Folks had better be well prepared to grab away the football, and I don’t mean from Y.A. Tiddle or Charlie Brown’s Lucy.
Nobody can be sure what is going on inside the president’s brain right now. It is a truly bizarre situation for us all. There are those who speculate that Trump’s erratic behavior is trending toward more and more violent and deadly consequences. They are ones who argue that as the process unfolds in the coming years, with his deteriorating mental state, he is more likely to view a crescendo of a nuclear first strike as something he will come to value more and move toward.
That would more likely be the case if he is frustrated in his efforts to fix the midterms or if a drumbeat to remove him grows too much louder.
Based on my observations, I do believe a form of dementia is setting in, but mostly his bizarre behavior results from many years of nihilistism and a profound disregard for human life. The man simply does not have a drop of empathy in his soul, and follows the lead of those like Elon Musk who claim that empathy is humanity’s greatest weakness.
Trump is a product of the worst decade in U.S. history, the 1970s, when the intelligence community’s counter to the human rights gains of the 1960s worldwide took the form of the open promotion of hedonistic excess and vile behaviors involving drugs and exploitation.
I survived that decade, but only barely. Its worst consequence was the AIDS epidemic that took over 700,000 (it is generally estimated) lives in the U.S. alone, mostly of younger single gay males. I consider it a matter of sheer luck that I did not wind up the way hundreds of my friends and associates did. Many members of the original cast of the long-running play The Boys in the Band died from AIDS, a particularly cruel and painful disease whose worst feature was often the stigma associated with it. Even among the Village People, the epidemic left its mark: the group’s creator, Jacques Morali, died of AIDS-related causes in 1991, while Glenn Hughes, the iconic “Leatherman” character, later died of lung cancer. The losses from that era were staggering and touched virtually every corner of the gay community.A particularly cruel and painful death whose worst feature was the stigma associated with it.
Parents rejected their children and friends abandoned each other when AIDS became an issue. It was horrid and cruel beyond belief. Trump is incredibly lucky that he, too, ducked that one, though he will, of course, never admit it.
Because he had money, he was able to avoid the worst by limiting his sexual activity to paying high priced hookers.
The infamous right wing gay thug and fixer Roy Cohn was his special personal pal in that decade, typical of the man who replaced him in that role, Jeffrey Epstein from the 1990s on.
Though he doesn’t appear in it, the best representation of Cohn was authored by the playwright Tony Kushner as he depicted him in his award-winning two-part play, Angels in America, in the early 1990s that became an equally-feted TV miniseries put on by HBO in 2003. Al Pacino’s portrayal of Cohn is among the best in existence. Anyone who hasn’t seen that six-part series that also included Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, Mary Louise Parker and Patrick Wilson should dial it up. It remains incredibly powerful and germane to what is afflicting the nation right now.
It is even more poignant to those of us who walked the streets of Manhattan, Philly, San Francisco and elsewhere in that troubled era, and who brushed up against the contagion a lot more closely than any of us might want to admit.
Then, the entire subculture was saying, “Go for it.” The popular fascist counterculture figure Michel Foucault lectured at U.C. Berkeley in that decade, encouraging hundreds if not thousands of students to cross the Bay Bridge and go into the gay bathhouses and partake in the riskiest forms of sexual excess, as he did himself almost every night.
Sadly, many who died fought to keep the bathhouses open even when it became obvious the disease was being spread there.
