Years ago while on a business trip to Europe, I visited Versailles, the storied palace monument to French King Louis XIV. It is magnificent, filled with excess of a former age, over the top but un-tacky.
Approaching from the front, the huge building looms in front of one , drawing the eye upward to embellished cornices and countless windows, designed to impress foreign ambassadors and courtiers. It did.
Shortly after, returning to the U.S., I toured our American White House during a previous Democratic presidency (not Obama’s). We live in a democracy. George Washington’s presidential residence – which he approved but never lived in – was a wake-up call. Federal elegance and simplicity reigned. Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s portrait, wearing a yellow dress imagined by the artist, was given special honor, along with the “dish room” displaying former presidents’ banqueting china.
This was decoration and restraint typical of chief executive families conscious that they were temporary occupants and would be gone within a few years.
I located Ronald Reagan’s portrait literally “below stairs,” near an elevator rising to service areas of the house, well off regular visitors’ routes. I’m sure it’s somewhere else now, not far from the open hallway featuring incumbent CE Trump’s wall-mounted running commentary on his predecessors which reads like a series of schoolboys’ trash notes.
This is the arrogancy and self-glorification of Versailles, reduced to tawdry hysteria, rewriting history with the wishful yearning of an impaired and character-damaged old man.
John Adams, second President of the U.S., wrote a prayer for the White House that only good and righteous people would ever live there……over 250 years, his prayer was partially, periodically, fulfilled. Then the long, disjointed decade of Trumpism began, causing ordinary people in our own and other nations to question security, privacy and peace formerly taken for granted since WWII but now in flux.
“These people have done a lot of damage” says one …..they forgot they were public servants; they thought they OWNED the country!” So commented - not a liberal US Democratic voter nor a disillusioned Republican farmer, but: A small shopkeeper in Venezuela, living within a banana republic society which seems to creep north along with Maduro’s capture.
A brotherhood of strongmen will always, eventually, breach decent social and political bounds, as did Maduro and his henchmen in Venezuela; as have Donald Trump and his slavering, sycophantic operatives here.
To say this is an era of global change is an understatement - the French are openly glad Maduro is locked up, out of power. The German government cautiously waits, as do the UK and several other NATO Prime Ministers. This is not over yet.
Regrettable and predictable is Trump’s continued decline, if for no other reason than that his erratic sleeping and hate-filled internet posting habits would undo even a 40 year old, signalling brain activity in which neuronal wiring passed a sell-by date.
Father Time comes round for us all. HOW, and with what dignity or lack thereof, we wind down our universe’s personal clock times, becomes a record of who we are, how we are remembered by history, and, to believers like myself, where we are going.
Trump, ever-wilder in his overreach of action and speech, is a frightened man; more fearful are his decreasing huddle of Congressional supporters, realizing the jig is up. Let us be cautious – a terrified man, or animal, can be dangerous as well as deranged.
If he remains unimpeached for his full term, who knows what chaotic harm he will unleash on a world order radically altered into Big Gun politics of uber-wealth and power lust. Trump or his cohorts routinely place investment bets upon his decisions in advance, in the manner of pre-French revolutionary aristocrats.
We do not need another revolution in the U.S., but a wake-up call among too-passive voters and MAGA enthusiasts who mistook shouting and chimeric promises for reality; we live in the result of this irresponsibility and naivete. Screaming noise is not integrity, but meant to obscure truth. Time to own this, move on electorally and reconstruct the rubble of what America’s founders intended.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
