Donald Trump’s credibility, such as it is, comes from his crudeness. He is the end product of a 60-year baby boom journey that mistook vulgarity for candor, incivility for honesty. It was a rebellion against the straight-laced prudery of the 1950s, the sitcoms where husbands and wives slept in twin beds, where Father said “Gosh darn it” and then blushed after such a close call with profanity. It began with “sick” comedians like Lenny Bruce who martyred himself for obscenity; then it migrated to publishing, with books like Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, which celebrated the joys of onanism—an act previously unacknowledged in mainstream American literature; and then on to the upper middle-class reaches of the antiwar movement, where “pigs” were police and working-class draftees were “baby-killers.” Suddenly there was blood everywhere. When Edward G. Robinson was killed in Little Caesar (1931)—”Is this the end of Rico?”—a gut-shot produced a trickle between his fingers; by the time of Bonnie & Clyde (1967), the heroes’ demise was a grisly, slow-motion blood-gush ballet. Blood was honesty. Profanity was honesty. Anger was honesty. Self-expression was honesty (self-restraint was not). And finally, with Trump, bigotry was honesty: “He talks about muslims the way we talk about muslims,” a New Hampshire voter told me in 2016.
When anything goes, everything went.
I spent my youth, especially after reading Sinclair Lewis, disdaining Babbitry and middle-class propriety, Lawrence Welk, The Sound of Music, Reader’s Digest, margarine, canned fruits and vegetables. There were three television networks, three flavors of ice cream. It was a common denominator world, about to be ripped to pieces by niche marketing. It lacked authenticity, which became a generational byword. It lacked edge. It celebrated comfort and commonality, not individuality.
What are you rebelling against? “Whatcha got?” Marlon Brando replied in The Wild One. I thought Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield was a rebel rather than the very damaged young man he seemed when I re-read the book. I didn’t understand that James Dean was overacting in Rebel Without A Cause. I believed that mentally ill people were saintly victims, as in King of Hearts, or rebels against a sick society, as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the 1970s, writing about politics for Rolling Stone magazine, I would go to Rotary Club meetings in Iowa or New Hampshire and smirk: how square! How terminally uncool. How bougie. How phony.
But we’ve lost a lot by abandoning propriety. You need facade in a democracy. We need to be buffered by ceremony and civility. Pretense is a balm. When the bark is off, it’s easier to get hurt; when you play with matches, you can set the house on fire. And, over the years, I realized that this old house, our republic, was precious beyond imagining—especially after I began to visit war zones and saw how flimsy a facade civilization was. In the 1990s, I watched Republicans immolate themselves, especially in the House of Representatives, as the courtly Rep. Bob Michel—a Purple Heart veteran of the Battle of the Bulge—was kicked to the curb by Newt Gingrich, whose only experience with violence was the blowback from his tantrums. Newt was a Trump precursor; he was smitten by his own entertainment value. He distributed “How to talk like Newt” tapes to the party activists; there were no guides for how to legislate like Newt. When Bob Michel wanted to settle a dispute, he gathered the aggrieved parties in his office for a “snort” of Crown Royal, whose distillery was located in his district. It was time spent with Michel and Bob Dole and Daniel Patrick Moynihan that caused me to begin questioning the ethos of my generation.
By the time I watched Jeb Bush and John Kasich speaking at Rotary lunches in New Hampshire in 2016, I was in full recalibration mode—and sensed we were in serious trouble as a society. Here is what I wrote:
On the day before the New Hampshire primary, Jeb Bush addressed a Rotary meeting at the Nashua Country Club. It was the sort of event that has, for the past 100 years, defined the Republican Party, just as union-hall rallies define Democrats. The Rotarians have always represented a peak of American bourgeois civility, and these Nashua businesspeople had listed some rules of discourse on a banner. The first two were: Is it the truth? and Is it fair to all concerned? Bush was perfect for this Norman Rockwell setting, speaking about his accomplishments as governor of Florida and his current travails as a candidate: he was tired of politicians who “push down a group of people to make themselves look better.” …He said that he had a trove of position papers but that they weren’t “resonating” because the coin of the campaign was insult. He said that if elected, he would be a “leader with a servant’s heart,” a lovely phrase.
A day earlier, I’d watched John Kasich make the same point in a more off-the-cuff way. He talked about how he’d had to listen to average people on the campaign trail, who told stories about their hardships and victories. And he had taken a lesson from it: “Slow down,” he said. “You’ve got to slow down … Heal the divisions in our families, be willing to listen to the people next door … give ’em a hug.”
It had been 40 years since my first presidential campaign, and I’d come full circle. At that point, in February 2016, it was still unimaginable that Donald Trump would become President, but untrammeled boorishness had become the coin of the realm. “Do you ever watch these programs like Jerry Springer?” Colin Powell, another fellow who valued facade, once asked me. “They’re so embarrassing!”
Why? I asked.
“Because so many of the contestants are black people making fools of themselves.”
But there were plenty of white people eager—almost desperate—to make fools of themselves, too. This was in the early days of Black Friday, that annual land-rush of greed and incivility, when “buying” trampled the traditional “giving” featured on the day before. This was in the early days of “ultimate” fighting, where anything went and everything—the traditions and restrictions of boxing—was gone. This was in the early days of Reality TV, about the time Snooki was punched out in a bar on Jersey Shore. It’s become a commonplace to note that Donald Trump was the Reality TV candidate. But he’s also the Black Friday candidate, the cage fight candidate. He was crude, but not phony—his boorishness was authentic. It was not focus-grouped by political consultants. What began with the flash, creativity and liberation of the counterculture had putrified into barbarity. We remain in its throes, with no direction home.
All of this is made more painful by the passing of Rosalynn Carter, soon to be followed—one suspects—by her husband. Talk about “a leader with a servant’s heart.” I remember wandering through the West Wing one night with Hamilton Jordan, and stumbling onto the Carters—he was wearing his famous cardigan—engaged in an Evelyn Wood speed-reading session in the Roosevelt Room. Self-improvement! (As opposed to self-aggrandizement.) I remember driving through Plains, Ga., on my way to visit friends—that’s you, Mr. Jay Beck—in Albany and seeing a sign in the window of the General Store: “President Carter will be teaching Sunday School this week.” Humility as the heart of spirituality! (As opposed to the gleam of ostentatious Joel Osteen’s teeth and bling). I’ve read the New Testament and there is no Gospel of Prosperity, only guidance on how to live with a servant’s heart.
So I find myself pining for…facade, which seems an imprecise word, perhaps the wrong one—but it connotes the importance of keeping up appearances…and appearances are, by their very nature, polished and tempered and purposeful. The perverse authenticity of Donald Trump’s narcissism is soul-numbing, society-crushing. I find myself yearning for civility to displace the crudeness that passes for candor, for the days when expertise had more credibility than populist rage, for the precision of George Will over the gagging snark of Jesse Watters, for the insistent intellect of The Washington Monthly’s Charlie Peters, just passed away, over the showboat race-hustling of Cornel West. I prefer handshakes to fist bumps. I am daunted by the rigor of Sanity Goddess’s devotion to grammar and etiquette. I seek Regular Order—and a snort of Crown Royal—in the House, and for propriety to replace privilege in Tommy Tuberville’s Senate. I’d like to see a place for Jeb Bush (and his position papers, especially on education) in government—and for John Kasich, too. Does this make me a conservative? Small-c for sure, just as I am a small-l liberal. These days, I value institutions like the Nashua, NH, Rotary Club…and all the other organizations that do the daily labors of community, the people who run the food banks and clean-up drives, who ask serious questions of presidential candidates, then listen respectfully. They are everything Trump isn’t. They are what we should be.
And meanwhile, don’t forget—the Gift of Sanity this holiday season:
I had the dubious good fortune of being surrounded by narcissistic and alcoholic adults in my teen years; I have a well-honed “shit detector” for hypocrisy. . .Sadly, the last (and only) time a mother-f*kr, Republican politician fooled me, he was surrounded by top brass, claiming to be a war hero, warning of “weapons of mass destruction.” Coming from the military, I fell for it. That WILL NOT happen again . . .and didn’t those people also “swift boated” a military hero, John Kerry? Mother f*ckers. The RNC is an organized crime syndicate installed and ruled by neonazi fascist billionaires with close ties to the Russian mob. THAT is all any voter needs to know.
To see what’s everything Trump’s not, list everything relating to integrity, honesty and honesty! He has none of those!