Joe Bennett: We get what we deserve
Spring Creek – single lane in, single lane out!
Perfect set up for two lanes considering the 10,000 mixed vehicles per day (not built yet!).
Sisyphus, as every schoolboy no longer knows, was condemned by the gods to push a rock up a hill in hell. When he reached the top the rock rolled back down and he had to start again. This went on for ever. Shifting firewood feels similar.
Six cubic metres of firewood arrived by truck at the top of my drive. From there it needed to go another thirty yards to the woodshed. To help it on its way I had only a wheelbarrow and some former muscles.
The work soon numbed my mind. Sadly it didn’t numb the body. As I loaded the barrow, and as I wheeled it across what began as lawn but became the Somme, and as I unloaded it at the other end, my thighs protested, my arms protested and my lower back, well, it threatened a coup d’etat.
The return trudge though the mud with an empty barrow was my thinking time. Mostly I thought about how much my back was hurting. Back pain is the price our species pays for going bipedal. My dog can’t hold a knife or wheel a barrow, but his spine’s just fine.
And I also thought about Sisyphus. Sisyphus’s punishment is famous. Less famous are the crimes that he was punished for. Sisyphus was a bully and a tyrant. Vain, vengeful and selfish, he acted as if he were above the law. So the gods felt the need to teach him a lesson, to punish him in a way that they would still be talking about five thousand years later. Hence the rock.
How wonderful, one might think, if the gods were still around. There’d be no need for the FBI and special prosecutors. ‘‘Trump,’’ the gods would say, ‘‘for obvious crimes we condemn you to a life of misery and isolation.’’
Well, the good news is that’s just what’s happened. The ancients knew a thing or two. Their gods weren’t supernatural beings to be worshipped. They were metaphors for the way things were. And the way things were is the way things are. Nothing’s changed. And the way things are has condemned Trump to misery as clearly as if the gods had spoken.
Trump yearns to be loved, to be admired. Praise is the fuel he runs on. But his stupidity and vanity have trapped him in a job that is utterly beyond him. And everyone can see it. He is despised throughout the world. And worse, mocked. He cannot open a newspaper, turn on the television, without finding himself ridiculed. The world isn’t laughing behind his back. It’s laughing in front of his back. A recent survey revealed that the three words Americans associated most with Trump were idiot, incompetent and liar. For a narcissist such knowledge is torture.
And there is no one who can make this better. Toadies suck up to him. Everyone else shuns him or mocks him. So he wakes every morning in a froth of impotent solitary rage and he vents it on Twitter in words of ever more desperate self-justification. By doing so he only makes things worse, becomes more transparently absurd.
An added cruelty is that he’s nigglingly aware of his own shortcomings but can admit them only by trying to pin them on to others. Nut-job, grandstander, very dishonest people, such phrases are the projected accusations of a man who feels the wordless weight of guilt.
His wife is no comfort. Chosen for her decorative qualities, she stays away as much as she can. And on the one occasion when she was required to give a speech in his praise she could think of nothing to say so stole a speech from another woman, stole it word for word.
And with an irony too delicious for even the gods to have thought of, that woman was Michelle Obama, the smart black wife of the smart black dude who humiliated Trump at a televised correspondents’ dinner, who made a whole room laugh at him. That ignominy still burns in Trump’s heart. His wife could not have aimed the dagger more precisely or twisted it deeper.
Isolated, out of his depth, exposed and mocked, consumed with hatred, awash with self-pity, and facing a slow but inexorable crushing in the jaws of justice, Trump is in hell more surely than Sisyphus ever was.
And actually Sisyphus, as Albert Camus pointed out, could be considered a happy man. He had something to do, and it was no more futile than most things. Every rock rolls back down the hill eventually. The pleasure is in getting it up there, in standing back after five hours work, ignoring the ache in the spine, admiring the shed full of wood and saying, ‘‘I bloody did that."