Never Again ?

Pumpkin pancakes and the nature of evil?

Sounds like an unappetizing combination, no? But there we were, at  Uncle Bill’s Pancake House in Wildwood, having a delicious pumpkin pancakes breakfast, and my friend was telling me about her recent trip with her mom and her mom’s twin sister to visit relatives they had never met before in Poland and to learn what they could about that side of the family’s homeland in ten days.

They visited Auschwitz, and the deep and shocking impression that citadel of evil had made on her was still clear and grim and resonating. The scale of horror and depravity was beyond anything she had imagined and her voice trembled some as she related that ghastly tour to me.

“Donald Trump would do that,” I said when she paused at one point.

After his United Nations speech when he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, I meant that I have no doubts that this President of the United States, given or taking the power, would not hesitate to imprison whomever he saw as detrimental to his America First vision. As far as the extinction of these political prisoners, even the possibility is chilling, and I hesitate on the one hand to even consider such a horror, but on the other hand, is it a far stretch for an obviously deranged man who almost casually tells the world that the mass nuclear slaughter of more than 25 million North Koreans is a very real possibility in his dark worldview? Is life that cheap to Donald Trump – or only “foreign” life? Let us hope we never find out either way. 

Out of one side of his mouth, he condemns North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un – “Rocket Man” in Trump’s crazed belittling – for being responsible for the “deaths of millions” of his citizens while almost in the same breath he talks of the total annihilation of North Korea by the America he sees as world sovereign with himself as sovereign over all.

This is frightening, evil talk from a man who displays many of the same supremely authoritarian characteristics as that supreme architect of evil, Adolph Hitler.

And in Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Trump has a henchman and accomplice worthy of comparison to Hitler’s worst enablers and functionaries like Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Sessions is as morally unmoored as Trump, and they are both far beyond any previous betrayers of the American way and dream, Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy and Benedict Arnold included.

Let us talk of evil, you and I, because it is the time for such disturbing  talk, reluctant as we are to admit it. A smirking and unhinged madman has led us to the reflecting pool of our worst nature and we stare now into that widening abyss of true evil that has always simmered and brewed beneath the thin crust of American civilization. Our dark heritages of slavery and ethnic eradication and all the strange and malignant forces that begot them and other aberrations have now been churned to the surface of our national consciousness and given license to be practiced and admired by a man with no moral center or conception of virtue. Donald Trump’s worldview is paranoid and dark, and his America a land of carnage and danger. The only light he sees in this blasted heath is Donald Trump himself.

He is our Messiah of Evil.