The Genesis of Trumplandia

In the beginning Donald remodeled the heavens and the earth. And the heavens were sublimely beautiful and the earth was a pleasing place, but Donald was without form and void, and he hovered like a shapeless cloud over the deep.

And Donald said, Let there be Darkness. And there was darkness.

And Donald saw the darkness, that it was bad, real bad, and Donald divided the darkness from the light.

And he called the darkness day and the light he called the night. And evening and midnight were the first day.

And Donald said let there be a really classy casino town on an island, like Atlantic City, but one that doesn’t go bankrupt this time, in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters, you know like a martini before you shake it.

And Donald made the really classy casino island town and divided the waters which were under the island from those which were above, where Donald of course would be living in the penthouse.

And he called the really classy casino island Heaven. And evening and midnight were the second day.

And Donald said, Let all of the waters that were under the casino island be gathered together into one place: it will make Mar-a-Lago the coolest resort ever.

And Donald called the dry land Trumplandia and the gathering together of the waters he called the Largest Swimming Pool in Florida.

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The Present Emergency

By Christopher Bernard

On November 8, 2016, we witnessed a kind of political 9/11, a Brexit as nuclear bomb. It felt like being given a diagnosis of terminal cancer for our society, our civilization, our way of life, or witnessing the sack of Rome by Alaric.

It isn’t the first time many of us have seen the barbarians swarm over American society: we saw it during the years of George W. Bush, of Reagan, of Nixon, when it came from the right, and during the sixties when it came, for the most part, from the left. It is one reason that, from a very early age, I grew to feel a growing alarm and fear regarding a certain strain in American culture that cultivates and breeds, preens and admires, some of the worst aspects of human nature, in the name of “freedom” to the point of license, of “personal expression” to the point of mutual contempt, of “the common man” at the expense of uncommon honesty and decency—of what I eventually came to see was a hyper, paranoid, poisonous white masculinity that would gladly rip up the restraints and norms of civilization and culture if it felt its privileges, illegitimately labeled “rights,” were threatened.

The howling Yahoo (I think it is safe to call him) who will now lead our country will be such an exact emblem of the dark side of the soul of American culture that it will effectively terminate our reputation in the world for a long time to come, if it does not terminate the world itself. I am embarrassed (though also, being human, a little proud) of the fact that I predicted this outcome, in the middle of George W. Bush’s administration: that the next successful Republican president would be a populist, know-nothing authoritarian, an out-and-out “fascist.” But it is almost shameful to be right about such things.

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