The wail of the weakling

by David Benjamin

 

“In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed…”

—William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”

 

MADISON, Wis. — Jeez Louise, whatever became of the strong, silent type?

For all my life, and yours, the first commandment of conservative dogma was stoic self-reliance. In the face of war, hunger and deprivation, sexism, racism, slavery, lynching, police brutality, mass incarceration, ghettoization, you name it, conservatives stood sternly before us—the teeming masses yearning to breathe—and they counseled, “Come on, you people! Man up! Quit your bellyaching and buckle down!” When Blacks and women, gays, Latinos, the poor, the disabled and other minorities, even sick veterans, cried out against injustice and bigotry, right-wing pundits would respond by warning the aggrieved that their “culture of victimhood” was nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy. While you complain about getting screwed by the system, said conservatives, you’re passing the buck, blowing your opportunities and screwing yourself.

“Suck it up,” Republicans would say. This is America, they would roar, where every mother’s son, regardless of race, color, creed or reality, has a chance to lift himself up by his strapless boots and run for president.

“Real men don’t ask for handouts,” was the right-wing mantra. “Real Americans don’t beg.”

Ah, but, as Dinah Washington once sang, “What a difference a day made.”

Since that magic escalator ride in 2015, the right-wing—the herald of White America—has willed itself to wallowing in victimhood and whining that life isn’t fair—to them. Their megaphone is the nation’s ur-victim, a septuagenerian crybaby of deafening volume, tireless repetition and epic self-pity, Donald Trump…

… who spends every day begging, and ends his every whinging communiqué with the word, “Donate.”

I know a few beggars. I talk to them often, ask if they have a place to sleep overnight, slip them a buck or two. I find them panhandling in front of Walgreen’s or standing at a traffic signal with a cardboard sign that reads, “Please,” or “Help Feed My Kids,” or “Homeless Vet.” The irony here, visible to some of us, is that America’s self-made Beggar-in-Chief isn’t a veteran, nor is he absent a pallet to lay down on the floor. Afflicted by phantom bone spurs, he dodged the Vietnam draft five times. And as for “homeless?” The perch from which he wheedles money from legions of less-affluent suckers is a tower in Manhattan, except when he begs for alms from his country club in New Jersey or his winter place in Palm Beach. 

But the thing is… the feature that confounds my lifelong understanding of the American conservative ethos is that Trump never shuts up. He can’t go ten minutes without feeling sorry for himself, in one thousand words or more.

I mean, think Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Picture him in the shadows of Shinbone, Arizona. He nods to his “boy,” Pompey (Woody Strode, hardly a boy!), and suddenly, there’s a Winchester repeater in his callused hand. He aims and snaps off a crack shot that kills Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). John Wayne tosses the rifle back to Pompey. He turns and walks away, silently. He never tells what he has done, except secretly to Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), who is adored throughout the land and lifted to fame and fortune—guiltily—as the man who shot Liberty Valance. Tom loses the girl (Vera Miles) and dies in obscurity. At the very end, “fake news” perpetuates the phony legend of Senator Stoddard.

Even better? Alan Ladd. Heedless of the cries of little Joey (Brandon deWilde), Shane rides off into the Tetons after gunning down Jack Palance and saving the sodbusters. Consider also John McClain (Bruce Willis), unable to express himself to his wife, but saving her life as he mutters to the loquacious Hans Gruber, “Yippe kiyay…” Or Gary Cooper in High Noon, Tom Hanks as Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan, who won’t even tell his men what he did before the war. 

Three words: Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

Picture, if you will, Donald Trump doing a guest shot on “NCIS,” blathering away about his trials, tribulations and his breathtaking penis while Gibbs stands cool and mute, shriveling Trump with “the look.” 

I wonder. Has the national gasbag, who tells everyone to march out and fight for him, ever been in an actual fight? If he did, did he win? And if he won, why hasn’t he spent the rest of his life bragging on it? Has he ever stood up for himself without a bodyguard and a team of lawyers? Without his dad?

There’s a New York term— “down-the-block tough”—more native to Brooklyn and the Bronx than to the gated Trump compound in Jamaica Estates. It refers to blusterers who raise a fist, shout threats and tout their combat skills from a safe distance—down the block. And then, they run. Inadvertently, Trump captured that down-the-block spirit when he famously boasted that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and I wouldn’t lose votes.”

Of course. If you use a gun and keep your distance, you avoid mussing your comb-over, and there’s no chance to disillusion a voter who believes you have actual hair. 

It has become standard practice to refer to Trump’s deathless popularity as a cult of personality. More accurately, it’s a cult of victimhood, in which a great swathe of Americans—middle-class white folks, most of them with jobs, houses, cars, trucks, cable TV, smartphones, health insurance and lots of guns—have morphed into an army of blame-seeking martyrs. Led by a man who admits to being a weakling buffeted by shadowy forces conspiring to “destroy” him, they have joined together to trumpet their persecution by those very forces. 

Okay, I have to mention one more film, The Grapes of Wrath, in which Henry Fonda, as Tom Joad, is the strong, silent protagonist. He symbolizes a hellish time in our nation’s journey, when he, his family and half of America were plunged into a decade of hardship and victimhood. The spirit of that story and that era, however, was not to bitch, bellyache and look for others to blame. It was, simply—against impossible odds—to stick together and persevere, to wage a real fight against unseen, untouchable, inhuman enemies, to weep when weeping was the only option but then to rise up, quietly and keep going.  

The message of that time, expressed patiently by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and articulated by director John Ford in the movie), was resilience, community and hope. In the Great Depression, the conservative ethos of strong silence survived through a confluence of Roosevelt’s liberalism and a war that sent everybody either back to work or into the carnage. 

As the wretched refuse of American conservatism traipses along, puling and sniping, behind Donald Trump toward the abyss of his ego, I listen, straining, for a voice on the Western breeze, calling out, reminding us, crooning counterpoint to the Mar-a-Lago wail of the once and future weakling…

“Shane! Come back! Come back! Come back…”