The Winter of Our Discontent

Tomorrow, Air Force One will become Air Force None at the very moment Joe Biden takes his hand off the Bible. The Secret Service in Florida will be waiting for an ex-president.

 

Donald Trump will be physically gone from the White House, but as Shakespeare knew, the evil that men do lives after them. Every Covid death will be a page in Trump's legacy; every mention ever of January 6 will be his marker in the books of history. Donald Trump's legacy will be as sordid as the man himself, a psycho-morass of the very worse of American public life and terror capitalism slopped together into a dark broth of death and vengeance and ignorance. 

 

And yet a dismaying swath of Americans have drunk deeply of this potent potion and it has corrupted the final frayed remnants of their weakened souls to the point that some will literally shit in the halls of government. Trump's living legacy of tens of millions of people who believe deep down and through and through that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president is a startling and fearful tribute to Trump's endless megaphoned pounding of that Big Lie. He mixed the Kool-Aid; they drank it. They were ready for a Messiah of Hate. Their terrible stunted dead-end white lives demanded retribution. Being white was all many of them had, and Trump, that billionaire television celebrity was just what the doctor ordered – Dr. Goebbels. Together, they would take back an America that had never existed for any of them in the first place. He would lead them back to the Big Myth, the white version of history, the only version they could tolerate. 

 

When Donald Trump is wheels down in Florida, he will leave us in the midst of an unequaled winter of discontent. The country is at the point of insurrection, no matter how short-lived – so far -- in physical fact. The pandemic is making our health system a broken battlefield, and the heralded Warp Speed of vaccine salvation has become a tangle of Trumpian lies and cruelty.

 

Yet Shakespeare's winter of discontent was the precursor of golden days. Ours? The one golden truth is that Donald Trump is no longer president. The pestilence has been finally banished by the voice of the people, no matter the denying clamor of treason and the ignorance it preys upon. 

 

We have the makings to survive these terrible Trumpian legacies. We've always had them, but they have become warped and distilled by the never-ending dangling of the impossible world of cable television and zero sum life that has infected the body civil as greed and power lust have infected the body politic. 

 

We've had a good long look into the abyss that was – and is – Trumpism, so-called, and there were enough of us to pull the country back  – for now. This winter of our discontent is ending. There will probably be more. Whatever new times emerge will be in the shadow of what we and the world saw on January 6. 

 

That shadow must be respected and feared lest we provoke it once more. Jefferson's strict rejoinder should be our guide: “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”