When the time came, she often said, when she was older, she would let her hair go gray. But the time never came, and her hair colorist continued to dye her graying roots to match the rich auburn of her younger self.
My mother kept many secrets, and though some of them wounded me and made me hate her at times, on the whole she kept them beautifully. Some had to do with her personal habits, others concerned her actions and interactions, those I witnessed and those that came at me from out of the past. Still other secrets had been thrust on her beyond her control: names she had to keep hidden to safeguard lives and also her own name, given her before her parents or ancestors or anyone in the world knew that the man's name hers was derived from would become synonymous with evil on perhaps as great a scale as the devil's own, because though she was always known as Dolly, they named her Adolfina.
I didn't know her birth name or her actual age for many years. I learned how old she was on a day my father's mother came to visit, a rare occurrence because my mother never cared to entertain her. My grandmother mentioned that Dolly had me at 31, though I'd thought she was currently 29. When I later confronted my mother, she explained that she couldn't tell me the truth because I would have told my schoolmates and then everyone would know. I nodded sagely, thrilled to be given such an adult (and mysterious) explanation, and never afterwards told anyone her age or -- when I learned it -- her birth name.
In other ways too, I went on lying for her, because she demanded it. When she was dying of multiple myeloma, cancer in the marrow of her bones, she insisted I tell her friends that she had a "bellyache." She believed cancer was "psychological" and was ashamed to be caught with it. But she was also dying quickly, in the hospital and at home with round the clock nurses. I hated having to lie to people on the phone; I was embarrassed for them, for myself, ashamed of that childish word "bellyache," ashamed of the knowledge I had, the dead certainty of what was going on. I couldn't tell anyone, and I couldn't stop what I knew.
Everyone has secrets. I don't believe, as my mother did, that cancer is a sign of repressed rage or repressed anything else. My cat Corduroy, who was also my best friend, died young of cancer and his rage was never repressed, nor his love either, shown in the way he tried to feed the family, bringing in headless squirrels or birds he'd killed and placing them beneath my seat at the dinner table. But there are other secrets, so big that people spend their lives and countries go to war protecting them.
America's secret is racism. It is the darkness at America's heart. Though it can be set aside (look at the President we have!), it continues, since it's easier to blame whatever's wrong (in your life, in the country) on others than on yourself. (This may be one reason to get married, though not a good one.) If other people don't look like you, it becomes even easier. Hitler had to tag the Jews with big yellow stars because they looked (and thought and felt) like other Germans. The star provided a target for German rage, which in truth had little to do with Jews and was mainly caused by devaluation of the currency and loss of jobs. But an enemy is a handy tool for an aspiring megalomaniac dictator. Especially for the newly-blond Donald Trump (who is dark-haired in photos of him in youth and middle age, and whose hair resembled an orange dishrag earlier this year), with his family tradition of racial intolerance, a father and grandfather who didn't like dark people, didn't rent to them, and who were drawn to the ideology of white supremacists.
Trump picks up on the American secret and adds the terror of the unknown. All murders are now the fault of foreign darkies, whether or not they had anything to do with it, all part of a world-wide conspiracy against blond white (straight) Christian men. In Trump's hatred of M folk -- Mexicans, Muslims, menstruators, minorities -- he rounds up a lot of dark people. Women make it into the core of his publicly-proclaimed nemeses by being biologically different from other people, in that they ovulate and menstruate, two cycles that Donald Trump would never in his life engage in, and therefore finds disgusting. Different is the bugaboo, and to Trump there is no reality outside of Trump.
He presents us with a caricature of the two greatest dictators of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler (né Schicklgruber) and Josef Stalin (born Jughashvili), with an added dose of pure American hucksterism. Like Hitler and Stalin, Trump is his own creation, in his case a blown-up cartoon of The Big Male with scowling face, broad chest, lots of sawbucks, lots of broads and a grunter's vocabulary. He's the entertainer, like Hitler in Brecht's play Arturo Ui and also like P.T. Barnum, prankster galore, who toured America with his freak show, entered politics in Connecticut, made millions, lost them and then made them back again in the firm belief that, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" (though the quote varies and is sometimes attributed to H.L. Mencken). Barnum said of himself: "I am a showman by profession . . . and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me," which shows a great deal more insight into his own nature than Trump has ever demonstrated. His personal aim, said Barnum, was "to put money in my own coffers."
The huckster, snake oil salesmen, slimy politicos and purveyors of hype that dotted our frontier probably were natural outgrowths of America's wild Dream: to invent yourself, to become anyone you wanted to be because the old rules no longer applied. It didn't matter who your parents were, where you went to school (or didn't) or any of the values that cosseted Europe in its old ways. Being American was a God-given passport to fun and freedom, to children who refused to eat their spinach because "America's a free country," and, on a more deadly note, to the necessity (for keeping the myth alive) of making sure some of the people are not included as people. The secret remained. Be white, be powerful, and the Dream is yours.
Adolf Hitler said: If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.
Trump also resembles Stalin, particularly in the penchant for putting his name on everything (remember Stalingrad? if things go rotten in November, New York could become Trump City). To every proposed building during his years as Chairman, he added steeples that transformed them into secular churches erected to the greater glory of himself. Stalin, like his latter day successor Vladimir Putin -- a man much admired by Trump -- did not believe in negotiating with perceived enemies. He had a quicker solution. "Death," he wrote, "is the solution to all problems. No man -- no problem." Putin seems to agree.
What is great in America is that this country took in my parents when it did; that it welcomed immigrants throughout its history because it is, on a grand scale, a nation made up of immigrants, a tree with many roots that finds its genius in difference. Americans are optimistic and flexible. We'll try anything, which is why we're such rich fodder for entrepreneurs. (P.T. Barnum: There's a sucker born every minute.) But if we screw up in November, we might lose far into the future, with a Trump Supreme Court meting out its justice.
Hitler: The victor will never be asked if he told the truth
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Truth is a moveable concept to Trump, who controls it as he controls everything around him. The Don sees himself as Czar of this country, Czar of czars, which is as czar-y or crazy as it gets.
N.Y. subway: If you see something, say something.
Donald Trump.
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