When I was in high school,
we had a ceremony in the football stadium one spring to elect the Prom Queen
and her court. The nominees had to walk out to the center of the football field to
receive the acclamation of the crowd. One of the girls nominated (by some
jokester) was the ugliest girl in the senior class—in the entire school, for
that matter.
As the poor girl—I’ll call
her Jane—trudged out onto the field, she was bowed down by the gales of
sardonic laughter. When she was elected, by the volume of cheers, as Senior
Attendant to the Queen, she began to weep.
It was funny, in a
perverse sort of way—for ten seconds or so. Then we realized what we’d done.
Nobody in our school knew
Jane very well, or at all. She was silent and withdrawn—not like those homely
girls who made up for their looks with "personality." Her predominant—her only--facial
expressions were a scowl and a glare, which she returned to anyone whose eyes
even innocently or inadvertently fell on her. I’d never heard her utter a word.
Jane, as it turned out, gamely showed up on Prom Night, and went through with the whole grim charade, with a scowl and a glare. Jane was Jane—an ugly duckling to the end.
There was an end, at least. Jane was royalty for a night, and then we
were done with her.
Donald J. Trump is the
Ugly Prom Queen from Hell.
Trump’s candidacy for
President was a grotesque novelty, and his election the upshot of an obscene
joke, one that was carried on to excruciating lengths. After Trump was swept
into office by our collective bad taste, we held our breaths until Inauguration
Day, hoping that our man would become more “Presidential” in the interim.
It was an untenable hope,
and we knew it. We all knew what we were getting, to a point, with Trump: an
ego-driven, ignorant, incurious, humorless, preening peacock--in short, a
narcissistic slob. Then we watched and recoiled in horror as, over the next few
months, the true extent of the man’s moral bankruptcy was revealed.
As well as being a liar of
monumental proportions, Trump is a hollow braggart and a poltroon. He dreams up
baseless accusations and leaves it for others to sort them out. He takes credit
for what others have accomplished, but shirks responsibility for his failures; if
he even acknowledges them as failures, he makes sure there’s always a fall guy
around. Without ever having read a book, he fancies himself the smartest person
in any room. Being suspicious of “the arts,” he’d like to abolish them.
Sometimes when I think
about Trump I think of Jane (who also had orange hair and complexion, by the
way). What would it be like to live for years with someone who was ugly inside
and out? (Which is not to deny the possibility that Jane might have led a perfectly
lovely inner life.)
I guess I’ll have to wait
and find out.
