Things to look forward to: roast meat, log fires and Trump trials
The clocks have gone back. The evenings have gone. The leaves are going. The winter is coming. It will get worse before it gets better. What is there to look forward to? I’ll tell you: roast meat, log fires and Trump trials. And the greatest of these is, well, let’s see.
How vegans get through winter I don’t know. The smell of meat roasting makes a house a den. Fat spitting. The steamed kitchen window. Gravy like arterial blood. It’s Lord of the Flies and primal. Roast meat goes way back.
Fire goes back further. Any log burner is every hearth in history - faces turned towards it and away from the cold and the dark. Stare into the flames and you can see back hundreds of winters to the AngloSaxon feasting hall, with the beer and the songs and the hounds that scavenge, and a great storm raging outside. And from that comes Bede’s famous image.
It’s the image of a sparrow that flies in from the storm, flies in from the cold and the dark and the rain and the wind, flies in through a door of the hall, to be dazzled by the light and the heat and the noise, and the sparrow flits about the hall for a few brief moments, then flies back out the door again into the darkness never to return. Even so, wrote Bede some 1300 years ago, is the life of a man.
And now, in addition to the great consolations of fire and meat, there are Trump trials. Two have gone already. Both were civil trials and Trump lost both, resoundingly. He was fined $90 million in damages for a sexual assault. And he was fined $450 million for business fraud.
The trial that starts this week is the first of his criminal trials. He’ll lose that too, also resoundingly. There is no doubt that he did what he’s charged with. But it’s not only the losing that matters. It’s also the process of the trial itself that’s as rich as roast pork, that’s as warming as a hearth.
Trump didn’t have to attend his civil trials. He could pretend they weren’t happening. Or he could swan in and out, fulminating to reporters at the door, telling his lies. But for his criminal trials he’s obliged to attend. He has no choice other than to sit and hear the truth being told about him. He will be forced to hear facts that he will be unable to refute. If he tries to shout them down, he will be silenced. If he tries to leave, he will be restrained. And he will find that intolerable.
Everything about Trump is fake, from his hair to his marriage to his claim that he won an election he lost. His life is a blitz of falsehoods, told to boost his ego. That’s all there is to Trump, lies and ego, and he knows his lies are lies. But he still needs them to be told and told again.
In court they’ll be stripped away. He’ll be exposed for what he is. And though he’ll be free to testify, he won’t, because he’d have to lie. There are consequences for lying to a court.
This exposure to the truth, this humiliation, is Trump’s nightmare. He knows it is coming and he’s terrified. There will be no limit to his anger and his desperation. And it is what he deserves and what the rest of us need, which is a sense that the world is turning the right way up.
Roast meat, log fires, Trump trials. It’ll be a fine winter.