Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows.
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair…
Growing up in Flatbush during the Great Depression I was accustomed to bullies in the neighborhood. The biggest bullies on our block were the Kelly brothers, and one day coming home from school I carelessly let them get close, and they — out of habit I suppose — knocked the books from my hand. As we looked at the mess scattered on the sidewalk, they weren’t interested in my textbooks. Like our president, they didn’t read real books, but spotted my smuggled copy of a Sheena, Queen of the Jungle comic magazine. They quickly got me to sit down on a nearby stoop and read it to them. In that way I acquired semi-safety with a semi-job reading comic books to two semi-literate cretins.
Dressed in leopard-skin bikinis, saving white men and polite natives from being beaten, eaten, or otherwise discomforted, Sheena and her monkey pal Chim arrived after Tarzan and Cheetah, but preceded Wonder Woman and Jumpa (her kangaroo). I sat on the steps and read away as my school friends tiptoed past on the other side of the street wondering how the bullies, not known for their speed, had captured me.
Now, having an acknowledged bully as president, I often look back on those days. Should I have been braver, or smarter, rather than a collaborator? My dad was giving me boxing lessons so I could defend myself, seemingly unaware that the brothers could have just bonked me on the head and strolled off. The Kellys disappeared after a year or so into the juvenile court system, whatever it was in those days.
So how should I, or we, react to Donald Trump, if at all? In an editorial, the Fake News New York Times said, after listing the humiliating bonkings Trump has given our previous, smaller, European allies (on climate change, security, immigration, trade), “the question is whether Europeans are prepared to, or even able to, stand up to the bully across the sea.”
That will be hard. Only China’s big enough. Typically, Trump’s promised to help keep China’s lawbreaking digital mega-conglomerate ZTE going, while American companies fall by the wayside or merge into monoliths, spitting out workers like peanut shells. Looking back to the Kelly brothers, I think I took the role with them now played by Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker John Ryan with Trump, going along, giving him a hint of respectability, a cover of literacy and normal manners. I wish I had run, or taken that bonk on my head. (Of course, bullies can grow up to be normal citizens. Young Governor Romney sometimes spoke about beating up gay kids in school, but now — perhaps due to the Trump Effect — Mitt seems pretty normal.)
America’s future with Trump at the helm is at best uncertain. His separating poor families from their children at the border is classic bullying, combined with racism. The main problem is that you and I may be happy, safe, comfortable, but Trump is steering a huge ship while hordes of our citizens huddle belowdecks in steerage. He may crash, but he’s having a party, and he and his friends will be fine. Jobs are up, the stock market looks good. But his new tax bill will be brutish in the long run (in 2017, 40 million Americans were living in poverty; this bill will stick them there). Each move that Trump makes enriches the wealthy while erasing, out of jealousy and spite, every trace of President Obama’s thoughtful programs, hurting the vulnerable: women, blacks, immigrants, gays, or the poor — especially their children. The Kellys were just kids: Trump’s a full-grown bully.
...until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind,
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold…
—Both quotes from “The Yachts” by William Carlos Williams, in Collected Poems, New Directions (1938)
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 5, 2018.
