A letter to a friend, about Trump and so on

My friend,

You’re welcome to your right-wing views – really, I believe you are. It’s a part of you, has been a part of you for all the years I’ve known you, and I’ve never judged you ill for of it. Because there’s a lot to be said for right-wing views.

But you will never convince me that you admire Donald Trump, and, each time you try, I think a little less of you. Because I know you don’t believe it. You’re cheerleading Trump because he happens to be the right-wing man of the moment. But Donald Trump – not the POTUS, but the man – represents everything you’ve railed against all your adult life. He’s sickeningly rich, arrogant, artless, and stupid. Neither you or I know a single person who admires a man like that.

You’ve seen, no doubt, the President’s effort at Black History Month – or, at least, read the transcript. It’s impossible to read this and come away with a sense of admiration for the American President. Unless you despise blacks. Read Trump’s words next-door to Barack Obama’s. I challenge you to do so and then tell me Trump is not a dill, or try to tell me Trump’s not so bad because Obama was worse.

The crazy thing is that he would hate you and me. He would think us degenerates. For over a decade you and I have rolled in the gutter of Trump’s world – drinking, taking drugs for fun, laughing at the absurdity of the established order of things. He’s towered over us, he and his type, as we’ve wrecked our way through a life they’ve told us is theirs when we know it is ours to play with. We never would’ve welcomed him down. Because he’s boring, up himself and has nothing to offer us. That’s what we would’ve said. And we would’ve taken great delight in telling him to put his chequebook away when he tried to buy our love. His currency, so easily spread, has never been our currency.

Five years ago, as you know, I moved myself to the desert – to an outback town so far from anywhere that a nuclear world war wouldn’t even register on our weather. A broken marriage sent me here, and the bottle held me here. For four years I couldn’t work – couldn’t write my name on a slip at the bank. Some people get over such things quickly. I am not one of them.

I haven’t had a television for all that time; didn’t read a newspaper, wasn’t even connected to the internet. Life was just the pub by night, animals in the morning and books in between. (It's ironic that me, not troubling – or troubled by – anyone else, could be told by you that I "have a duty" to vote for your horrible scheme, for if there were more like me, and less like you, the world would be as pretty as the one I see there.)

But coinciding with my arrival was the closure of the only book shop in town, whose massive second-hand inventory was sold for a song. I now have thousands of books in my house – history, classics, and fiction too – shelved to the ceiling and piled like city skyscrapers, through which I stalk like Godzilla on my way from the bedroom to the crapper. For four years I have read from morning to night, only stopping when the booze made the words go fuzzy, but I worry that I’ll never get to read them all – there just isn’t enough time.

So, how do you know as much as you say you do? Do you inject books, as a junkie does? This is my problem, now I’ve come back online, to see how the world is talking. Everyone’s so smart – millennials to baby boomers have all of the answers – but I know that’s not possible, because they couldn’t have held down jobs and relationships at the same time as educating themselves as well as they purport to have done. It’s not possible, even mathematically. Unless their education is the news, the cheap upside-down pyramid, the intravenous drip of Twitter. What sad, helpless, heroic little turds.

Tell me about how Nietzsche is right and Marx is wrong and I’ll listen. Tell me why you think immigrant cultures are poison and I’ll do my best to understand. But don’t come talking to me about the wisdom of Donald Trump or I’ll suspect you’re having us both on. It’s indefensible.

The American President is an idiot. That might, somehow, turn out to be for the good. But history will never change the fact that the American President was an idiot.

Admit that or get lost. I love you, either way.

Jack xx