Our Golem

America has created its own golem out of the stinking mud of the dark recesses of our national consciousness.

A golem is a mythical creature, usually associated with Jewish folklore, created from inanimate material – mud or clay – which lends itself to limitless symbolism.

Donald Trump is our golem, mark that well. Clay is too rich a substance for this creature; he is a mud man, ugly and grasping, out of control, like the worst and direst of the golems of legend.

That he is a mud man is supremely ironic because that part of his chosen “base” that is most repulsive and reviled, the neo Nazis and white supremacists, see their mission as the eradication of the “mud people” – those minorities and anyone, actually, who does not subscribe to their doctrine of racial superiority and privilege.

Donald Trump is the terrifying incarnation of the golems of yore and the terror he provokes is unparalleled because, unlike the mute  golems of legend, we have been cursed to have a golem with a voice, a voice of division and hate and evil.

The slimy rhetoric that spews endlessly from the voice and fingers of this muddy golem is making our country a pariah among nations, no longer a bastion of freedom and equality, but a divided, confused, and floundering remnant of our most revered principles.

The roster of this ugly, tainted golem’s transgressions against his sacred presidential oath is long and amazing. There seems to be no American verity that he is not bent on obliterating. He is both golem and anti-Christ, it would seem, a star-cursed prophet of chaos and darkness.

And our golem-in-chief was in fact created from the mud of what America is becoming. His rise as a so-called real estate magnate was fostered by the easy escapes from accountability of six bankruptcies, by laws that were made by and for the predators of our system.

His rise to a pinnacle of popular American consciousness was through the mindless and irresponsible vehicle of so-called “reality television,” which, fittingly, is the lowest and stupidest or our media – the muddy bottom, as it were.

A sly, instinctive golem, he made his slimy brand of politics even a bloodier sport than it has been and moved it into the limitless realm of modern entertainment, a feast for the stunted attention span and corrupted moral values of too much of this country.

This aberration lurches from one self-made calamity to the next, blithely, his trademark thumbs-up gesture becoming his version of the Nazi salute.

Yet when mud dries, it cracks, and the cracks of the Mud-Trump golem are becoming more and more evident even to those of the political party that is fastened to him like the tar baby in another calamitous legend.  The term “unhinged” is becoming heard more and more frequently in the halls of government, the groves of academe, and among the dispirited citizens who see that the grandiose promises of Mud-Trump were as hollow as the core of his soul.

In many golem legends, rabbis and other men of goodness stood fast and deconstructed their amok creations, returning them to the muck and rot from which they arose.

So it will be with our golem. It cannot be otherwise for us to survive.