In the 1998 movie, The Truman Show, Jim Carrey played the main character, Truman Burbank, where he is the unknowing dupe in a sci-fi sitcom that takes place in the fictional idyllic community of Seahaven, Florida. Everything is copesetic until Truman takes his sailboat to the edge of the set only to bump into the sky and tear it open and he discovers a genuine theater. The real world of 1998. Later, when Truman realizes that everyone else is part of the long-running show and walks out of the studio and into the real world, the live audience, the other actors, including his wife, cheer his escape. The other side of the set in a Truman Show 2020 would be quite different in ways I have bludgeoned you to death countless times in previous posts.
The Truman Show was a nostalgic experience for me because I could, I can, relate to Seahaven. Seahaven could be anywhere in this country. I spent some of my formative years in a small farm town in NW Ohio in the late 40s. I led a traditional Midwest WASP kid’s life with a physician father, stay-at-home mom, 3 younger sisters, an orchard next door, a collie, a cat and a Lionel train rolling around the tree every Christmas but no BB gun (father figured I’d put my eye out). Had it not been for the fact that I contracted rheumatic fever at 6 and was in bed for two years trying to stay alive and be tutored at the same time, it would have been a fantastic childhood and it still was.
It was often on an Elm Street or Elm Street wannabes in a small rural Midwest town in the first half of the century, that nostalgia got its roots in literature, cinema, poetry, theater, etc. at least for baby-boomers. In the late 40s and 50s, hundreds of Elm streets thrived all over the U.S. with endless sentimental examles in literature such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith (1943), Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play, Our Town, about Grover’s Corner, or my favorite, William Saroyan’s, The Human Comedy (1943), a novel set in the Armenian town of Ithaca in Southern California. We can’t forget It’s a Wonderful Life, classic movie produced in 1946 based on the novelette, The Greatest Gift (1943) by Philip Van Doren Stern. That literature, for the most part, was optimistic and idyllic from that period, symbolizing an America that was ending and not coming back. It was a transition between the Depression and a world-changing war vs. a revitalized, post-war America.
In 1984, Elm Street got a serious make-over when Wes Craven discovered that it still had sex appeal and Freddy Krueger joined the neighborhood and became a household name. The Nightmare on Elm Street left skid marks in the shorts of those of us who were afraid of the dark (and I refused to see it!). Mary Poppins had retired from dropping down chimneys and GIs weren’t coming home to ticker-tape parades, hugs, turkey and good old Uncle Josh. GI Joe was an ass-kicker with a big ass gun and a big ass thingy for Barbie. We were more than ready to let Freddy into our now, on the cusp of becoming a strongly techno-aociety.
Nightmares were great in literature and on the screen, but only if they remained there. The process of desensitization to violence had begun probably with the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War but it was the first time we baby-boomers saw the unfiltered results of raw violence on the TV and in body bags.
Now, leap ahead another 30 years to the 2010s and Freddy, officially offed in 1991, had spawned many spectacularly horrifying and sanguine spin-offs since the original, now featuring slashers, chainsawyers, human vampires, dinosaurs, wood chippers, puppets, dolls, fishermen, doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, accountants, ants, spiders, sharks and badger bad-asses. I believe every taxonomic group of animals and even a few plants (Little Shop of Horrors) has been represented. I was so ignorant of that genre that I thought Freddy and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre dude were one and the same. I think my daughters corrected me on that one, even though they claimed they never saw any of them, which was probably true since they were cowards like their old man. The body-chipping scene in Fargo had me leery of pencil sharpeners for weeks. Combine all that with a media that went into convulsions and got fired if they didn’t get their daily story of bridge abutment beheadings and dumpster babies. The upshot was, as Steve Martin said about John Candy in my favorite comedy, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, “I can take anything because I’ve been with Del Griffith.”
In 2016, a reincarnated Freddy Krueger went to Washington in the form of Donald Trump. What had been only horrifying, sometimes so absurd as to be laughable nightmares for those of us who had over-dosed from watching too many rerurns od The Apprentice, stepped off our pillows and into our lives in the shape of a real living and breathing orange monster. Mr. Trump was really in the White House and not as a waiter but as the POTUS. Since then, roughly half of us have been in therapy trying to get our lives back in order while the other half reveled in the ecstacy of having one of their own on center stage. Their man had actually risen much higher than the highest level of incompetence a person of his background, political experience, and moral fiber could achieve and then some. During Mr. Trump’s reign of chaos, this country has been in a state of daily disbelief, shock and near-panic. What hath God wrought? None of us had ever experienced anything like the kind of instability we are experiencing now.
We’ve had four years of neglecting or simply brush-fire fighting the humongous issues of the day. Much of it was there all along and finally bubbled to the surface. Covid-19 probably was looking for an opening to explode into stressed environments. Also, we can’t ignore the daily, if not hourly challenges that a derailed president provides. This neglect simultaneously exacerbates the negative impact of the others previously mentioned.
“Heeeerrrreeee’s Johnny” has become one of the most famous lines in cinema, delivered by Jack Nicholson in the Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic based on Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. Nicholson was parodying Ed McMahon’s introduction every night of the great comedian, Johnny Carson. In the movie, the deranged husband, Jack Torrance, terrorizes his family and surprises them in hiding with his trademark ghoulish grin, “Here’s Johnny” greeting. and an axe. This is exactly how Trump has affected many of us.
Trump completely took us off-guard. I don’t think it was because we were being complacent, but I also don’t think most of us realized how fractured our country had become and how deep those fractures ran. The signs were there, given the power of the gun and how white supremacist brand racists, sexist, misogynist and predatory we really were. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Politicians had ceased to be politicians years ago and morally and duty were no longer on their radar screen. The conservative party had an unofficial pact with their followers; I’ll feed you and you feed me. In biology, we call this a mutualistic relationship.
It is now November 2020, and we are in the midst of an anticipated but dreaded election, however exciting—a duel between Trump and Biden. It looks like it could be a fight to the death, but eventually truth will find its way to the surface and when it does, if it has been suppressed for only four years as opposed to eight and Biden is elected, the ugliness will likely recede over time to be only a bad nightmare. If Trump is reelected, this once great nation will have succumbed to its dark side and could easily reach a point of no return, and fairly quickly, too.
We desperately need stable leadership more than at any other time in our history and it will need to be bipartisan leadership largely because of four years of total neglect of immediate challenges of both climate change and a raging, deadly pandemic. During Trump’s term, irreversible ground has been lost in both arenas, which translates as increased human and biological mortality of both habitats and species, as well as private and public property.
Consequently, the triumvirate of exective, legislative and judicial branches needs to decide to grow up and quit playing “Scratch My Back” with the president and address the real world. This would be the world that Truman saw when he rammed the set limits with his boat, but two decades later. If that were to happen, we might be able to get our country back. That also means the obvious needs to happen: cooperation and compromise, exactly how our Founding Fathers envisioned things would work when they crafted the Constitution. And Trump’s fictional concept of MAGA could actually become reality down the road. I’m not sure what Trump’s historic yardstick for MAGA has been, but it really doesn’t matter, we have no where to go but up.
Joe Biden can’t do it alone and if the Republican controlled Senate decides to take their marbles and go home (again!), the ghost of Donald Trump will continue to terrorize the halls of Washington, occasionally tossing treats to Mitch and Lindsey and their Rat Pack of cowards and darkness and depression will remain.
