A Good Laugh
I had a good laugh the other day. Short, unexpected, and one I had to stifle, but a pretty good one nonetheless. And it’s all thanks to Donald Trump, usually the least funny thing around.
It happened at the end of a long day in Washington DC, a town I hadn’t been to in many years. We were visiting friends rendered jobless by the mad destruction of USAID.
A Four-Hour Tour
We had started the day with more than four hours in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture — not enough time to experience all of that overwhelming institution.
We’d gone on to a rapid tour of many of the major monuments and memorials — Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, Vietnam, MLK.
Then we had just enough time before dinner for a quick spin through the National Portrait Gallery to see the portraits of the presidents.
And there — after gazing at the likes of John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, James Garfield, and all the rest — we arrived at the galleries with the most recent Commanders-in-Chief.
I was all set to feel sick to my stomach. I did not want to see the image of our current chief executive in the company of actual statesmen like JFK, Barack Obama, and Dwight Eisenhower.
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I had seen pictures in the news of Trump’s portrait. Apparently he himself had chosen for the gallery that pseudo-threatening, forward-leaning pose, that bloated, angry visage. I remember being nonplussed at how such a picture could have been approved — by anybody, even the Grifter-in-Chief himself. It was a ridiculous choice.
But I was not prepared for my actual reaction upon seeing it in context, amid his predecessors (and intercessor — no — interruptor? — a nobly posed photo of Joe Biden).
And what was that reaction? An involuntary guffaw.
The photo indeed captures something of Trump‘s true personality. A kid bully, a puffed-up child getting all in the face of his peers to assert dominance, all the while showing himself to any disinterested observer as a sociopathic empty shell of a human being.
And to think that that is what is leading this country, causing thousands if not millions of deaths overseas (cf. USAID); the maiming and killing of unknown numbers of our own servicemen and women in a foolish war of choice; hardships all across the land; the frittering away of all our soft power and the exhausting of our military; the corruption of the justice system and the neutering of Congress (John Quincy Adams would’ve been appalled).
But what did I do, instinctively, spasmodically? I laughed. I just couldn’t help it. The whole absurd nightmare was, in a twisted way, risible.
Tension and Release
The release of tension made me feel a bit better. Touring the monuments had filled me with stormy, conflicted feelings, feelings I’d been sucking down into my soul as the day progressed. The profundity of the nation’s founding principles, the courage and sacrifice of the Civil Rights movement, the tragic scale of death and suffering in Vietnam — all tainted by the putrefaction now overtaking all of that complex history good and bad.
It was the snarling face of the monster itself that broke the tension for me. How had the people of this nation sent, not once but twice, a vengeful giant baby to the Oval Office? But there he was, glowering at me in the gallery.
And what struck me in that moment was not the tragedy and horror, but the absurdity.
At a certain point, when it all gets to be too much, you just have to laugh.
