TRUMP AS DADDY COOL

Trump thus discovered a new role for himself on the world stage: a global daddy safeguarding peace with a mixture of awards and brutal pressure.

Welcome to the desert of the real!

If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence.

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G.K. Chesterton’s classic Father Brown story “The Sign of the Broken Sword” takes place during a fictional 19th-century military conflict between Britain and Brazil. General St. Clare commanded 800 British infantry in a campaign against the Brazilian general Olivier, a charismatic and generous enemy. St. Clare led two or three British regiments in a reckless assault on Brazilian positions, during which his troops suffered heavy casualties and had to surrender. Olivier paroled his prisoners, but soon after, St. Clare was found hanging from a tree, his broken sword around his neck.

Years later, Father Brown reveals that St. Clare, in the course of his military career in India and Africa, engaged in torture, fornication, and corruption, and ultimately sold England’s military secrets to the Brazilians. Major Murray, one of St. Clare’s officers, uncovered the treason and demanded St. Clare resign. St. Clare murdered him, the point of the general’s sword breaking off in the major’s body. Coldly calculating, St. Clare ordered a doomed assault, making “a hill of corpses to cover this one.” The surviving British troops are led by Captain Keith, who deduced the truth and lynched St. Clare as soon as the Brazilians departed.¹

Is it not the case that Israel is doing the exact opposite of St. Clare: focusing on one (or some—Hamas) to cover the hill of corpses (Palestinians)? No, the Israeli government is doing what St. Clare was doing, although with an important shift. It is making a hill of corpses among the Palestinians to cover one corpse—which one? Here comes the surprise: the corpse of Jewish identity. With the majority of Jews in Israel caught in the genocidal grip, they are, in some basic sense, committing collective suicide, abandoning the spiritual greatness that once characterized their identity. And is Trump not doing the same? His corpse is the corpse of American freedom and democracy… When I write this, I can already hear “Leftist” voices shouting back at me: but were Western “freedom and democracy” not a hypocritical fake from the beginning? Is what is happening now not just their truth coming out? I think this is a simplification which, if we act upon it, can cost us dearly.

Our basic moral edifice is not just hypocritical (as it always already was); with the Gaza war, it has lost even the hypocritical force of appearance—in it and with it, appearance effectively becomes just an appearance, no longer an appearance which contains its own truth. Along these lines, Arundhati Roy remarked more than a year ago that, if the Gaza bombing goes on, then “the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.”² Crucial here is the idea that, in spite of its hypocrisy (or, why not, because of it and through it), the liberal moral edifice nonetheless “provided some sort of shelter.”