Thursday
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the following Great Gatsby passage applied to DJT but it’s always worth revisiting:
I couldn’t forgive [Tom] or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made …
Political commentator Ben Rhodes has a great summation of the latest mess, which our president is desperately trying to retreat from:
In the best-case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents—including hundreds of children—dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.
In Fitzgerald’s novel, Tom’s infidelity sets off a chain of events that results in three deaths. Daisy has accidentally run down Myrtle, Tom’s lover, after her own fling with Gatsby is ending. Tom then lies to Myrtle’s husband George, telling him that Gatsby did it. (“He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car,” he tells Nick, prompting Nick to observe, “There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.”) Tom’s lie prompts George to shoot Gatsby and then himself.
At the inquest, there are no ramifications for the Buchanans as Daisy’s sister Catherine tells her own set of lies:
When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade—but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it too—looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man “deranged by grief” in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.
Think of Catherine as those Fox News pundits, who are currently attempting to turn Trump’s acceptance of Iran’s 10-point-plan into a victory. Examples:
Laura Ingraham: It looks like Trump ultimately hits the home run here, takes it to the brink. Iran blinks. Matt Towery: When will the Democrats and some Republicans ever learn that the rhetoric he uses is done for a reason. And it works.
The reality, of course, is that Trump’s entire life has consisted of creating messes that others have tried to clean up, from when his father bailed him out of bankruptcies to the Supreme Court letting him off the hook for his January 6 coup attempt. Whether he has found the offramp he is frantically looking for remains to be seen.
Returning to the book, it’s no surprise to discover that Tom Buchanan, like Trump, is also a white supremacist. Those in positions of privilege, whether class or race, are capable of inflicting immense damage when their preeminence is threatened:
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
And a little later:
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
Cocooned in their privilege and sense of superiority, such men are convinced that only their own needs matter. If a civilization has to be destroyed to salvage one’s ego, then it must be destroyed. As Nick puts it, talking with Tom feels like “talking to a child.”
One other Gatsby passage comes to mind after reading a fascinating article by John Gray in The Statesman. Gray says that “Trump seems driven by an impulse to reimagine the past and reassert American – and his own – greatness,” and then adds, “When an infantile fantasy of omnipotence comes up against unyielding realities, the response is inchoate rage.” That rage, in the words of former Trump supporter Alex Jones, is making him sound “like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie.”
Fitzgerald understands what’s going on. “So we beat on,” he writes in his famous last sentence, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The beating on is particularly frightening when the party has access to nuclear weapons.
