Essays in Idleness

I do hope Mister Trump lives, and that he recovers fully. I do not mean this as a nice sentiment, for he is not in my circle of family and friends, so as a personal matter, I couldn’t care less. That’s not what our relationship is about. I try not to form emotional attachments to pixels on my computer screen. I view historical characters through a different lens. I rate them below characters in literature and art, as portals of experience and consciousness. And I put friends and family, even, below God. If this makes me, in the modern tabloid view, mean and insensitive, very well. Let me reach for my Browning.

Trump is, for the moment, historically useful. The moment must, inevitably, pass, but I don’t think he has completed his job yet. Those who say that the man is a vulgar oaf, might as well be complaining about Constantine. He could be “insensitive,” too; and probably worse than Trump who, according to my information, doesn’t drink or swear. (From a bitch who went to CNN, we learn that Melania swears, however.) Well, I was never on the town with Constantine, or for that matter, with another Roman emperor; I have no idea whether any of Geoffrey Monmouth’s stories are true. (He says Constantine was the successor to King Arthur. Other historians beg to differ.)

But the Constantine who founded Constantinople, arrived at a low point in Christian history, and left us at a high point. He broke the logjam of persecution, that had been turning our elites inwards, into hypocrites and heresiarchs. There were many later setbacks, but after Constantine, the lethal “political correctness” of the pagan Roman state was done for. Julian the Apostate could not bring it back. I do hope this Constantine died, after his own Batflu, truly in the bosom of the Church, but as a Christian I must hope this for everybody.

To my mind (and it is the only mind in the High Doganate, at least until tea), the significance of Constantine is not, as received from standard references, that he conquered, or changed the regime of the formerly anti-Christian empire of Rome. It was that by his conquests, he broke the logjam; cut the noose around all Christian enterprise west of Persia. (Or, Sassania, if you insist.) Now, Trump by comparison has a rather more modest task, but he has confronted our own “cancel culture.”

Is Trump a White Supremacist? Am I? Are you, gentle reader? It is worth pausing, to consider briefly what any accuser might mean by this. The conclusion must then be, that he has an ulterior motive, for the question itself is (if I may use current jargon) batshit insane. That is what we’re up against, now — people who will say anything — and we need Trump to do lasting damage to what we laughingly call the “deep state.” He cannot eliminate evil, of course; that’s “above his pay grade.” But at the moment we need him to do as much damage as possible, to an enemy that grows daily more explicitly Satanic.