How I hate Starbucks,
Costa Coffee and the like. here's a conversation I had this morning, after
determining that my daughter wanted a white coffee:-
A white coffee, please.
What sort of white
coffee would that be?
A regular white coffee
Do you mean a black
coffee with milk on the side?
As opposed to what?
A latta[sic]
I don't know what that is. I'll ask my daughter
. . . . .
[Returning]
She just wants a
regular white coffee.
A latta[sic]?
Yea. Just give me one
of those.
[Returning to daughter
with a small vase of milky looking liquid]
What's that?
It's a latte , I guess.
Or as she called it, a 'latta'. She's not English. Nor Italian, I'd hazard a guess.
Talking of purchasing
expensive drinks . . . If you didn't know you could buy 'luxury
water' at 80 quid a bottle, click here. Presumably, it doesn't come
from a tap in Peckham. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Last evening, I went to post an urgent letter of my daughter's. The 1.3 miles to the post box took me 35 minutes, through the usual traffic jams. And I walked the last 0.3 miles, having parked the car on the pavement/sidewalk in frustration, and fear I wouldn't make the 6.15 deadline. This is about 2mph, or 3.2kph. In retrospect, I should have walked all of it.
If you've ever wondered why English film titles are rendered into something very different in Spanish, this El País article, in English, might help you a bit. As for La La Land, I'm lucky as I've got a friend who's seen it and given me the benefit of his experience. So, I won't be bothering.
Uh, uh. Trouble brewing in Cataluña. More trouble, I mean. It can only end in tears. Or rips in the Constitution.
I think I've reported that as many as 200,000 EU citizens have left Spain in recent years, possibly driven out by new tax laws such as the infamous Modelo 720. A goodly proportion of these seem to have left the lovely Valencian town of Jávea which I visited last year and rather liked. I doubt this has gone down well with the locals.
I voiced here last year my disgust for the Franco memorial in the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid and opined that the mausoleum should be dynamited out of existence. In a rather calmer tone, Spain's socialist party, the PSOE, is demanding that at the very least the dictator's corpse be removed from it. As well as that of a previous right-wing dictator, I guess. Click here for more on this.
Just when you think you know all there is to know about Donald Trump, up pops someone with an astonishing insight into him, his family and his mates. As my friend Dwight has said, it's more than you really want to know. Scroll down to the article, if you wish to be gob-smacked. As I've said a couple of times, History will not understand how the 21st century American people came to put this crooked lunatic into power. Though it's not as bad as in 1930's Germany, of course. And plenty of historians have an explanation for that.
Meanwhile . . . A cartoon from The Times on today's news:-
A
Short History of the Trump Family: Sidney
Blumenthal
The
most enduring blight left behind by Donald Trump, long after he has
smashed things up, will be the pile of books devoted to trying to
make sense of him. It will grow after investigative journalists have
spent years diving for hidden records, exploring subterranean
corporations and foreign partners but never reaching the dark ocean
bottom. It will continue after political scientists have trekked
through mountain ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of
his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and
working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV,
collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail
inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere
near the elevators of Trump Tower. It will not be stemmed even after
the memoirs of Trump’s associates, unreliable narrators in the
spirit of their leader, have been removed from the remainder bins in
used bookstores.
A
week after the inauguration, Nineteen
Eighty-Four
and The
Origins of Totalitarianism
were number one and number 36 respectively on the US Amazon
bestseller list, but the true-life Donald J. Trump story has more to
do with what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘foul dust’ than with ideas
or ideology. Reckoning with Trump means descending into the place
that made him. What he represents, above all, is the triumph of an
underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians
and tabloid sleaze that festered in a corner of New York City, a
vindication of his mentor, the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a figure
unknown to the vast majority of enthusiasts who jammed Trump’s
rallies and hailed him as the authentic voice of the people.
The
notion of a Trump literature begins, appropriately, with an imaginary
novel, 1999:
Casinos of the Third Reich,
contrived by Kurt Andersen, an editor at Spy,
a New York magazine of the 1980s and 1990s. Over several months in
late 1989 and early 1990, Andersen kept referring to the non-existent
Casinos
of the Third Reich
and its implausible protagonist, Donald Trump, whose narcissistic
exhibitionism offered a never-ending source of unintentional
self-satire. ‘Who’s my toughest competitor – if not in content,
only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m
thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza
Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really curious as to
how I would do.’ ‘Yes,’ Andersen wrote, ‘in the blockbuster
1999:
Casinos of the Third Reich,
it’s nobleman-lounge singer Donald Trump!’ Andersen simply quoted
Trump, referred to Casinos
of the Third Reich
and sat back. Trump did all the work. The fabulous novel had no plot
and the protagonist’s character didn’t develop – just like in
real life. Spy
assumed its readers were in on the joke about the ‘short-fingered
vulgarian’. (Marco Rubio flung Spy’s
slight against Trump in a debate, without noting its provenance in
the defunct magazine, if indeed he knew it. Trump heatedly replied:
‘If they’re small something else must be small. I guarantee you
there’s no problem.’ The Trump spectacle often ends with insult
imitating satire.)
Fred
Trump, Donald’s father, was a king of Queens; the Donald became a
joker in Manhattan. In search of fame and greater fortune in the big
city, he set out from the family mansion with its 23 rooms, nine
bathrooms and, at the front, four white columns adorned with a
confected family crest. A Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce were parked in
the driveway, guarded by two cast-iron jockeys. Even in Queens, it
was a world apart. ‘“Be a killer,”’ Fred Trump, ‘who ruled
all of us with a steel will’, told him. Then he said: ‘“You are
a king.”’
Trump
wasn’t looked down on in Manhattan because he was a parvenu, a
dressed-to-kill bridge-and-tunnel bounder from an outer borough. New
Yorkers hardly have a bias against aspiring newcomers. The musical
Hamilton
exalts a classic New York story of a brilliant young immigrant rising
in a mercantile culture. (‘I hear it’s highly overrated,’
President-elect Trump tweeted last November after the cast addressed
Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as he was leaving the theatre,
calling on the new administration ‘to work on behalf of all of
us’.) Walt Whitman sang in ‘Mannahatta’ of a city ‘liquid,
sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient’. Trump wished to be more
than accepted in Manhattan: he wanted to be adored, there and only
there, and came to despise it in all its diversity and cacophony when
time and again he was rejected. ‘I want to wake up in a city that
doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.’
The lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s standard ring out like a mocking
chorus from the Yankee Stadium when the hometown wins. Poor Trump,
who thought the song should be his anthem, could never shake his
‘little town blues’.
His humiliation at his failure ‘to make it
there’ is at the heart of his vengeful compulsion to wreak
humiliation on those he fears will belittle him. The uncontrollable
anger that unleashes a regular flood of insults derives from his
profound feeling that he has been, is being and will be diminished.
In a constant state of alert and hurt, he victimises others because
he burns with the feeling that he is the true victim. Every time his
outlandish behaviour turns him into the butt of a joke, especially at
the hands of sources associated with New York, from Spy’s
jibes to Alec Baldwin’s impersonation on Saturday
Night Live,
his rage is stoked. Portraying himself as the innocent party he
lashes out, a narcissistic reflex but also a tactic he learned from
Roy Cohn.
Resentment
born of entitlement, of the feeling that he was being treated as an
inferior though he knew he was superior, was an inadvertent and
inverse link with the lower-middle-class whites who fled Queens and
Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s for the Long Island suburbs to escape
black migration. They went one way and Trump another, but both were
repelled by Manhattan’s racial liberalism, which was seen as an
insult to and impingement on their own status from those above and
below them.
Trump’s
loathing and bullying are among the few things he came by honestly:
they were part of his inheritance. Fred Trump was arrested for
participating in a violent Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927; he had Mob
ties and flagrantly discriminated against blacks when renting out
housing. Woody Guthrie, his most famous tenant, wrote about his
landlord in the first literary work on a Trump, ‘Old Man Trump’:
I
suppose
Old
Man Trump knows
Just
how much
Racial
hate
he
stirred up
In
the bloodpot of human hearts
When
he drawed
That
colour line
Here
at his
Eighteen
hundred family project
In
1988, Spy
conducted a national poll, the first ever on the presidential
potential of Donald Trump. Offered a list of non-candidates, voters
were asked: ‘Who are you most disappointed isn’t running for
president?’ Trump got 4 per cent of the vote. Tellingly, Spy
discovered the celebrity’s irreducible base: ‘In terms of level
of education, the voters who most favoured a Trump candidacy – with
a 9 per cent rating – were those whose minds remain uncluttered by
any learning beyond junior high school.’
Trump
was already among New York’s stock cast of colourful characters,
one of Spy’s
‘top ten jerks’, joining notorious loudmouths of the era such as
the New York Yankees’ bullying owner George Steinbrenner (another
Roy Cohn client). From the Bronx to the Battery, opinion on Trump set
as hard as the cement on his construction sites and as fast as he had
ordered underpaid Polish immigrant construction workers in 1980 to
jackhammer the Art Deco friezes on the Fifth Avenue Bonwit Teller
building to make way for his tribute to himself, Trump Tower, a slab
of banality which resembles an elongated flat-screen TV. He had
promised to preserve the reliefs for the Metropolitan Museum, but
after blasting them to smithereens to widespread condemnation the
Trump Organisation issued a press release declaring that the
sculptures were ‘without artistic merit’. Through a PR agent,
Trump claimed the demolition was a matter of aesthetic judgment and,
he added, cost him $500,000, no doubt a round number pulled out of a
hat. In the New
York Times
the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the
Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald
Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones
was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ‘Donald’
were Trump. ‘What do you think? Do you think blowing up the
sculptures has hurt me?’ he asked Vanity
Fair
a decade later.
Who
cares? Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would
have just put them in their basement. I’ll never have the goodwill
of the Establishment, the tastemakers of New York. Do you think, if I
failed, these guys in New York would be unhappy? They would be
thrilled! Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I
am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.
Then
Trump fired the illegal immigrant labourers, ‘the Polish brigade’,
after they’d completed their work, meaning that they were deprived
of wages and benefits. The US Labor Department filed suit against
him, a federal judge found him guilty of fraud, noting that his
testimony was not credible, and eventually he paid a fine in a sealed
agreement.
Donald
Trump’s universally disparaged image in Manhattan attained
skyscraper heights at the turn of the 1990s, after his flamboyantly
bungled real-estate projects, tabloid hijinks, manic club-hopping,
flagrant Mob associations, cruel wife-dumping, outrageous defence of
his housing discrimination, not to mention his purchase of screaming
full-page newspaper ads demanding the death penalty for black youths
accused of rape, the Central Park Five, who later turned out to have
been innocent. ‘The banks call me all the time,’ he boasted. ‘Can
we loan you money, can we this, can we that.’ But Trump had wildly
run up $3 billion in debt. Now his grandiose Trump Shuttle airline
crashed and burned. He lost his crown jewel, the Plaza Hotel. (‘They
say the Plaza is worth $400 million? Trump says it’s worth $800
million,’ said Trump. ‘Who the hell knows what it is worth?’)
His casino empire across the Hudson River in Atlantic City, his Taj
Mahal, went belly up. (‘The most spectacular hotel-casino anywhere
in the world’.) He declared bankruptcy four times in order to stiff
his contractors and workers. Every financial house in the city
spurned his plea to extend his loans. Rather than acceding to his
childish demands after meetings at which he brandished newspaper
clippings about his antics instead of financial papers, the banks put
the profligate Trump on an allowance like an irresponsible
adolescent. He had to sell virtually everything, including his yacht,
the Trump
Princess,
which he had purchased from the shadowy Saudi arms trader Adnan
Khashoggi. Trump threatened to sue a journalist at the Wall
Street Journal
for accurately reporting his collapse, one of his many attempts to
intimidate the press, and another technique he learned from Roy Cohn.
‘Wa-a-a-a-h!
– Little Donald, Unhappy At Last – Trump’s Final Days,’
crowed the cover story in the August 1990 issue of Spy.
The illustration depicted him as a wailing toddler. The story inside
the magazine, ‘A Casino Too Far’, featured a fictional scrapbook
of newspaper clippings carrying ‘the brash tyro’ forward to his
miserable future in 1996, bloated, balding and broke, ‘doing a
little consulting for the Sultan of Brunei’.
Trump
never fitted the mythology of rugged individualism he mimicked and
tried to sell as intrinsic to his brand. Launched as a front and
junior partner for the tainted Fred Trump in Manhattan real estate,
he had been on gaudy display in New York since he first crossed the
Queensboro Bridge with $14 million from his father. ‘My father gave
me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that’s
worth many, many billions of dollars,’ he lied during one of the
presidential debates. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he
insists that he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But, as well
as staking him to launch his real-estate career, when the Taj was
sinking like Donald’s own private Titanic,
Fred Trump rushed to the casino to buy $3.35 million in chips to buoy
his flailing child, who used the money to avoid default by making an
interest payment he wouldn’t otherwise have had the liquid reserves
to meet. A straight loan would have put Fred Trump in the lengthy
queue of creditors. With his loan in the form of chips he could
redeem it as soon as his son had the capital. The New Jersey Casino
Control Commission ruled a year later that Fred Trump had engaged in
an illegal loan and that Donald should return it, which would have
forced him into instant bankruptcy. The Trumps blithely ignored the
finding and instead paid a meagre $65,000 fine, though the manoeuvre
failed to save the casino.
But
Trump evaded the fate Spy
had foreseen for him. His genius was to promote his clownishness, so
that the headlines fed to the New
York Post
consisting of make-believe quotes from his then mistress Marla Maples
(‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had’) became a PR platform for the
licensing of his celebrated name to murky investors from Russia,
China and Saudi Arabia who were looking for an American frontman. His
salvation was a double play of a con.
The
glitzier the gigantic bronze block capitals of his name staring down
Fifth Avenue and across Central Park, the more secure New Yorkers
felt in their contempt. Trump Hotel was strictly for out-of-towners
seeking to be sprinkled with ersatz gold dust. Trump could never
escape being a ‘Queens-born casino operator’, as Spy
stamped him. But he wasn’t scorned only for his unrelieved
vulgarity. The reaction to him wasn’t the antique snobbery Edith
Wharton dissected in her society novels, but the worldly perspicacity
of New Yorkers high and low. Trump’s quest for respectability only
deepened his problems. It wasn’t that he had missed his moment like
the passive Newland Archer in The
Age of Innocence,
but that his love was unrequited because New York found him repellent
despite his incessantly harassing courtship.
Trump’s
reality TV shows, The
Apprentice
and The
Celebrity Apprentice,
were fantasy projections of his dominance in the city in whose eyes
he was obviously not the master of the universe. From 2004 to 2015,
he played on TV the persona that he intended Manhattan to worship. Of
course, ‘reality’ in Trump’s reality TV wasn’t real. In every
episode he acted out dramas of control over submissive contestants
seeking his favour, wilting at his denial of it and fawning at his
approval. Under Trump, winning was the road to serfdom. The subtext
was pathos, not only on the part of the supplicants but also in the
boss’s trademark phrase, ‘You’re fired.’ No matter how many
people Trump rejected, he couldn’t force his own acceptance.
If
there is one subject that has unified discordant New Yorkers over the
past five decades, it has been Trump. In 2016, he lost 87 per cent of
the vote in Manhattan, and most of those who voted for him probably
did so with distaste, casting their loyal Republican votes for a man
who for most of his life donated money to Democratic candidates in a
Democratic city. (Trump also lost in Queens, carrying only 22 per
cent of the vote; in Brooklyn, he won less than 20 per cent; and in
the Bronx, about 10 per cent.)
After
the election, Trump’s manic sensitivity to his rebuff by New
Yorkers exploded in his id’s unfiltered outlet, his trigger-happy
Twitter account. When Vanity
Fair
headlined a review of his restaurant ‘The Trump Grill Could Be The
Worst Restaurant In America’ he fired off an early morning tweet
directed at its editor, Graydon Carter, who not coincidentally had
been co-editor of Spy.
‘Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of Vanity
Fair
Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent,
will be out!’ Immediately, Vanity
Fair
had its biggest one-day increase in subscriptions. Once again, Trump
had foolishly exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always
been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place
where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’
Wa-a-a-a-h!
Winning
the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that
spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a
means to compel New Yorkers finally to genuflect. Washington had
never held the slightest allure for him – until now when it is
leverage over New York. Even so, Washington is strictly Palookaville,
a nowhere town for grown-up student council presidents. There is only
one City on a Hill for Trump, the city that doesn’t sleep, where a
perpetually wide-awake collective eye fixes its unwavering judgment
on him. ‘It’s up to you, New York, New York.’ President Trump
in his eyrie is King Kong defying the gaping city below. But in
contrast to the original movie, there is no tragic anti-hero: he
lacks the giant ape’s sympathy for a beautiful young woman, and it
won’t be beauty that kills the beast.
After
his nomination for president, Trump talked about his fondest wish:
winning New York State. ‘We are going to win this state,’ he
proclaimed, adding that he had won the Republican primary there
‘because nobody knows me better than New Yorkers’. Unfortunately
for him, New Yorkers did know him. But earlier in the campaign he had
expressed another wish. Nothing he said during the campaign more
succinctly reflected his furious and damaged narcissism than his
dream of committing cold-blooded murder and getting away with it. ‘I
could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, OK, and
I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?’ The ‘somebody’ he wanted to
kill could be any New Yorker. But why did he ask twice if it was
‘OK’? His statement expressed three unconscious desires at once:
striking back at New Yorkers; breaking the rules without consequence;
and gaining adulation from the fans for whom he can do no wrong.
Shooting ‘somebody’ on Fifth Avenue, however, presumably would
not win him voters on Fifth Avenue, which is where he lives.
‘We
don’t win anymore,’ Trump lamented. His reverent followers took
his omnipotent image from his reality show as the reality and his
anger as something felt on their behalf. They didn’t understand his
inner injury. Rousing the crowds at his rallies to a fever pitch –
‘knock the crap out of them’ – he encouraged an atmosphere of
violence and fear. Watching Trump incite his pitchfork revolt, New
Yorkers were merely astounded that others couldn’t recognise his
all too familiar stuntmanship. He knew he had to cross the Hudson to
find true believers, but the further into Duck
Dynasty
territory he ventured the more it felt like banishment to Queens. In
winning he had not won. He couldn’t get over it. Nothing had
changed for him since the interview he gave to Vanity
Fair
in 1990 in which he said: ‘There are two publics as far as I’m
concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society
horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real
public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I
go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam.’ Trump’s
most deeply felt grievance 26 years later wasn’t that he lost the
popular vote by 2.8 million – he dismissed these votes as
fraudulent. Less than a month after his election, the president-elect
sent out a post-midnight tweet: ‘Just tried watching Saturday
Night Live
– unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin
impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad.’ Getting madder, he
accelerated his never-ending attempts to get even. His far-right
appointments weren’t so much signs of his ideological commitment as
symbols of his retribution.
Trump
has thumped around Manhattan for an epoch like a dinosaur that
survived extinction, anachronistic proof of Veblen’s late
19th-century Theory
of the Leisure Class,
an anthropological examination of the robber barons, published in
1899. Veblen described the tycoons flaunting their conspicuous
consumption, their atavistic appropriation of feudal symbols
suggesting pre-industrial rank, and their treatment of women as
‘trophies’ – an ‘archaic trait’ that ‘begins in the lower
barbarian stages of culture’. The key to understanding these
displays was that they established social status as based on the
moguls’ distance from actual productive work.
If
Trump was a ‘captain of industry’, a phrase Veblen popularised,
then the industry was leisure: hotels, casinos, reality TV shows, a
beauty pageant and a wrestling federation. More than a century after
Veblen, the ultimate representative of the leisure class indulged in
an aesthetic of ‘conspicuous waste’ in order to offer himself as
an object of envy and magical thinking. ‘There has always been a
display of wealth and always will be, until the depression comes,
which it always does,’ Trump explained to Playboy.
‘And let me tell you, a display is a good thing. It shows people
that you can be successful. It can show you a way of life.’
‘Dynasty,’
he added, ‘did it on TV.’ It was conclusive proof.
Trump
wanted his pretences to be accepted at face value as signs of his
authenticity, his ostentation as accountability in lieu of tax
returns. His recklessness was intended to engender deference, his
disorder belief in his power to impose order. The faux aristocrat
sought to inspire a faux populism: ‘I love the poorly educated.’
For Veblen, his vulgarity would have been self-defeating in the
struggle for reputation, ‘the lower barbarian stages’,
undermining any potential image of ‘honorific virtue’. In
Veblen’s terms, he never learned to emulate the taste for
understated pre-industrial trappings that would enable him to
assimilate to the upper class.
His
style has been unfailingly kitsch. His penthouse apartment at Trump
Tower is museum-like in its curating of exquisitely tacky taste in a
faux luxe style: marble floors, walls and columns; Louis XIV chairs
with cushions stitched with the Trump coat of arms; gilded lamps,
vases and crown mouldings; ceiling murals with scenes from Greek
mythology (‘If this were on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,’
he boasted, ‘it would be very much in place in terms of quality’);
a large copy of a statue of Eros and Psyche; a fake Renoir;
coffee-table books, carefully placed – the ‘Vogue’
Living Book,
the ‘Vanity
Fair’ Oscar Night Book
and a Muhammad Ali tribute book. ‘The Trump style is
“developing-country despot”, rather than European or “evolved
American”,’ Peter York wrote in the Times.
‘It doesn’t even try to get things “right” – “real”
antiques, architecturally correct detailing or any of that –
because, as with DC despots, neither the client nor the people he
wants to impress care about that.’
Trump’s
interest in interior decorating exceeds his interest in paintings.
His major acquisitions have been a six-foot-tall portrait of himself
done in five minutes by a little-known ‘speed painter’ and
another portrait that now hangs over the bar at the Champions Bar and
Grill at the Trump National Doral Miami Golf Resort. Both were bought
with funds from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Another portrait of
himself in a golden glow as a young man in a tennis sweater hangs at
his Mar-a-Lago mansion. He entitled it The
Visionary.
He
once turned down the chance of owning Andy Warhol’s pictures of
Trump Tower. Warhol met the already famous Trump on 22 February 1981
at a birthday party for Roy Cohn. They met again on 24 April at
Warhol’s Factory, where they discussed Trump Tower and agreed,
Warhol noted in The
Andy Warhol Diaries,
that ‘I should do a portrait of the building that would hang over
the entrance to the residential part.’ Warhol produced ‘a
beautiful series of multi-layered paintings in black, silver and
gold; some with a sprinkling of Warhol’s glittering diamond dust’,
according to the Warhol Museum blog. Warhol’s rendering of Trump
Tower was an idealised imagining. The two men met on 5 August at the
Factory, where Trump delivered his judgment to the artist. ‘Mr
Trump was very upset that it wasn’t colour co-ordinated,’ Warhol
wrote. Trump sent his interior decorator ‘to come down with
swatches of material so I can do the paintings to match the pinks and
oranges. I think Trump’s sort of cheap, though, I get that
feeling.’ In the end, Warhol couldn’t satisfy Trump and he never
bought the paintings. Warhol’s 15 minutes with Trump were over. He
ended up like the other stiffed contractors. They ran into each other
once more on 26 February 1983 at another Roy Cohn birthday party.
‘And Ivana Trump was there and she came over and when she saw me
she was embarrassed and she said: “Oh, whatever happened to those
pictures?”’
‘It
is a fact that my buildings are acclaimed and they have lasting
power,’ Trump wrote in 2014 in an op-ed for the Chicago
Tribune
to tout his new Trump hotel in the city. At the press conference
announcing that he would build Trump Tower, he said loudly to the
architect, Der Scutt: ‘Give them the old Trump bullshit. Tell them
it is going to be a million square feet, 68 storeys.’ Scutt
replied: ‘I don’t lie, Donald.’ Trump’s aesthetic
contribution to the design of his buildings has been to tell the
architects to make them big and shiny. During the campaign he
suggested he was an architectural genius. ‘Trump described himself
as an Ayn Rand fan,’ an interviewer for USA
Today
reported. ‘He said of her novel The
Fountainhead:
“It relates to business [and] beauty [and] life and inner emotions.
That book relates to … everything.” He identified with Howard
Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist, who designs skyscrapers
and rages against the establishment.’ Roark is an Ubermensch, a
towering genius set above the mass of mediocrity. He blows up a
building he has designed rather than submit to any modifications, is
triumphantly acquitted after defending himself eloquently in court
and wins the girl: it’s an adolescent boy’s dream plot, Nietzsche
for teenagers. Trump’s description of the novel reveals no evidence
that he has actually read it, but his identification with Roark is
consistent with Rand’s exaltation of egoism.
Trump’s
self-promotional grandiosity has prompted endless comparisons to P.T.
Barnum, the showman and circus operator of the 19th century who was
the son of a storekeeper. (A Google search turns up more than 520,000
references to ‘Trump Barnum’.) One of Trump’s advocates, also
consumed by his own grandiosity, Newt Gingrich, raised the Barnum
cliché in Trump’s defence: it ‘resonates well with the working
class’, he said, ‘but not the elite’. The hackneyed comparison
is demeaning to Barnum. Unlike Trump, who not only didn’t write the
books that carry his name but doesn’t seem to have read them,
Barnum wrote a great deal. He was witty; Mark Twain was an admirer.
He was also a philanthropist, the founder of the Bridgeport Hospital,
and an educator, helping to found and fund Tufts University. Both as
a member of the Connecticut state legislature and as mayor of
Bridgeport, he was responsible for a host of civic reforms and
improvements.
Nobody
in New York buys Trump’s humbug that he’s a reincarnation of the
original rags-to-riches hero out of Horatio Alger’s Ragged
Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks,
a Gilded Age tale of pluck and the Protestant Ethic that lifts an
urchin to respectability through a business career and churchgoing.
In a 1990 interview Trump boasted to Playboy
that ‘the working man likes me because he knows I worked hard and
didn’t inherit what I’ve built. Hey, I made it myself; I have a
right to do what I want with it.’ Trump, the heir with the urchin’s
manners, has undergone no moral transformation. The rapacious spirit
of his formative Manhattan period – the world of The
Bonfire of the Vanities,
with its scandal-driven media, unscrupulous race hustlers and
politically ambitious district attorneys – is still with him. But
he also still lives in the shadow of the fictional character who
became the symbol of the Roaring Twenties.
‘What
preyed on Gatsby,’ the narrator asks himself in Fitzgerald’s
novel, ‘what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams?’ The
fabulously wealthy Gatsby takes a mansion on Long Island, holds
extravagant parties drawing the swells from Manhattan, and appears to
be the effortless maestro of the scene. He has willed himself into
being. Gatsby is actually Jay Gatz, a poor boy from the plains, in
romantic pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the upper-class object of his
desire, who once rejected him. He believes he can win her back
through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom
Buchanan, an upper-class boor. Trump’s claim to have risen
Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby’s magical self-invention.
Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentleman he wished to
be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privilege for whom, as for
Tom and Daisy, there are no consequences for ‘smashing things up’.
Trump is Tom Buchanan farcically playing Gatsby. Gatsby might have
appreciated the audacity, but would have avoided the shabbiness. Both
Gatsby and Trump, however, are characters enthralled by the
possibility of recapturing the past and reshaping it as they imagine
it should have been.
What
Gatsby and Trump also have in common are gangsters. Gatsby’s
fortune is secretly derived from his bootlegging partnership with
Meyer Wolfsheim, a character based on the mobster Arnold Rothstein,
who fixed the 1919 World Series. Trump’s business has been
dependent almost from the start on real-life racketeers. There was
Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family,
and Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime
family, who owned the company that provided the ready-mix cement for
Trump Tower, used in place of the usual steel girders. There was John
Cody, the boss of Teamsters Local 282, who controlled the cement
trucks and was an associate of the Gambino family. There was Daniel
Sullivan, Trump’s labour ‘consultant’, who in partnership with
the Philadelphia crime boss Nicodemos ‘Nicky’ Scarfo’s
financier, sold Trump a property in Atlantic City that became his
casino. There was Salvatore ‘Salvie’ Testa, ‘crown prince’ of
the Philadelphia Mob, who sold Trump the site on which two
construction firms owned by Scarfo built the Trump Plaza and Casino.
There was Felix Sater, convicted money launderer for the Russian
Mafia, Trump’s partner in building the Trump SoHo hotel through the
Bayrock Group LLC, which by 2007 had more than $2 billion in Trump
licensed projects and by 2014 was no more. There was Tevfik Arif,
another Trump partner, Bayrock’s chairman, originally from
Kazakhstan. Bayrock’s equity financing came from three Kazakh
billionaires known as ‘the Trio’, who were reported to be engaged
in racketeering, money laundering and other crimes. And so on.
*
There
was no art to these deals. Trump’s relationships with the Mob
weren’t just about the quality of cement. In his defence it was
said that doing business with the Mob was inescapable in New York,
but the truth is that there were prominent developers who crusaded
against the sorts of arrangement that Trump routinely made. From
beginning to end, whether Cosa Nostra or the Russian Mafia, Trump has
been married to the Mob.
On
New Year’s Eve, President-elect Trump held a party at his
Mar-a-Lago estate at Palm Beach for almost a thousand revellers from
whom he cleared a neat profit. For members of his Mar-a-Lago Golf
Resort, for which he levies a $100,000 entry fee, the price was $525
a ticket (guests at the hotel paid extra). For that they got to
mingle with celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, who turned down
Trump’s offer to become chairman of the National Endowment for the
Arts, and Joe ‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough, the former Republican
congressman turned TV talk show host. Marjorie Merriweather Post,
heiress to the Post cereal fortune, collector of Russian art, Fabergé
eggs and husbands, built the lavish 126-room estate in 1927. She left
her art to the Hillwood Museum, which had been her Washington DC
residence, the diamond earrings that had belonged to Marie Antoinette
and other pieces of jewellery to the Smithsonian Institution, and
Mar-a-Lago to the US government to serve as a winter White House.
Trump snapped it up in 1985 when the government put the unused but
costly property on the market.
As
celebrants rang in the year in which Trump would become president,
the man himself appeared on the stage of Mar-a-Lago’s gilded
ballroom to tick off his future achievements: ‘We going to get rid
of Obamacare!’ Standing next to him was a tuxedoed man pumping his
fists at Trump’s every line to lead the cheering throng. Joseph
‘Joey No Socks’ Cinque is a former associate of the Gambino
family boss John Gotti who was convicted in 1989 for possession of
stolen artworks including a couple of $20,000 Chagall prints and a
Miró. (The New York district attorney’s office withdrew a plea
bargain after an informant reported a conversation in which Gotti was
heard promising Cinque he would ‘take care of the DA’.) After
getting involved in New York bars and clubs and the used-car
business, Cinque got a new racket. Called the American Academy of
Hospitality Sciences, it reportedly bestows Star Diamond awards on
hotels and restaurants that pay its entry fee and annual charge. Half
the trustees are Trump employees, including the general manager of
his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, the vice-president of his
Mar-a-Lago resort, and his butler. Trump’s sons Donald Jr and Eric
have been listed as ‘honorary trustees’, and Trump himself was
‘ambassador extraordinaire’. The Star Diamond website lists 19
Trump properties that receive its imprimatur. ‘How am I involved in
it?’ Trump replied in 2015 to a reporter from Yahoo News. ‘I
don’t know. I don’t know that my sons are involved with that,
actually.’ Asked about Cinque, Trump said: ‘I don’t know him
well. I don’t know him well, but I have found him over the years to
be a very nice man.’ In 2014, Cinque’s website posted an article
stating: ‘Joseph Cinque, president of the AAHS, has been attending
Mr Trump’s party for the past 16 years. It is somewhat of a New
Year’s Eve tradition for him and of course, he has become dear
friends with the Trump family.’
More
than the frolics at Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg, New Year’s Eve
at Mar-a-Lago evokes the goings-on at another Long Island estate –
that of the Corleone family. The founding father of what became the
Trump Organisation, Frederick Trump, a German immigrant who changed
his name from Drumpf, left a substantial legacy of New York real
estate and investments that had originated in brothels and bars in
the Yukon and the Pacific Northwest. When he died, his son Fred, then
15 years old, assumed his mantle under the stewardship of his mother.
His housing business flourished from the 1930s until the early 1950s
thanks to his close partnerships with the Brooklyn Democratic Party
machine and a steady flow of loans from the Federal Housing
Authority. In 1954, he was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate
Banking Committee, where he was questioned about profit windfalls and
inflated costs. From then on he would receive no FHA loans – which
is the reason the Trump Village on Coney Island, among other
projects, was greased by his Brooklyn political connections. Also
cited in the FHA investigation was Fred Trump’s partner, contractor
and financier William ‘Willie’ Tomasello, who according to the
federal Organised Crime Task Force was associated with elements of
both the Gambino and Genovese families.
Fred
Trump appeared to be grooming Fred Jr to take over his business. But
he was a harsh and exigent father and lost patience with his eldest
son. Donald, though eight years younger, adopted his father’s
attitude to Fred Jr. ‘Donald put Freddy down quite a bit,’ a
family friend told the New
York Times.
‘Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday
parties,’ Robert Trump, the youngest brother, who went to work for
the Trump Organisation, reported to Vanity
Fair.
‘If I built the bricks up, Donald would come along and glue them
all together, and that would be the end of my bricks.’ Fred Jr
rebelled, first by joining a Jewish fraternity at Lehigh University,
and then by giving up on the Trump business and becoming an airline
pilot. He literally flew away. But the free spirit of the Trump
family fell into alcoholism, crawled back to work on one of his
father’s construction crews and died in 1981 at the age of 43. When
Fred Trump died in 1999, his will completely cut out Fred Jr’s
children. They sued for their share, claiming that the will had been
written under ‘undue influence’ from Donald Trump. In
retaliation, Donald withdrew payments for the medical care of Fred
III, who had cerebral palsy. After extended litigation, a settlement
was reached. Donald had learned some lessons from Fred Jr’s demise.
‘Our family environment, the competitiveness, was a negative for
Fred,’ he told Playboy.
It
wasn’t easy for him being cast in a very tough environment, and I
think it played havoc on him … He was the first Trump boy out
there, and I subconsciously watched his moves. I saw people really
taking advantage of Fred and the lesson I learned was always to keep
up my guard 100 per cent, whereas he didn’t. He didn’t feel that
there was really reason for that, which is a fatal mistake in life.
People are too trusting.
While
the Trump money had its origins in prostitution and multiplied
through ties to clubhouse politics and Mob figures, neither Frederick
Trump nor Fred Trump fits the role of Don Vito Corleone. Vito
Corleone avoided flamboyance and publicity. He was straitlaced,
patient and tactful. He gained power and influence not only through
crime and corruption but also by understanding people’s feelings
and helping them when they were in trouble. The Don’s bond was not
the Trump way.
Fred
Jr resembled the middle Corleone brother, Fredo, who is weak and
indecisive, and is eventually murdered by his younger brother,
Michael, after he assumes control of the family business. Donald was
most like the hot-headed Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone, whose
impulsiveness results in his assassination by rival gang members at a
tollbooth. Donald has raced through many tollbooths, but has survived
the hail of gunfire. Though he grabbed hold of the family business,
he is not much like Michael Corleone, a war hero, Dartmouth graduate
and tragic figure who initially resists the poisoned Corleone
chalice. Early on, he tells his Wasp wife he has nothing to do with
the sordid business: ‘That’s my family, Kay – that’s not me.’
But he becomes everything he was determined not to be. His success is
to have transformed the Family into a corporation. ‘This is the
business we have chosen,’ he is told by Hyman Roth, the Mafia
character based on the real-life mob financier Meyer Lansky. Roth
also speaks about the scale of the enterprise, ‘bigger than US
Steel’, and suggests to Michael that someday he might be able to
choose a president.
The
member of the Trump family who most resembles Michael Corleone is
Ivanka. Her father’s favourite, the ambitious and fashionable
Manhattanite presents herself as an advocate of childcare and climate
change policies, selling herself as the one hope for decency among
the Trumps. While merchandising her dresses, shoes and jewellery she
has achieved a degree of social acceptance in the city. She
represents Donald’s last chance at respectability, but her
precarious image depends finally on repudiation of the father she
worships. ‘That’s my family – that’s not me.’
Roy
Cohn, the Mafia lawyer, was more than just the consigliere in Trump’s
story. He was Donald’s mentor, his godfather. If Trump received an
education beyond his two years at Fordham and as a transfer student
at Wharton (‘I’m a smart person. I went to the Wharton School of
Finance’), it was from his guide through the circles of the
Inferno, who conducted masterclasses in malice. Trump was an apt
pupil in aggression. ‘I don’t think I got that from Roy at all,’
Trump told the Washington
Post.
‘I think I’ve had a natural instinct for that.’ He didn’t
really need an education in heartlessness, but he learned the finer
points from Cohn. Offering his highest praise, Trump called him ‘a
total genius … he brutalised for you.’
Like
Trump, Roy Cohn was the pampered son of a politically connected New
York family. His father, Albert Cohn, was a major player in the Bronx
Democratic Party, an assistant district attorney who was appointed to
the division of the New York Supreme Court presiding over the Bronx.
Roy Cohn was a child prodigy; he graduated from Columbia Law School
at the age of twenty, and was appointed as an assistant US attorney
for the Southern District of New York. He promoted himself in his
early cases by giving false leaks to the New
York World Telegram.
He was put in charge of prosecuting communist agents, staging several
prominent show trials, including one of 11 Communist Party officials
for subversion. In 1951, he took effective control of the trial of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of stealing atomic
secrets. He pulled strings to appoint both chief prosecutor and
judge, then urged the judge to impose the death penalty, though the
evidence against Ethel Rosenberg was flimsy. Cohn’s tour de force
brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who hired
him as chief counsel in his Red-hunting investigations. After the Red
Scare came the Lavender Scare, when Cohn launched a campaign against
homosexuals in government jobs, though he was a closeted homosexual
himself.
Cohn
opened a law office in New York, taking on such clients as the Mafia
kingpins Tony Salerno, Paul Castellano, John Gotti and Carmine ‘The
Cigar’ Galante, underboss of the Bonanno crime family – as well
as the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and the New York Yankees. He
was the city’s supreme fixer. The menacing milieu around him was
portrayed in the 1957 noir movie Sweet
Smell of Success,
about an influential and vicious New York tabloid newspaper columnist
called J.J. Hunsecker, modelled on the latter-day Walter Winchell,
who operates from a booth at the 21 Club, where he dines with movers
and shakers. Hunsecker rules the town, making and wrecking
reputations through smears and fear. When he uses a PR agent to
destroy his sister’s jazz musician boyfriend, who denounced him for
his ‘phony patriotism’, the plot turns nasty.
Donald
Trump met Roy Cohn at Le Club, a private New York disco, in 1973,
when Trump was 27 and had a serious problem. The Justice Department
was suing him and his father for racial discrimination in their
building at 100 Central Park South. ‘My view is tell them to go to
hell,’ Cohn advised, ‘and fight the thing in court.’ From that
moment, Cohn and Trump were inseparable. Cohn recalled that Trump
would phone him more than a dozen times a day. With Cohn as their
attorney the Trumps filed a countersuit against the federal
government for using ‘Gestapo-like tactics’. Their suit was
instantly dismissed and two years later the Trumps settled after
being forced to sign a decree forbidding them from engaging in
discriminatory practices.
Roger
Stone, a longtime Cohn protégé who began his political career as a
dirty trickster and ‘ratfucker’ for Richard Nixon’s re-election
campaign in 1972, explained the relationship. ‘First of all,’ he
told an interviewer, ‘Roy would literally call up and dictate
pieces for Page Six [of the New
York Post]
because Rupert [Murdoch] was a client and because Roy always had good
material. So Roy understood the tabloids. Donald, I think, learned
the tabloid media, and the media cycle, from Roy.’ Cohn was the
sorcerer and Trump the apprentice. ‘Roy was a mentor in terms of
the fast track,’ Stone said. ‘I mean, Donald was from Queens,
Manhattan’s the fast track. I think, to a certain extent, Donald
learned how the world worked from Roy, who was not only a brilliant
lawyer, but a brilliant strategist who understood the political
system and how to play it like a violin.’ For Trump, Cohn served
‘like a cultural guide to Manhattan’, Stone told the Washington
Post.
‘Roy was more than his personal lawyer.’
Cohn
took him to the 21 Club, where they held court in Cohn’s reserved
red leather booth. He took him to his townhouse on 68th Street, where
he lived and conducted his law business, and which was filled with a
running crew of attractive young gay men, models, cigar-chomping
politicians, gangsters and journalist hangers-on. ‘Roy lived in a
matrix of crime and unethical conduct,’ according to his biographer
Nicholas von Hoffman. He ‘derived a significant part of his income
from illegal or unethical schemes and conspiracies, the most blatant
of which was not paying income tax’.
Cohn
initiated Trump into the highlife and lowdown at the hottest club in
town, Studio 54. ‘What went on in Studio 54 will never, ever happen
again,’ Trump told a journalist much later.
First
of all, you didn’t have Aids. You didn’t have the problems you do
have now. I saw things happening there that to this day I have never
seen again. I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known
supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room.
There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a
different guy. This was in the middle of the room. Stuff that
couldn’t happen today because of problems of death.
Cohn
greased the skids with favours. ‘I got to know everybody,’ Trump
said. Cohn arranged for the Mob to construct Trump’s towers and
provide protection against labour trouble. ‘You know how many
lawyers in New York represent organised-crime figures? Does that mean
we’re not supposed to use them?’ Trump asked. Cohn threatened to
sue anyone in Trump’s way to secure leases on properties and city
tax abatements. He wrote the prenuptial agreement stipulating that
Trump’s first wife, Ivana, would return all gifts in the event of a
divorce, and coerced her to sign; Cohn had suggested an associate to
serve as her lawyer. (‘I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or
pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?’ Trump told his friends,
according to Vanity
Fair.)
And Cohn finagled a federal judgeship for Trump’s sister, Maryanne
Trump Barry. When anyone resisted Trump’s demands, he waved Cohn’s
picture in their face. ‘Would you rather deal with him?’ he would
say.
The
State of New York disbarred Cohn in 1986 for unethical and
unprofessional behaviour described in the judgment as ‘particularly
reprehensible’. A month later, he died of Aids, an illness he tried
to conceal (he told Trump he had cancer). He was an outrageous racist
and self-loathing Jew, freely spewing epithets about ‘niggers’
and ‘kikes’. He was also a self-hating homosexual, who
obsessively denounced ‘fags’ and crusaded against gay rights.
When he was dying Trump turned away from him, shifting his business
to other lawyers. ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,’
Cohn said. ‘Donald pisses ice water.’ Cohn called Trump to ask
him to find a room in one of his hotels for Cohn’s former lover and
assistant, near death himself from Aids. Trump got him a ‘tacky’
room and sent Cohn the bills. Cohn refused to pay. Trump’s
underlings called to evict the dying man. The only surprising part of
the story is Cohn’s shock.
Cohn
made an afterlife appearance as a major character in Tony Kushner’s
Angels
in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,
staged in 1993 and produced as a TV miniseries in 2003. Dying of Aids
and disbarred, Cohn denies his homosexuality, attempts to hoard an
experimental drug, and finds himself in a hospital bed cared for by a
nurse who is a drag queen. Ethel Rosenberg hovers as a ghost to haunt
him and in his death scene chants the Kaddish as an act of mercy over
his unrepentant soul.
At
the height of the Cold War, Richard Condon’s The
Manchurian Candidate
laid out a Russian conspiracy to elect a malleable president. Raymond
Shaw, a US army sergeant during the Korean War, is captured and
brainwashed along with the other members of his unit in Manchuria.
His comrades are programmed to testify falsely to his bravery, for
which he wins the Congressional Medal of Honor. ‘Raymond Shaw is
the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever
known in my life,’ they all declare. The American war hero is
turned into a Russian sleeper agent, groomed to assassinate the
presidential nominee at the convention. But Major Ben Marco, a former
member of his army unit, breaks through his brainwashing and so
instead of murdering the nominee, Shaw shoots his mother, who had
been controlling him throughout, along with his idiotic stepfather.
Decades later, Condon explained the inspiration for the perverse
dynamic between Raymond Shaw and his mother. ‘Raymond’s mother is
Roy Cohn, and her husband Johnny is McCarthy. I was fascinated by the
very strange relationship between Cohn and the senator. Roy ran
McCarthy, totally dominated him.’
What
Cohn would have made of Donald Trump’s romance with Vladimir Putin
is anybody’s guess. The Red-hunter might have been appalled at his
client becoming an agent of influence for the former agent of the
KGB. But Cohn might have approved. After he departed, Trump fell and
rose, his resurrection partly financed by clandestine loans from
Russian banks linked to a state governed on Mafia principles. During
the 2016 campaign, Putin appears to have provided assistance to Trump
through the Russian intelligence services’ hacking of the
Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, and his
political model may serve as something of an inspiration too. Trump’s
business has always operated organisationally like a prototypical
Mafia, with a tight circle of family, friends and flunkies, bearing
little resemblance to a modern corporation. As Masha Gessen put it in
the New
York Review of Books,
borrowing from the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar, the
‘post-communist mafia state’ is ‘run like a family by a
patriarch who distributes money, power and favours’. Usually, the
‘family’ is ‘built on loyalty, not blood relations, but Trump
is bringing his literal family into the White House. By inviting a
few hand-picked people into the areas that interest him personally,
he may be creating a mafia state within a state.’ He has long been
attracted to authoritarianism. In his 1990 interview with Playboy
he expressed admiration for the Chinese government’s violent
repression of the democracy movement. ‘When the students poured
into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,’ he
said. ‘Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it
down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country
is right now perceived as weak … as being spat on by the rest of
the world.’
Talk
of a ‘mafia state’ echoes another period’s fears of fascism. In
1935, fascist figures emerged not just in Europe but in America.
Father Charles Coughlin held millions of his radio flock in thrall
with jeremiads against bankers, liberals and Jews, and enlisted them
into his Union for Social Justice. The DuPonts and other wealthy
conservatives financed the American Liberty League to campaign
against the New Deal as un-American, spending twice as much as the
Republican Party. William Randolph Hearst likened Roosevelt to Karl
Marx – ‘imported, autocratic, Asiatic’ – and declared:
‘Whenever you hear a prominent American called a “Fascist”, you
can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal citizen
who stands for Americanism.’
It
was in this combustible environment that the most celebrated writer
of the day, Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win the
Nobel Prize, voiced his sense of imminent catastrophe in the American
heartland. Lewis’s previous novels – Main
Street,
Babbitt,
Elmer Gantry
and Arrowsmith
– had satirised the hypocritical manners and morals of small-town
life. He punctured the suffocating prejudices, mean-spiritedness and
crushed idealism in the nativist, isolationist and Prohibitionist
America of the Republican-dominated 1920s. His characters were
studies in the cultural constraints of the age. There was not a
Gatsby among them. Now, his alternative history showed how the people
of Main Street might fare in the face of homegrown fascism. In It
Can’t Happen Here,
it happened here.
FDR
loses re-election in 1936, defeated by Senator Berzelius ‘Buzz’
Windrip, ‘a Professional Common Man’, who pledges a return to
‘founding’ principles. He embodies ‘every prejudice and
aspiration of every American Common Man … the Common Man
twenty-times magnified by his oratory, so that while the other
Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the
same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised
hands to him in worship.’ A tabloid journalist, Lee Sarason,
generates a blizzard of propaganda and ghostwrites Windrip’s
manifesto, Zero
Hour: Over the Top,
excerpts from which appear as chapter epigraphs. ‘In the little
towns, ah, there is the abiding peace that I love, and that can never
be disturbed by even the noisiest Smart Alecks from these haughty
megalopolises like Washington, New York, & etc.’ ‘Sarason had
encouraged Windrip to keep up in the Great World all of the
clownishness which … had endeared him to his simple-hearted
constituents.’ A radio preacher deploys his League of Forgotten Men
behind Windrip. Among Windrip’s ‘camp followers’ are
‘Intellectuals and Reformers and even Rugged Individualists, who
saw in Windrip, for all his clownish swinderlerism, a free vigour
which promised a rejuvenation of the crippled and senile capitalistic
system’. President Windrip announces a new ‘Corporatist’ state,
suspends civil liberties and sends his militia, the Minute Men, to
enforce order. Sarason directs propaganda, telling the masses ‘they
were the honoured foundation stones of a new Civilisation … And
they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more …
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’
Windrip’s policies fail to deliver on his extravagant promises.
Dissidents disappear into concentration camps. A New Underground
organises against the regime. Sarason stages a coup and installs
himself as president. Then his ally, General Dewey Haik, ousts him
and invades Mexico to arouse patriotic unity. The country descends
into civil war. The end.
The
Confidence Man: His Masquerade
was the last full-length book Herman Melville published in his
lifetime. Moby-Dick
had been poorly received and Melville could no longer scrape by on
his writing. A flat-out failure, he was about to take a job as a
clerk in the New York Customs House. His new book, inspired by a
story he read in a newspaper, takes place on April Fool’s Day, when
a mysterious stranger boards a Mississippi steamboat named the
Fidèle.
We are a long way from the Pequod.
The confidence man is anything but loyal. He assumes different guises
as he works his way through the passengers, from the ‘cosmopolitan’
to the kindly old lady. To one he sells non-existent shares in the
Black Rapids Coal Company. He inveigles funds for the imaginary
Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum. He hits up others for something he
calls ‘the World’s Charity’. From yet another he coaxes money
for an investment in ‘a Protean easy chair for invalids’.
Whenever any of his dupes baulks he appeals to their sense of
confidence, understanding that their weakness is their desire for
hope. Written at the nadir of his own hope, Melville masked his
bitterness with satirical humour. The reviews of his plotless and
oblique work were unkind. He withdrew into the Customs House. In The
Raven and the Whale,
the critic Perry Miller wrote: ‘The few contemporaries who examined
the book were in no position to see it as, whatever else it is, a
long farewell to national greatness.’ The only character who
escapes the confidence man’s swindle, the only one to lack
confidence, is the steamboat’s barber, who refuses to wield his
scissors without first being paid, and has hung a large sign in his
shop reading: ‘NO TRUST.’
The
original version of this piece contained two passages that require
correction and clarification. At the time of the Roy Cohn leaks
mentioned, the New
York World Telegram
was owned not by Hearst but by Scripps Howard. A paragraph referring
to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it
accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility
towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads
referred to appear to be clever fakes.
No comments:
Post a Comment