To anathematize the Devil is not impolite.
This obvious sentiment arrived in my head special delivery, I’m guessing, in response to my long-dead parents.
Our parents are always looking over our shoulders, welcome or not. Our early years, spent trying to please them, instill a lifelong habit. We may break with them, disown, repudiate them, but they never leave us. Their deaths may free us to assail them – what harm now? – but their influence cannot be erased.
My parents preached appearances: courtesy, neatness, punctuality, propriety, polite conversation, pass salt and pepper together. There were right schools, addresses, acquaintances. Who you seemed mattered; who you really were – well, who could know that? Infidelity was permissible – “behind closed doors.”
Theirs was an easy curriculum as long as one avoided controversy. Every inch the good boy in public, in private I reveled in villainy. My villainy, in retrospect, was pretty tame, but it felt heroic. What if I was found out!
While the limitations of such an education are evident, its rewards merit regard. I’m preternaturally preoccupied with pleasing – in person and prose. However unflattering my opinions, my manner seeks to ingratiate. My duty to society – and duty is the right word – was to lubricate, not lucubrate. “Keep your opinions to yourself” was a parental mantra.
I do not keep my opinions to myself – you may have noticed – but I’m hardwired to express them cordially – or was until recently. A moment comes to renounce, denounce, excoriate, vituperate, vilify, anathematize, when one must shout no in thunder and decorum must yield to disgust. But when is that moment? When is it OK to “make a scene” (my mother’s trope)? If the Devil comes calling, must we serve him tea?
Trump is my Devil. Worse than despicable, he embodies the opposite of much I hold dear. I believe in truth, kindness, fairness, justice, grace, and, yes, courtesy. His actions demonstrate – again and again – that he does not. He espouses tyranny, I liberty; he revenge, I forgiveness. His sleazy manner and tacky taste, while not criminal, complete the picture. He sneers at ideals, I honor them. He ridicules patriots and war dead as losers.
His vileness is so brazen I can’t conceive of a single person endorsing him. Yet daily people of substance, who’ve accomplished things in their time, accord him their support and wink at his affronts. Are these humans so hollow, blind, corrupt? Can they truly stand for so little? How do they sleep at night? “What will it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”
Tastes differ, I’m told – lighten up.
Yes, tastes differ. But aren’t there values more fundamental than opinion? I believe in diversity but isn’t tolerance, past a certain point, intolerable? “Anything goes” may apply swankly to fashion, but to morality?
I hate to hate. It hurts, distracts, disturbs my sleep, dredging darkness from my depths, revealing to me a cruelty within I’d prefer to ignore. No Saint Francis I (neither, I suspect, was Saint Francis).
I’m not happy hating Trump and his flunkies, but I’m sure it’s right. If I do not, who am I? What’s love worth if it cannot hate?
I can feel my parents tut-tutting such intemperance – Really, Carll, hush! They might have supported Trump, for all I know, because, well, “everyone else” was. I harangue them in hindsight, which is hardly fair.
Trump taught me morality, by his lack of any. A world without values is a world without value. “If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior,” said Thoreau.