Trump’s Shadows? The Nothing That Is

Thursday

If you want a quick glimpse into the nerdiness of English professors, we sometimes laugh out loud when obscure literary allusions pop up in articles we are reading.  Yesterday I laughed midway through a humorous Washington Post satire by Alexandra Petri when she quoted Wallace Stevens.

Petri was responding to Donald Trump’s off the wall contention that a strange shadow organization no one has heard of is controlling Joe Biden:

People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. . . . People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets.

When Fox’s Laura Igraham, for once skeptical, asked for proof, Trump replied,

I’ll tell you sometime, but it’s under investigation right now, but they came from a certain city, and this person was coming to the Republican National Convention, and there were like seven people on the plane like this person, and then a lot of people were on the plane to do big damage. They were coming for 

Petri put it as follows:

Donald Trump was born with a gift that allowed him to see the Shadow People and avoid them. 

And earlier:

To know any more detail about them would destroy your mind; only a mind such as Donald Trump’s can comprehend exactly what they do in the shadows, can behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Congratulate yourself if you identified “The Snow Man.” To be sure, there’s not a lot to be learned about Donald Trump from applying the line. Petri just uses Steven’s mysterious and tangled poetry to satirize Trump’s tangled mind:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

There’s one point that can be made, however. Stevens is challenging us not to project our own associations upon the world (in this instance, our internal misery upon a snowy landscape), but instead to become cold and objective, like a snow man. If we do, we won’t see what is not there (say, people in the dark shadows) and we will see what is actually there. The “nothing that is” may be a barren place.

Trump, who projects incessantly, is as far from this snow man as it’s possible to be. No objective observer he as whatever internal winds blow through him shape what he thinks he sees.

If we are to have a responsible politics, however, we must demand of our political analysts—and of ourselves as voters—that they/we respect the actual facts before us to the fullest extent possible.

It may be that, even in the midst of the howling wind, we will see rough spruces glittering in the January sun. It may be that we will see a more beautiful reality than our dispirited psyches admit to.