Comments
GUEST WORDS - I write in haste. At a political rally on Saturday afternoon, Donald Trump was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin. At present all I know is that, minus a hole in the ear, Trump himself is well and his assailant is dead. I also know that the rally took place in Pennsylvania and that the shooter was 20 years old. That is all I know of the incident, because it is all that I have chosen to know.
Let me explain. Saturday night, having seen the headlines, I went to bed determined to know no more, thinking that the whole thing was just too depressing, marking yet another new low in the state of our democracy. To have tuned into pundits as they expertly weighed in on the matter would have sent me into a tailspin of further despair. My life, I thought, is too short to devote yet more of it to an attention-sucking fool who now gets to play martyr.
I went for a run early Sunday still knowing the complete ‘next-to-nothing’ mentioned above. As I ran it occurred to me that not only was my near-total ignorance emotionally salutary, it gave me a certain advantage over most Americans. It allowed me to think ahead, for myself, toward how Donald Trump would react to the incident. I could speculate about that reaction without any foreknowledge of it, whether voiced by the man himself or pontificated by anyone else. The gap in my knowledge meant that I could try my hand at predicting Donald Trump’s response, given what I think I know of him, to see if I actually know him at all. ‘What will he make of it?’ I thought to myself. More importantly, how will he use it? To his own advantage? (Of course, duh!) To the betterment of our world ? (I laughed).
A near-death experience is a scary thing. It changes lives. Libraries are filled with the stories of persons who miraculously survived some near encounter with death: plane crashes, overdoses, wars, the list is endless. In the stories these survivors tell, their encounters shake them to the core, teaching them things about the world, and about themselves. As if newly born and given another chance, they turn inside themselves, rethink their values, and become more understanding and kind. St. Paul was knocked flat on the road to Damascus, blinded, an experience that jolted his inner being and turned him from murdering Christians to loving them and embracing their cause.
That is why I have chosen, still as of today (Monday), to stay ignorant of Donald Trump’s reaction. I have persisted in not opening the headlines (though as of a few minutes ago I happened to hear that the shooter was a registered Republican). I want to see what I know of the man. His near brush with death is the stuff from which new lives are made and new values gained, and yet I cannot not for the life of me find any way to believe that he will use the experience to turn inside himself, or become a kinder, more understanding person.
With my knowledge of the matter still nearly complete, here goes. What will he make of it? I can predict with a high level of confidence that he will play it to the hilt as an outstanding political opportunity rather than a cause for rethinking anything that he has ever thought. If he does turn inside, he will find nothing there other than the selfish and ignorant child that has always been there. As a result, he will turn not to his Bible, but to his comic books. He will demand to be worshiped as a superhero, a man of steel who sheds bullets (pointing to his ear). Remember, this is a man-child who, as president of the United States, wanted to step out onto a balcony at the Walter Reed Hospital sporting a Superman shirt. He had to be talked out of it. Of the tens of millions of Americans who were infected with Covid-19, I know of only one above the age of seven who wanted to play superhero because of it.
Donald Trump will do many awful things with this opportunity, doubling down on his self-assured hatreds and lies. But the worst of it will be this: pandering to his evangelical base, Donald Trump will claim that Democrat Devils wanted him dead, but that Jesus has kept him alive as their only hope and their savior. Breaking the first commandment, his worshipers will praise him for it, and as he basks in their glory his advisors will sweep in to help him adjust his Bible, The Revised Trump Version, to keep him from holding it upside down. Such is my prediction.
(Kirk Freudenburg is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Classics at Yale University, and a former fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR 2002). His Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero, co-edited with Shadi Bartsch and Cedric Littlewood, appeared last November. This article was first published in commondreams.org.)
