TRUMP WANTS TO BE DICTATOR OF THE WORLD

THE TURNING POINT IN HISTORY WE'RE AT, WHY IT MATTERS, AND WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

What does Trump want?

We’re now living through times of immense tragedy. Greater, I think, than many understand or know. Our civilization is unravelling before our eyes. And for those of you, like me, who believe that the golden thread of civilization itself is humankind’s greatest accomplishment, binding all others together—perhaps you share my sense of loss and grief, too.

What Trump wants. By now, the answer is before our eyes. It’s an impossible one. A pornographic one. Before we say it out loud, even now, we must guard ourselves from it, because Trump, first and foremost, is a pornographer. A pornographer of the human spirit. A defiler of the human mind. He makes everything around him obscene, from women’s faces, to tacky gold accoutrements, to language itself, to nations themselves. He is a pornographer who creates obscenity: spectacles of desire, inadequacy, and rage, lurid fantasies of wish-fulfillment made flesh.

Trump, this pornographer of the human spirit, wants to be something so grotesque, that we must curse ourselves every time we say its name out loud. Because when we do, we invoke all the demons of history before us. And so too, we must exorcise them.

He wants to be dictator of the world.

Take it in for a moment, before we discuss its weight, import, and gravity. It head-spinning hubris, its bewildering idiocy, and, too, its foreshadowing of horror, Just sit with the most terrible thought of all for a second, which is now before us, and coming true.

Trump wants to be dictator of the world. The evidence around us is crystal clear. It’s in the shattered ruins of the jewels that used to be civilization. Can you see it yet?

When Trump says, I will hand-pick who leads this nation or that one, that’s the stuff of…a dictator of the world.

When he chokes off the energy of an entire world, which is all but sure to lead to lead to devastation, that’s the stuff of…a dictator of such a world.

When he says to this nation, you can have pennies, you can have resources, I exempt you from the very rules I have created, like “letting” India have Russian energy…that’s the stuff of a dictator of the world.

When he cavorts, gleefully, with losing millions of people their life savings, from America to Japan to Europe, that’s the stuff of…a dictator of the world.

Economically. Financially, Politically. Socially, culturally. Even morally—he decides who is “right.”

Trump wants to be dictator of the world.

And in this vision, the wars, attacks, enmity, hostility, rage—these are one by one the pornographic spectacles which build to the climax. You see, I phrased the above in the wrong tense. Trump is already becoming dictator of the world.

His tawdry vision of such a world is already there before us, and exactly what you’d imagined a “really great businessman” to come up with, LOL. The world is be run by a “board”, a “board of peace,” no less. And somehow, Trump has improved on Orwell. He’s an ever better dystopian. For Orwell, war was peace, but in the hands of government. Trump’s vision of the world is that it’s a giant corporation, and wouldn’t you know, guess who the “chairman of the board” is?

So…what does that make everyone else? Please, stay here with me. It is so vital that we discuss this, and that you understand this. If the world is a giant corporation, and Trump is its “chairman of the board,” then what are…you? The “shareholders” are to be those who pay Trump his extortion-mafia-racket fee. I suppose that you are just a worker in this corporation, and perhaps a consumer in it. What you don’t have in such a vision of the world is any existence whatsoever as a political, social, cultural, financial, or economic agent. You have no existence whatsoever in sociopolitical terms, in fact.

You are just a pawn, a nothing. You’re Beirut, fleeing the bombs. You’re an innocent family in Tehran, cowering under the fire. You’re the average American, watching their life savings turn literally to smoke. You’re nothing, nobody, and never will be. Do I go too far? Does the taste of my contempt make the room unbearable for you to be in? Stay here with me, because I am not the one who created this obscenity.

Obscene is the only word to describe all this. Trump is a pornographer, and his business, really, is obscenity. He’s obscenitymaxxing, day after day, if you need a clever portmanteau. Precisely because he is becoming dictator of the world.

But can we live in such a world? What does it mean for a world to have a dictator? Even a man who has failed at becoming one, in the end? Did you hear the 1930s whispering to you just now from the shadows?

Now I want you to think in civilizational terms. We live in a world where, for people like you and me, it appears that the processes of thinking, rationality, imagination, judgment, reflection, have broken down catastrophically. So when I ask you to think with me I know that I am asking for something very dangerous. Winston Smith’s second most revolutionary act was thinking, and his first was loving.

A dictator of the world.

Let us go back in time, to its distant recesses. Can you find an example of such a thing? Empires had emperors, true. But even then, there was no…dictator of the world. Perhaps some tried to be. Alexander. Caesar. The list of imperial conquerors is long, and their names are bestowed on babies to this day.

The world has never had an emperor before.

It has had many terrible institutions. And these are the demons of history. Slavery. War. Empire. Casteism. Hatred, bigotry, ignorance. History has a cave full of demons. And they still cackle there. Only a fool would say that to this day, we are free of these demons. We are not.

But perhaps now, here, we meet the devil himself.

An emperor of the world.

A figure who thinks that he is to make the political, economic, and financial decisions of a world, for it. To decide who is to pay what price, and when. How much more will gas cost you next week? And groceries next month? How much money did you lose in the stock market this week? And he is to decide who lives and who dies. A million people will have fled Beirut this weekend. How many have already fled the rest of the region? Who is to have the right to live, how, where, for how long, in what way?

A dictator of the world. An emperor of emperors. A king of kings, in the way that defiles the living truth of the prophet billions believe in, and his message of love and peace. A power only unto himself, over the world. I am the only sovereign left. This is what Trump said not so long ago. But did we understand his meaning?

Who has tried to be a dictator of the world before? Here, we meet history’s truest monsters. It’s only in modern times that we even had personas who attempted to be such a thing, precisely because only as we crossed into modernity did we have a global civilization at all. Do I need to remind you who we’re talking about? Am I allowed to use the Hitler comparison, or will the New York Times call me an “alarmist”? How many more bombs have to fall?

Only in modernity have we seen figures repellent enough to indulge the dream of being dictators of the world. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito. And perhaps it was true that in ancient history, there were those, too who, almost dreamed of such a thing—but they knew, then, too, that it was beyond their grasp. The limits of “civilization,” to the Romans, stretched only to the barbarians. Their grasp was only so long, then. But now?

Now we find ourselves confronted with the most barbarous idea that has ever been. A dictator of the world.

To my mind, all history’s other demons shrink by comparison. Slavery, war, empire. What are these, next to a dictator, ruler, emperor, of the world, a modern one, who has the grasp to devastate an entire world? There’s Trump, openly demanding that he “hand picks” who leads Venezuela, Iran, Cuba. Who’s next? Canada? Denmark? France? Of course we know it hardly ends here. There’s Trump, choking off a world’s energy, crashing its stock markets, cratering billions of people’s life savings, triggering a shockwave of ruin— gleefully.

As if all this were nothing at all. Here I am, toying with a world. It is my plaything. Look mom, look dad, see how you abused me once? See how powerful I am now. Do you love me now? Do you respect me yet? The world is mine, and I will crush it like an ant, if that is what pleases me.

To say that one wants to be a dictator of the world is the most obscene thought of all. I suppose there are some who will object to my “framing” of pornography as something negative. I am speaking metaphorically. There are many things far more pornographic than mere pornography in this world of ours now. Porn is something one click away. But pornography? The stuff of lurid desire, of flesh for fantasy, of omnipotence and omniscience? That is what I mean, and in that way, to even imagine one’s self to be dictator of the world is the most obscene thing of all.

It is not a thing civilized minds think. Children fantasize about it, but only in childish ways—their world is little. It is not the world. Here we have an infantile mind, with the arms of the world’s most powerful man, using them to become the world’s first global dictator. Those of us who think in a healthy, mature adult way? To do that is precisely to understand and accept human fallibility and frailty. And therefore to grant all others dignity, respect, and existence.

Trump wants to be dictator of the world. And it’s not enough to say that he will surely fail. Because that road, my friends, is oblivion for us all. And not the sweetest kind. But the stuff only of darkness with no redemption. It is the road of true ruin, from depression to atrocity to war to breakdown and collapse.

We are in a civilizational crisis now.

In this, we find ourselves at one of history’s bleakest moments. Because there has never been a dictator of the world before. Will there be now? Wrong question. All history’s demons kneel. They have have met the devil himself. And so, now, have we.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)