David Weiss is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist who grew up in Oak Park. He has written for Newsweek, the LA Herald Examiner and Men's Journal and co-founded the band Was (Not Was).
By David Weiss
My undergraduate days in Ann Arbor lie long behind me, a grey haze of great books and big ideas, now jumbled into a fuzzy, fragmented world view that is three parts Shakespeare, one part Homer, plus the odd shard of Nietzsche, Kafka and Keats. What remains is more a feeling than myriad plot details or quotable lines, though there’s always Google for that if I want to appear more mnemonic or scholarly than I truly am. Stand by.
If this is the guy who's supposed to save us, we're screwed. (File photo)
The vaunted age of heroes is but a VW Bug in the rear-view mirror of history, though it often springs to mind these days as I ponder the centripetal and entropic forces that have led us from Pericles to Robespierre to our founding fathers to the surreal and grotesque morass that passes for good governance in these beleaguered United States of America.
Though it may stun his rabid followers to say so, no, I do not find Donald Trump to be a hero of any kind, but more of a cruel historical accident, and proof that politics, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum and will fill the void with antimatter rather than empty space -- although the President often closely approximates the latter. All MAGA hat and no well-done porterhouse, as they like to say in Texas.
For the record, I am the grandson of a Russian-Jewish émigré who fled the pogroms and plunder of Odessa for New York City in 1905, already a confirmed atheist and bomb-toting anarchist with no respect for the murderous potentates he stood against, and who would go to his grave excoriating same when prompted. Thanks, Joe, for your gift of skepticism and irreverence, and a lifelong intolerance for bullies in Brooks Brothers suits.
Then again, my knee-jerk-cum-genetic embrace of godlessness and cynicism have been replaced by a sneaking suspicion that the story we are witnessing before our weary eyes is the work of a dispassionate and blackhearted deity intent on teaching us all a hard-won lesson in hubris and humility. None but an omnipotent god (lower-case g) could have written a story so heartless, so bleak, so lacking in redemption or hope or inspiration.
An adversary immune to tweets
I say this with a heavy heart, as an enemy without, no bigger than a couple of microns across, lays siege to order and calm, wreaking panic and havoc and death in its microscopic wake. COVID-19 is mightier than the pen and the sword combined, a silent and insidious mass murderer daring to be dissected, decoded and (hopefully) deprived of its colorfully toxic crown.
Excuse me for finding bitter irony in the pitiless advance of these invisible marauding hordes, rather than seeing it as the first act of a proper tragedy. In a proper epic, Odysseus or Achilles or Hercules would step to the fore, and likely sacrifice themselves for the greater good, taking one for the team as we like to say. Enter Donald Trump?
This is where the forces of unreason threaten to overcome what’s good and true in an epic battle between humanity and a nearly invisible enemy. The anti-vaxxer, anti-science, Earth-last plunderer of what future we have left has been thrust, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century he has seemed intent on destroying in the name of present profit, political expediency and oligarchic plunder.
Of course, I am not blaming humble Donald Trump for the sudden emergence of a genocidal virus (though his friend/role model Vladimir Putin is certainly capable), at least by commission. But by omission, his de-funding of science and medicine and ubiquitous health care services has transformed our precious human habitat into a toxic, hurricane-whipped, fiery inferno, a far cry from the baby-blue oasis as seen by satellites and astronauts and, okay, gods.
David Weiss (aka David Was)
We all held our breath when this lethally charming charlatan -- a darling of late-night television hosts and lurid tabloids (thanks, David Letterman, Mark Burnett, Rupert Murdoch, et al) -- ascended to the highest office in the land. Surely, he will grow into the role, become presidential, we hoped and even prayed. He couldn't be as selfish and thoughtless and incompetent as his business and personal life would portend, or could he?
He could, and did. Stocking his cabinet with petty thieves and career criminals (Ross, Pruitt, Kushner, etc.), Donald Trump put full faith and credit in the grubby hands of trickle-down desperadoes intent on taking back the reins from a government that had forgotten how to kowtow to moneyed interests, be they bankers or brokers or real estate vultures like the president himself. Worked well for a while, at least for those of power and privilege.
Science to the rescue? Maybe.
Yep, all was going quite swimmingly until that pesky amoebic parasite entered the ring with its glowing red crown. Here was an enemy that name-calling Donald Trump could not readily insult, only deny its efficacy against the mighty powers arrayed under his tsunami of fool’s-gold hair. Could the sultry coronavirus play Delilah to Trump’s Samson? Would a mere mortal – albeit a stable genius – be able to stand up against an alien invasion?
Which is why I began -- and will hopefully tie up with a neat red ribbon -- with the notion that we are all witness to life-as-literature, an epic without a hero, but with hubris and ignorance laid low by blind fate and faithlessness, and by disobedience to vengeful deities (those who serve as nature’s stewards and defenders, not as our own private Blackwater goon squad). Who you gonna call?
In a word, science. Now is the time for this transactional Philistine, this carnival hustler and bankruptcy baron, to come to account for the innumerable people he has raped, pillaged and plundered in the almighty name of Trump. That the great and greedy Oz should be defeated by a lion, a scarecrow and a girl in red ruby sneakers is a warning to those whose “overweening pride” is a surefire recipe for infamy and shame.
As we were duly warned by those annoyingly prophetic Chiffon margarine commercials some fifty years ago: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” Here’s hoping that Gaia has a little mercy left in her heart for the hairy apes intent on reducing her beloved planet to pestilence, cinder and ashes. Hell, I’ll even bow down to her and pray to save us from ourselves, all of us, even the least heroic in our humble ranks. Will you join me, Mr. President?
