Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen

by David Benjamin

 ‘You remind me of a man.’ ‘What man?’ ‘The man with the power.’ ‘What power?’ ‘The power of hoodoo.’ ‘Hoodoo?’ ‘You do, remind me of a man.’ ‘What man?’…”

— Cary Grant & Shirley Temple, The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer

 

PARIS — Once, in my early worklife, on a Wednesday, the money was all gone. Nothing in my wallet, nothing in the bank, no one to borrow from and nothing in the fridge. My wife and I faced two days without a crumb. Payday was Friday. I was the only one working, because my wife had to stay home with our baby, who would not starve because there was food for him, and breast milk,

We toughed it out, of course. Payday came. For two hungry days, we thought not once about whom we might blame, beyond spendthrift ways, for our crisis.

That experience calls to my mind a “round” kids used to recite: “‘Well, that’s life.’ ‘What’s life?’ ‘Life’s a magazine.’ ‘How much it cost?’ ‘Fifteen cents.’ ‘I only got ten.’ ‘That’s tough.’ ‘What’s tough?’ ‘Life.’ ‘What’s life?’ ‘Life’s a magazine.’…”

From this nonsense, the lesson that kids told ourselves—or, more accurately, our parents and grandparents (veterans of the Depression) told us—was that things are tough all over. Or, more succinctly: Quit your bellyaching.

Today, the leader of one of our two parties bellyaches mightily and proudly, without respite. He has declared himself, to widespread popular acclaim, the most persecuted human in American (or any) history. This beleaguered martyr could, more appropriately, update his tiresome four-word mantra to a more poignant motto: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” 

Indeed, his cultists have come to believe that their troubles are today so onerous and insufferable that their only option is to rise up en masse in armed revolt, attack police, contrive to murder their elected leaders and destroy the very institutions that have given the the right to rise up on masse.

I have a few quibbles with this sentiment. 

I wonder if the leader of these aggrieved masses, renowned for both his wealth and appetite, ever once saw trouble as mundane, but frightening, as that Wednesday when my wife, my baby and I faced two long days when every penny was spent, the fridge was barren, with no friend at hand to offer succor. 

It did not occur to my wife and I, back then in Beloit, to think that nobody knew the trouble we were seeing. We’d heard, read and talked about things like hunger and penury. We’d both survived through hard times in some pretty tough neighborhoods. We knew—and to this we applied a touch of humility—that somebody, a lot of people, thousands, millions before us had known the trouble we’d seen.

The cultists whose troubles apparently require the destruction of the world’s oldest and most stable liberal democracy regard their ordeal as unique, unprecedented, unheard of. Nobody has seen it before. It is less bearable than any trouble experienced previously by anyone anywhere. Remarkably, this onset of epochal trouble has stricken countless American voters at exactly the same moment in history—from coast to coast, but especially in states like West Virginia and Mississippi and in towns like The Villages, in Florida, in Mesa, Arizona, and in the better precincts of Wauwautosa, Wisconsin.

If nobody knows the trouble these tormented folks’ve seen, how is it that so  many seem to be seeing it right now, all together? And how come they’re all white?

Yip Harburg wrote a song in 1932 that contains these lines: “… Once I built a tower up to the sun/ Brick and rivet and lime/ Once I built a tower, now it’s done/ Brother, can you spare a dime?…”

The trouble depicted in Yarburg’s haunting lyric is poverty, hunger and a terrible descent from glory to gutter. But this is quaint, old-fashioned, easy trouble—Grandma and Grandpa trouble. t bears little resemblance to the truly profound and extraordinary trouble afflicting our current troubled cult of flag-waving, anti-democracy patriots, partly because, actually, these folks seem to be hip-deep in dimes. Most seem to have jobs, houses, cars, boats and savings—so much so that they can afford to drive hundreds of miles to attend rallies wherever their hero appears. They collect arsenals of ordnance—automatic weapons and stockpiles of ammo, explosives, body armor, head-to-toe camouflage costumes and logo merchandise bearing the name and image of their hero. None of this shit comes cheap.

So, okay, their trouble is deeper than mere gold. They suffer a veritable malaise of the soul. The media explain that these folks are aggrieved beyond any previously known threshold of human tolerance. We must understand and empathize with their righteous but inchoate, and irrepressible, rage. We must feel—if not share—their pain. They are losing something they once had. They are watching that tower of brick and rivet and lime tumble to the earth, never to rise again.

It ill suffices to suggest, either to these martyrs or their media, that maybe someone else has perhaps had troubles that are somewhat comparable. Once, the Cherokee tribes were marched westward, hundreds left dead beside their Trail of Tears, from their green homeland to a bare wilderness. Once, a million-odd Africans were packed into ships naked in their own filth, dying by the dozens, to be sold like beef and cotton in Charleston, New Orleans, Brazil and Hispaniola, forced into lifelong bondage, forced to breed more slaves, beaten and tortured, degraded and, even after emancipation, disenfranchised and denied their rights, impoverished and uneducated, segregated from society and lynched at will beneath dancing throngs of bigots whose greatest fear was democracy. Once, a million white men were impressed into military duty and shipped overseas to fight and die by dozens, hundreds and thousands against a malignant narcissist and his cult of believers, who turned the mass murder of religious enemies into an industry, while people back home in America changed their work, changed their lifestyles, rationed everything and in magnificent solidarity sacrificed everything, including their husbands, son and brothers, to sustain this mighty effort against the enemies of liberal democracy.

But never mind all that.

All that petty inconvenience of olden times—the Black Death, the Inquisition, Babi Yar, Auschwitz and Wounded Knee, genocide, pestilence, death, famine, war and conquest—was mere bagatelle compared to the distress of the suburbs in 21st-century America, where nobody but its denizens—fearful that the blacks and the immigrants and the Government are mounting an invasion that will trample their lawns, hijack their minivans, spray-paint their shi-tzus, seize their Kalashnikovs and indoctrinate their children with transgender toilets and pedophile Satanism—knows the trouble that Donald Trump has seen.

Nobody knows his sorrow.

… Well, maybe Melania.