It does us good to be belittled
Iwrite on the morning after a storm. The thing you notice is the silence. ‘‘This house has been far out to sea all night,’’ wrote Ted Hughes on a similar occasion, and his image captures the wildness of a storm, the lashing and the bucking, the sheer marine ferocity of it, when the world turns deafening, when it becomes a Turner painting with no distinction between land and sea and sky, when to take the dog for a walk is to dress like Scott of the Antarctic and to tighten the strings of the hood and to screw up your face like a raisin and to open the door and bend forward into the polar blast and to feel your very eyeballs assaulted and your skin raked, and to see the rain shifting in sheets across a darkened world and to step out hunched against it and to feel the wind driving you back, and to plug on drenched and streaming and to look round and find the dog isn’t there. He’s stayed inside.
Inside is lovely, is rich with the simplest luxuries: shelter, light, heat. The log burner is the glowing hearth of every house since time began. To look out of the window is to wonder how anything could endure out there. Yesterday beside the tunnel road, horses stood in paddocks without shelter, mute and battered, tarpaulins strapped over their backs, their regal heads bare and motionless in the hammering rain, their hooves sunk in mud, enduring.
A storm reminds us how fragile is the world we occupy, and how contingent we are.
If this storm had gone on for a week, for a month, how long before we’d have fallen apart?
Few enough regions are habitable as it is. How easy it would be to lose others to perpetual storms, or intolerable heat, or creeping desert sands. For all our technological sophistication, we exist by grace of the climate and we forget it at our peril. A point entirely lost on Trump. Trump, who in his own person manages to embody all that is worst in human nature – vanity, selfishness, cruelty, stupidity, ignorance, greed, dishonesty – loves to boast about American power.
He revels in military hardware, in aircraft carriers, in phallic missiles, in great black submarines. He calls them beautiful, sees them as projections of his own supposed virility.
Yet where was American power when Katrina struck, or Sandy? It lay curled in the bunker, whimpering. American power, all human power, is as nothing against the climate, is a trinket to be tossed aside.
Storms belittle us, and it is good to be belittled.
Shakespeare knew about storms. He sent King Lear out into one.
Lear was an ageing bully, an angry tyrant, a narcissist driven mad by his daughters and awash with self-pity. He had ‘‘ever but slenderly known himself’’. Out on the heath in the raging storm Lear’s wits begin to turn. He starts to see how the world goes. For the first time he gives thought to the lowly of his kingdom.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have taken Too little care of this. And when the storm eventually abates, ‘‘I am a very foolish fond old man,’’ says Lear to his one true daughter. ‘‘If you have poison for me I will drink it.’’
But Trump is no Lear. Trump hasn’t the wit to gain selfknowledge. And though he pretends to cherish the poor white workers of America, and has ridden to power on their backs, he has no interest in them. He runs a cabinet of billionaires for the benefit of billionaires.
Yet he knows, by wordless instinct, that it can’t last. He is already tweeting about pardons. He fears that someone will rat on him, and he’s probably right. He who gives no loyalty won’t get much.
And Trump is haunted by Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel, the spare, lean FBI man who doesn’t smile.
Mueller is everything Trump is not. He is honest. He thinks before he speaks and he means what he says and he generally says nothing. That nothing terrifies Trump.
Trump has sent his whorish minions to dig dirt on Mueller. But you have only to look at Mueller’s jaw, to know there’s no dirt to be dug. He’s Trump’s nightmare. He’s the conscience Trump never had.
How Trump will go down I don’t know. But somehow somewhere he will. And people will wake to the morning after. And will notice the sweet silence. And will start to clean up.