Trump and his ilk have made corruption an art form
What is the best metaphor for the way we live now? What with Trump treason, global heating, online disinformation, a rising tide of racism, U.S. child concentration camps, a global necklace of authoritarian leaders in Russia, China, Brazil, the U.K. and the Philippines, etc., the threat of Trump declaring war on Iran and a trade war with China, and recession approaching. Political hell? I’m finding good parallels in “The Last Judgement,” the 16th-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch that shows inventive scenes of humans tormented in limbo and hell for their sins. The seven deadly ones — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride — seem like badges of the Trump administration. Almost everyone attached to the White House is earning them daily.
We’re seeing global sin causing global heating, yes. But in the Trump administration, we see sins the size of party balloons as well as of great balls of fire. We see petty crime, plots, cruelties, team crime, army-ofone crime, phone crime and lawyer crime. There are secret meetings in Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago, confrontations with citizens in restaurants, campaign rallies, sniping at press conferences … and then there’s Twitter, Trump’s cubby.
I’m thinking of Donald Trump promoting his own hotels while supplicants rent rooms. As head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, demands firstclass travel, a used hotel mattress and special lotions. Ivanka Trump dines with China’s president and quickly wins local trademarks for her clothing line. Jared Kushner gets a massive, last-minute foreign bailout to cover a disastrous real estate deal. Housing Secretary Ben Carson gets a dining room set.
That’s part of the genius of Bosch. He grasps the immensity of the horror, but renders it in tiny scenes and horrific inventions that boil out of his brain. He is very much a Netherlandish Dr. Pimple Popper, that nice U.S. YouTube doctor who cheerfully excises the matter that bides its time just beneath our skin. Once you see her investigate a lumpy bump, you think you’ve seen it all.
Then up pops Bosch and his human actors. I’ll be the lipoma, you be the cyst. The disgraced, big and small: Corey Lewandowski, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Steve Bannon, Anthony Scaramucci, Louise Linton, Linton’s husband, Steve Mnuchin, and Ryan Zinke. Many of the names have faded now. I forgot to mention Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who broke ethics compliance rules and is still in cabinet.
One Bosch scene of greed shows a fat man swallowing a stream of liquid being poured from a barrel. Check the funnel in the barrel. Into it streams excretions, presumably representing dirty money, from Satan himself, orifice unknown. Or is this waterboarding? An odour of pee tape pervades throughout.
Lust is Bosch’s tower of naked men pierced with branches and lances. It’s pure Abu Ghraib, as well as the Washington great and good who clustered around pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. A hooded devil with claws and a tail brands the damned with horseshoes, a variation on the modern prison tattoo.
Bosch’s humans are treated like animals, “caught like fish, hunted like game and slaughtered like cattle.” Who treats people this way? Didn’t you think we’d forget you, Trump adviser and refugee tormentor Stephen Miller? That’s racist wrath.
Gluttony is a bird with a fish fins and human legs eating what may be a rat-turtle. In Bosch, people are fried or roasted on a spit. Devils will eat anything. Expensive food served in huge portions is the hallmark of Trump cuisine, except for athletes at the White House served junk food, like the gruel discarded by Bosch’s poor.
Sloth in “The Last Judgement” is a man slumped over a barrel in a shabby inn, bored, holding a set of bagpipes. Is that Ross sleeping through Trump’s UN speech? I’m still trying to figure out who could represent Paul Manafort.
The triptych is painted largely in shades of green, blue and red. It has been suggested that green signals inconstancy and unreliability, blue is trickery and illusion and red is unChristian. On the other hand, it might just be American dollars plus the flag.
The scene is packed with weaponry, as is the United States. Eating and excreting are prime themes. It is a landscape of constant activity, mostly piercing, but no one ever dies. It looks like chaos but isn’t really. Everyone in Bosch has a job — to do harm and to suffer harm, eternally.
Our thanks to Mr. Bosch, class. Let’s end our visit on a bright note. Trump seems eternal, popping up again and again after horrors that would have finished another president.
But he is not eternal. We are not in hell. These horrors will end.