Remember that you are dust, Donald Trump, and to dust you shall return
On Wednesday, millions of Americans, but not Donald Trump, will hear someone tell them something disturbing about themselves they need to hear, and say it literally to their face.
On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, penitents walk to the front of the church to have a priest rub a cross on their forehead with ashes and hear him say, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.” (I leave out the butterflies and unicorns version now allowed, “Repent and believe in the gospel.”)
Mr. Trump would be a better man, and therefore our nation would be better off, if he heard the words and believed them.
A dark thought
“You are dust and to dust you will return” is a dark thought and it’s meant to be. It summarizes the basic Christian story of why man is who he is: That God created man, that man willfully broke their friendship, that because he broke their friendship bad things happen to him and to the world (and he himself does many of those bad things), and that eventually everything dies.
It recognizes what everyone should see, that the world we live in does not look like the world a good and loving God would have created. Something went badly wrong.
If you believe in God, that’s a problem. If you don’t believe in God, it’s not a problem but it’s still a fact. The world’s screwed up, and we’re part of the problem, and we should try not to be.
Most of us know this because we know ourselves. I’d like to think I’m a good enough guy, as guys go, but I know with toe-curling shame how bad I can be. I have a fairly good idea how unsatisfactory family and friends can be.
The religions differ a lot in how they understand the state of man and what has been done or can be done about it. But they all say in their own ways that we are not satisfactory, that we’re at least a little off and maybe quite bent and twisted, that we are not who should be. They assume, speaking broadly, that we cannot get better without knowing and admitting how deficient if not offensively bad we are.
I wrote a few weeks ago against the insane idea that Donald Trump is in any meaningful sense a Christian. Which of course does not prevent him from being president or from being a good president. But he cannot be a good man and therefor he cannot be a good president, without believing the truth about himself that the Ash Wednesday ritual declares. It wouldn’t matter if he knew it in Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or other terms, as long as he knew it.
We have no evidence that Mr.
Trump does. He does not seem to have any idea that he is an unsatisfactory human being, at best, that he may even be bent and twisted. That’s especially bad for a person because part of being bent and twisted is that you don’t know it. You think you’re straight as an arrow.
Which means you keep doing bent and twisted things, which only bends and twists you more, and you believe that the people who really are straight as an arrow are the bent and twisted ones. The evidence is that they oppose you. This explains a lot about Trump on the campaign trail and in office.
The Donald Trump who lies like the rest of us breathe, who betrays friends and allies, who cheats or tries to cheat whenever he wants something he didn’t get (like a majority of the electoral college), who speaks of the poor and vulnerable with contempt (remember his dismissive remark about “sh* thole countries”), who didn’t see anything wrong with bragging about groping women not his wife, who ... I don’t need to go on: He does not act like someone who knows he is dust and to dust he will return, and he must try to be a good man.
He needs to be better
If only he did. We need him to say, sincerely, “I need to be better.” If you reject everything he believes, you should want this to mitigate the effects of his beliefs. If you agree with him, you should want this even more than anyone else, because you want him to succeed and he would do much better did he not act the way he does.
Ancient philosophers made a great deal of the character of the king, because what kind of man he was affected his kingdom. A president in office is too much like a king for comfort, and this former president is still a king to a huge number of Americans, and could very well be presidentking again.