Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert Draper, 1909, Oil on canvas
"Mass audience was created by promotion, by the marketing of excitements that take the place of ideas, of real collective debate, vision, or catharsis; excitements that come and go.... which strand us in our fishbowl lives, illegible to one another."
What do we have in common as Americans? Is it our shared love for a good show, our lust for entertainment and distraction, our favorite underwear? Do we share commutes and product preferences? I stand with Audre and Adrienne in the belief that true community is not built from a shared commute. Our etymology confuses the forest for the heartwood.
Having never known true community, many of us are willing to settle for its spectacle, the malignant grandiosity afforded by Trump. For Trump voters who kept their affinity and preference a secret prior to the election, the 45th emerged like a siren call, a ghastly temptation from espoused values, pragmatism, and hope. The empathy gap begins with my admission that I cannot for the life of me hear this siren called Trump.
Perhaps this is due to the different nature of the summons and the song itself. Ulysses was tempted by the incredible sweetness and beauty of the sirens' song which promised knowledge into all things of this world. Knowing he would not be able to resist, Ulysses plugged his ears with wax and refused to listen. The song itself was a danger to his life. He refused to gamble.
Trump's siren call is not that of beauty or knowledge. Unlike the Greek sirens, Trump lures us with the aesthetic horror of Stepford wives, spray-on tans, and cheap glitz. He promises not insight or understanding but power to destroy knowledge and vilify understanding. As a culture, we are tempted by certain things, and the rise of Trump makes it clear that there is little of "Western civilization" or Greco-Roman aesthetic sensibility left in these American arteries. We are clogged by consumerism, oblivious to any call that is not immediate and stadium-drenched.
A funerary statue of a siren, 370 BCE. The Greek mythical creatures holds the soundbox of a lyre made from a tortoise shell.
We can agree to disagree on the form of a siren. Ovid described the sirens as reddish-plumed birds with virginal faces. For Appollonius of Rhodes, sirens resembled women from the waist up and birds from the waist down. For Fox News, a siren looks like cold hard cash, preferably dollars. The current siren is a 70-year-old man that traffics in white eye make-up, expensive suits, and an angry mug.
Perhaps the fault is geographical. After all, the original sirens were thought to dwell on a western island near the Isle of Circe. There is no ancient account for the contemporary neon orange tastes known to all the world as American. But what does the vigilant, ever-loyal Trumptivist find to gratify his ardor? The siren call might be nationalism but there is something more complex and violent at stake-- a rise of the nihilist right that resembles the rise of fascism in its cult-trocity.
In 1940, Jorge Luis Borges published a magazine piece, "Definition of a Germanophile", that speaks to my emotions when speaking to loyal Trump voters. I am flummoxed, speechless, much like Borges when telling the "Germanophile" of Hitler's atrocities, only to discover the atrocities excused, rationalized, justified in the name of power and nationhood.
He laughs at my antiquated scruples and raises Jesuitical or Nietzschean arguments: the end justifies the means, necessity knows no law, there is no law other than the will of the strongest, the Reich is strong, the air forces of the Reich have destroyed Coventry, etc.
How to overlook and ignore the basic precepts of civilization? Beyond might makes right, there is little principle except nihilism to unite the church-going Americans who have pledged their honor and troth to Trump. Borges continues:
Disdaining these dry abstractions, my interlocutor begins or outlines a panegyric to Hitler: that providential man whose indefatigable discourses preach the extinction of all charlatans and demagogues, and whose incendiary bombs, unmitigated by verbose declarations of war, announce from the firmament the ruin of rapacious imperialism. Afterward, immediately afterward, a second wonder occurs. It is of a moral nature and almost unbelievable.
I always discover that my interlocutor idolizes Hitler, not in spite of the high-altitude bombs and the rumbling invasions, the machine guns, the accusations and lies, but because of those acts and instruments. He is delighted by evil and atrocity. The triumph of Germany does not matter to him,; he wants the humiliation of England and a satisfying burning of London. He admires Hitler as he once admired his precursors in the criminal underworld of Chicago. The discussion becomes impossible because the offenses I ascribe to Hitler are, for him, wonders and virtues. The apologists of Amigas, Ramirez, Quiroga, Rosas, or Urquiza pardon or gloss over their crimes; the defender of Hitler derives a special pleasure from them. The Hitlerist is always a spiteful man, and a secret and sometimes public worshiper of criminal "vivacity" and cruelty. He is, thanks to a poverty of imagination, a man who believes that the future cannot be different from the present, and that Germany, till now victorious, cannot lose. He is the cunning man who longs to be on the winning side.
It is not entirely impossible that there could be some justification for Adolf Hitler; I know there is none for the Germanophile.
And so, I conclude, there is no explanation for the persistent Trumptivist except a destructive hunger for spectacle that approximates Samuel P. Huntington's tragic, late-life conversion to white American nationalism (though I think even he would be shocked at what Americans have elected). In a comment on August 23, 1944, Borges observed of Nazis: "by behaving incoherently, they are no longer aware that incoherence need be justified."
To be a Nazi is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph.
Given the attack on the environment, working classes, veterans, blacks, women, GLTBQ persons, what is left is the ruins of America in the deification of the spectacle. Those who wish for the triumph of Trump's ideology cannot by any margin continue the lie of making American great again.
"The Sirens" by Gustave Moreau, b. 1872
