Nausea. I can't shake it. Its jellyfish tendrils invaded my throat on election night and hooked in, expanding and enveloping me with a Sartrean nausea that tints the world in Joycean snot-green. And now I feel caged on planet of the apes waiting for a lobotomy.
The nausea kicks in a gag-reflex reaction whenever Trump appears on a screen or his insisting voice clips out of a random speaker. No amount of rationalization helps alleviate the condition of my condition. My friends and family have taken a combative stance, grabbed placards and hit the streets in protest. But I’m so weakened by my condition that all I can do is curl into my despair.
The election returns hit my nostrils like mustard gas with the realization that half of the America I love gulped down Trump’s lies like mother’s milk and now revels in a warm wash-water of gullible anti-intellectualism and isolationism, harkening to a past of lathes turning, deaf to the keystrokes irreversibly tapping.
Every tenet of the code I live by, every pathetic fiber hanging from the helix of my DNA withers as Trump’s dark horsemen gallop toward Washington, sabers hacking away years of hopeful expectation that America was,
• addressing the existential threat of climate change,
• working toward smart humane immigration,
• protecting reproductive rights,
• accepting the LGBT community,
• changing insane gun laws,
• supporting universal health care,
• protecting the crown jewels of U.S. social services – public schools, Social Security and Medicare -- and strengthening laws designed to prevent another catastrophic economic recession like the one Obama inherited.
Oh, hold on...Here he comes to drain the swamp in Washington, a Yeatsean shape with lion body and the head of a man with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, wearing a flowing flashing golden cape, two baskets on his rump – one marked Alt-right and the other Lumpen. “Only I can do it,” he mutters. The Lumpen stir but lean away from the vipers jutting out of the other basket.
But lets return to where we started. A man on horseback guides his mount gingerly to the edge of a ridge. It is a typically stifling summer day in the swampy hollow and the insects buzz. Only the top of the Capitol dome gleams above the water line as the murk laps at the statue of Armed Freedom.
The man groans, “We finally really did it ... You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"