Having almost housebroken Cecil of his talking while eating habit (or eating while talking, pick your poison), today’s been something of a setback. A serious setback.
The news has Cecil well and truly rattled. The news of the world. The news emanating mainly from our neighbour to the south. Cecil’s got a bad case of Trump Fever. A highly contagious bug which spreads with the opening of a newspaper page, turning on the radio news, flipping through your particular choice of news app on a phone. Wherever you find news, you’ll catch Trump Fever. Symptoms vary from person to person. Headaches. Nausea. Chills and high temperature. Profuse sweating. Sudden waves of great sadness and tears.
In Cecil’s case, the disorder manifests itself in an inability to chew and swallow his food before speaking or speaking before chewing and swallowing his food, resulting in an indignant spraying of morsels all around him. On the table. His shirt front. My shirt sleeve. A bit of something even landed in my coffee, I believe.
“Now it’s a 35% tariff on us, Barnaby?!? Right smack dab in the middle of trade negotiations! After we cut that digital tax! After we threw more money on securing the border against a threat that doesn’t even exist! After meeting his military spending target! And it’s, Thank you very much and here’s your 35% tariff! Can you believe that?? It’s outrageous, Barnaby! Outrageous!!”
It most certainly is, I agree, while trying to duck a mucky bit of oat, I think.
Outrageous merely scratches the surface of what it is.
But none of it surprising. Not anymore. What the man does on an almost daily basis. Each and every day. Not in the least bit surprising, any of it, but still managing to surprise us. Each and every day.
Always on our back foot.
Which is the intent, one assumes.
That is, of course, if there’s any intent at work.
“It’s the… What do you call it there, Barnaby? It’s all just so surreal. Is that the word I’m looking for, you think? Surreal?”
“It is certainly an apt word for the situation, Cecil,” I tell him before taking up a forkful of scrambled eggs to eat without saying anything further. An attempt to make a point of showing Cecil how a mealtime conversation, no matter how feisty or lively, should be conducted. But I think the lesson’s lost on him at the moment.
“It’s like a constant state of disbelief,” Cecil says as he works the condition out in his mind. “You cannot believe that he just said what he said, did what he did. Again and again. Over and over. Just running on the spot, trying to catch your breath. Trying to keep up even though it’s the same thing. Over and over again.”
Cecil stops as if in mid-sentence, mouth slightly open, free of food fortunately. His mind is wandering, you can tell. Searching for something. A word? A thought? Or is he just replaying the recurring, distorted cyclical nature of all our lives at the moment? Glitched up on a doom loop, as the kids call it.
He then breaks from his stillness and scoops a spoonful of his breakfast bowl into his mouth.
“Do you think that’s just how his mind works, Barnaby?” before I can bid him to pause to finish his food first, a piece of blueberry, it looks to be, landing in one of our water glasses. Not sure whose. “Just this series of incoherent ramblings from topic to topic, sometimes not even on the topic. Ideas coming and going, unchecked, unfiltered, forgotten almost as soon as they’re stated out loud? What do you call them? Synaptic snappings flying straight off his tongue. No moderation or consideration. Just BLAH!”
Most of the food in Cecil’s mouth is gone by this point, so things don’t get as messy as they might have with that last declarative that’s caught the attention of some of our fellow patrons. Our a.m. conversational excesses are not unfamiliar in these parts, so this one doesn’t kick up much of a stir.
“Do you think we’ve all just got swept up inside the Trump brain, Barnaby?” Cecil wonders in between sips of his coffee. “Living in the world as he sees it?”
“I don’t know about all that, Cecil,” I offer. “But I do think discombobulation is the point. Or maybe not the point, but the result.”
“What’s the difference, you think?”
There it is again. Intention versus mere chance. Haphazard. A lucky break. A convenient turn of unexpected events.
“Well, I think for a man like Donald Trump—”
“Donald J. Trump,” Cecil adds. “Please. It’s the President of the United States of America we’re talking about here, Barnaby.”
“Right. Donald J. Trump.”
“Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Cecil says. I’m unsure why.
“For a man like this,” I proceed without inquiring as to the particular matter at hand Cecil referred to, “whose main life lesson, perhaps the only life lesson he’s in the least bit attached to, is to never admit he’s wrong, admit no wrongdoing. A certain freedom comes from that, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess,” Cecil reluctantly agrees, tentatively, it strikes me as, stirring the remains of his bowl ingredients like he’s trying to discover my meaning in their configurations. “But what’s that—”
“Well if you never have to admit to a mistake, Cecil,” I continue. “If you never have to say the words ‘I was wrong’, you’re free to say anything you want, aren’t you? Do anything you want even! If you’re never wrong then there has to be other reasons why what you said in the first place, what you did, didn’t actually happen or work out like you said they would. Yeah?”
Cecil is thinking my line of reasoning through as he finishes up his meal. Mercifully. Thinking rather than talking.
“And when you get enough people believing that you’re not wrong, that you’re never wrong, that you can never be wrong, a critical mass of people believing in your infallibility, that’s when the discombobulation sets in. For those of us outside that circle of believers.”
“And then it becomes a movement when the cynics and operators appear!” Cecil jumps in, catching the drift of my thinking.
“The purveyors of that firehose of bullshit, yes.”
Cecil seems pleased with the exercise. He sits back in his chair, coffee cupped in two hands, tonguing his teeth in search of whatever food remnants he hasn’t ingested or projected. A slow look of concern crosses over his face.
“Yes, Cecil?” I ask.
“That solves the what of the matter, the how, maybe. Maybe, why. But it still leaves us all, how’d you put it? Discombobulated?”
“And discombobulation is the handmaiden to evil,” I suggest, throwing Cecil for a bit of a loop. “If you can’t believe something’s happening,” I explain, “if it seems not possible or, what did you say earlier? Surreal? That’s when they pull it off. In our disbelief. Our doubting of our senses. Our inaction because, well, this couldn’t possibly be happening. Could it?”
“And then,” Cecil says, with a little dramatic flourish, I’d say, “it’s done.”
“And then, it’s done,” I agree.
Cecil finishes up his coffee and sets the cup down on the table. He pushes his bowl across the table and sweeps the crumbs and less identifiable detritus onto the floor. Breakfast is now over, it seems.
“So, it’s good we’re still discombobulated then,” he declares.
“Why is that?”
“Because it means that’s it’s not done,” he replies as if the point should be obvious to me. “This thing ain’t over it. The grip’s not ironclad.”
There is that, I suppose.
Reality wonky but remaining on its feet, upright.
“I mean, it’s a something, Barnaby,” Cecil says, “don’t you think? Recognizing our condition?”
Diagnosis is the first step, yes. But it’s also the easiest, I would think. What comes next. Well, that’s the hill to climb. The task.
“So, how exactly does one go about dis-discombobulating, Barnaby?” Cecil asks me, very matter-of-factly. As if he just inquired how to make a cup of coffee or for directions to the nearest pharmacy. How do we unreal unreality, make the real real again?
It is a question I never imagined as an old man eating breakfast with an old friend I’d be asked. Not in my lifetime. Not here. Not now.
Such arrogance is what made us vulnerable.
I smile at my old friend Cecil and sit back in my chair with the last of my coffee in hand.
I have no answer for him. At least, not at the moment. An odd state of mind for someone of a generation that believed deep in our bones that we had all the answers.