump or not, the real question remains for us:  why did we elect such a man to be president?  The answer is that he was a white man – his only qualification – and that he projected a bullying, macho-heavy hand that would re-establish white, male supremacy in our land after we had the temerity to elect a Black man as President. The bitterness of race is similarly wound so deeply and tightly in us as a people and as a nation, that we would risk everything on a white man as bitter as Donald Trump.

I hope that we are in the death throes of white, male supremacy.  There are signs that we are, but this remains a very dangerous time.  Like Donald Trump’s life, the great experiment of the idea of equality – an idea which has fired so many people in so many ways – now hangs in the balance.  As John Lewis put it so well, voting is the only non-violent option for change in a democracy.  Let us exercise that right while we still can and seek to put us back on that path to a vision of equality and justice for all.