"Don't 'Tapp' Me Bro." Or, "T.R.U.M.P."

Overcomber Don's misspelling is what I might in my elevated patrician way call "Jacksonian." This is not because Jackson's spelling was famously bad –– although it was –– see Allen Walker Read's excellent "Could Andrew Jackson Spell?" in American Speech 38 (1963) – but because in the era of Jackson the common man (that log cabin hard cider crass asshole) was for the first time celebrated in popular literature, often in the guise of the misspelling, vulgar hick.

Hosts of hack writers in the 1830s would write newspaper squibs about rural protagonists, country confidence men or village psychotics selling tin and paper wares, going to the  city or the centre of government to bring their style of "savvy" to elite politicians. It might be Albany, it might be Washington. The joke remained the same, rus in urbe.

He might not be from the country exactly, but he pretends like he's friends to the rural dwellers in Kaintuck and Mizzuruh, and Trump being a vulgar interloper (nearly wrote intercomber) from Queens or was it the Bronx was always shut out of the aristocracy of Old New York.

Oh boo hoo.

Trump's allegations of Obama trying to "tapp" his phones at Trump Tower was in this Jack Downing, Sut Lovingood, Birdofredum Sawin vein. White trash attacking men of colour out of contumely. Maybe you've read Matthew Whittier's "Ethan Spike" pro–abolitionism letters out of Portland Maine?  Probably you haven't. Or Lowell's Biglow Papers. Probably not as I said.

Trump's peculiar spelling –– his interesting grammar. His routine manner of lying. His back-country scrabbling around. His fucked up way of thinking and acting and doing!

O for a Lowell today.

O for an Artemus Ward!

Sometimes I wonder what Pound would have made of Trump. He used to have a weak spot for demagogues as we know.

New "phunny phellow" name for the Pres: "Donald Tapp".

"Tapp – tapp – tapping on Tosspot's wig."

"Tapper Don." Instead of "Trapper John" from out of M.A.S.H.

"B.J. Honeycutt."
"B.J. Wiretapp" from S.M.U.S.H.
"Blow Job Wire Tapp, Agent of H.Y.D.R.A."
"Doctor Mindcomber, Agent of COBRA."

Write in today and say which you think is the best new name for our glorious 45th illustrious President. 

"Dump Truck / Chinatown."

Today I had a lot of work and then we watched Chinatown in the evening and then we watched the DVD extra, and so we didn't give much thought to Don the Overcomber for a change. Not much. I'd flip to CNN to see what Don Lemon was saying. Big story seemed to be about Trump sitting in a truck.

Trump truck.
Trumk.
Dump Truck.
Dumb Fucking Dump Trump.

THAT DUMBFUCK DUMP TRUMP SITTING IN A TRUCK on the White House lawn pretending he was driving a "big rig". This seemed to have been a PR coup. "He's a big kid he's great with folks," they were cooing –– even Don Lemon's face folded in irresistibly at the big galoot.

Only I had my wits about me enough to think, "He has literally the blood of millions on his misshapen hands." So I was wantonly misusing the word "literally" –– so what. This is an age of lies.

(At this moment the ghost of my sensei appears before me to deliver that classic filmic good advice: "When you use your enemy's inferior strategies you become no better than your enemy.")

At the end of Chinatown, when Jake's assistant (the one who isn't Crispin Glover's father)  famously says, "It's Chinatown," Jack Nicholson's PTSD expression and the leering of John Huston's abusive father character, who swaggers and shit-grins through all his sins and triumphs and prevails, I laughed and said "It's the absolute triumph of evil!"

That familiar cocktail of municipal incompetence  and petty corruption (here the LAPD and the DWP) and cynicism. Trump had just said to a Time magazine reporter, "I'm President and you're not." The finale of Chinatown was so redolent of our lives all of our lives since November and more especially since January. Any time you see patent hand-wringing malcontents on TV you are now reminded of the Oval Office crowd. I nodded my head at Jack Nicholson's catatonic face. "That's how I felt after the election."

* * * * * * * * * *

Incidentally, I cannot imagine for the life of me Overcomber Don using the words "somewhat vindicated". I think this is a distillation of what he probably actually said. What he probably said. "I won. I'm President. You're not. You're fired."

"Where's Charlie?"

It's hard to write funny, usable satire about Overcomber Don some days.  I'm not like the radio personalities on NPR who chuckle vacantly over the week in Washington even at the rosy-fingered dawn of Armageddon. And if I can't find spiffing fun in the day's events I'm of no use to anybody because my gnashing of teeth and venting of spleen morning til night is not worth the hearing. I say it freely. Protect us from the grinding of tongues.

Sorry Wash –– not much to say today but I promised I would check in daily.

This has been one of those days when "our side," patently the side of decency righteousness Christhood and truth, seems to be losing. Like Norman Mailer said to Dick Cavett on his eponymous show, "I believe that God and the Devil are in combat and regrettably the side of the good is losing. Now I really must leave you and the studio audience at home." He quite remarkably got up off the couch and left the talkshow set.

Norman he wasn't a great writer but he was great to have around for a while as a public intellectual. I wouldn't go so far as to say, "Oh for a Norman Mailer today," but it beats George Sanders talking to Seth Myers who is standing in for Charlie Rose.

Where is Charlie, incidentally.
Wasn't he supposed to return in March?

"They Call Him Big Jim."

I didn't understand why Don Lemon called FBI Director James Comey "Big Jim" until yesterday, when TV showed footage of him sauntering into the hearing, verily towering above all the other participants like they were Japanese people scrabbling about on the Tokyo subway. The man is six foot eight. It was a stalwart performance Big Jim gave, fending off the seething little southern Republicans who wanted to berate him with bulging eyes and tense jaws (who the fump is "Trey Gowdy" after all?), and I almost forgive him for handing the election to Trump in the first place.

My only other comment on Big Jim Comey is this. It's:

Has anybody noted (the obvious size difference notwithstanding) the Director's slight resemblance to Dr. Daniel Kane, noted expert on the Lower East Side poetry scene?

Squint and it's there.
Don't and it isn't.

Other matters. Last night Trump was busy entertaining the Iraqi prime minister, enjoying towering over him. He maybe imagined that he was six foot eight. He maybe imagined that he was Big Jim. Do you remember around the time of the inauguration, he "joked" with obvious chagrin to Comey, "You're more famous than me now Jim!"

Many a thing said in jest, Combover Don!

(I Googled "Trump how tall," and found that he is six foot two. Invokana and Melanoma are both five foot eleven apparently. I could not with comfort enjoy towering over them, pretending I was Big Jim Comey. I would have to pretend instead that I was Dr. Daniel Kane.)

("Donald Kane.")

Then I googled "Iraqi prime minister how tall" and it must be the essence of optimism, of faith in technology to hope that such a factoid has been recorded on the world wide web. His height must remain a mystery to everybody but his wife and his Savile Row tailor.

While I was watching that fifth-tier news story about Trump and the Iraqi prime minister I noticed Trump's hair again. Well how can you not notice it. It is an insult to the American flag. I said to wife, "It isn't even there. It's the exact same colour as his bald pate. It's a mirage –– a castle in Spain –– a phantasy –– a parody –– an aporia –– an absence in the body politic –– sprayed on –– a non–thing –– a lie –– a turn–off –– a discarded weave under the BQE –– a not–in–itself not–of–itself –– unglaublich." It is, as I have said earlier, without countenancing the obvious pun, a trompe l'oeil. You could get a migraine trying to make sense of it. It is a migraine.

He is in actuality a baldheaded man but through the permanent enslavement of numerous otherworldly wizards he maintains this illusion –– the weird echo –– of some hair there. The shadow of a hint of his former head of hair,  a few chicken scratches on an essentially bald head –– a sketch –– notes towards a hairstyle. A few lines drawn on sideways by a madman with a ruler. His hair is like Charlie Brown's,  –– crossed with Hitler's:

 

M.K. Price tried to comment on this site on this subject, as our tonsorial correspondent in England. He was frustrated by the apparatus so forwarded me his remarks via email. I quite cavalierly presume that he still considers his comments apt for public consumption, and they follow:

23 years ago a barber told me that the hair on top of my head was not what he called "real hair". The thick blonde horse shoe above my ears and around the back, that was "real hair", but the dry, sun bleached, thinning thatch atop was not real, and never could be, however much I cultivated it. Soon after I chopped it off and the Unreal Hair never grew back.

Donald Trump has used his money and sheer brass balls to maintain his Unreal Hair for 70 years; he represents the absolute best possible outcome for those in Unreal Hair Denial and he still looks terrible. No man can defeat Unreal Hair.

Pricey, this wasn't the Fat Barber in Canterbury, was it? He used to harangue me for the fineness of my hair. Like the stagecoach robber Black Bart, the "PO–8" who used to leave doggerel verse at his crime scenes, and who cursed the "fine haired sons of bitches" who trod on his "corns."

I'd visit the barber's with naive dreams of a certain haircut, even a photograph pathetically gripped in my hand, and I would leave with a mohawk because he had butchered me so badly, whittled me down to a nub. I spent most of the 1993–4 season with a mohawk, my default look. In that long season, almost daily, that Mercury Rev line would come into my head on waking: "Waiting for your hair to grow." *

SO much for Donald Tripp–– that gorilla with mist on his head!

_________________________________________________

* Note for Pedants: The album version of "Boys Peel Out" (on the excellent Boces) has the line "Waitin' for the phone to blink... prayin' for your hair to grow..." However, the EP Bronx Cheer has a version called "Suzanne Peels Out" where they do indeed say "Waiting for your hair to grow."

"Dog and Beth on the Campaign Trail."

On the campaign trail I saw an ugly thing. An awful crushing of hope, all too symbolically resonant of this recent election over all. Like "Big Jim" Comey I see fit to sit on these things for months and months, deliberating uselessly until it is totally redundant to remark upon it.

Then I remark upon it.

Last summer Dog and Beth Chapman were going out for a meal at famous Craig's in this town. The paparazzi –– incredibly –– followed them as they went in to that restaurant, asking them who they were voting for. You could have predicted the answer, or so you would think.

Dog looked even more exhausted than ever, he was even redder in the face than before, so red he was purple, but he planted himself squarely on the spot in front of the cameras, perhaps guilelessly grateful and proud that TMZ was asking his political opinion. He waved away his nervous PA, who kept trying to delicately drag him off camera like a recalcitrant nonegenarian. He stood firm like Gary Cooper and held out his arms palms downward and half-squatted in place, his preferred posture to make a public statement. Now he gently repeated with obvious good will and earnestness some words of wisdom he "onct hyeard Dolly Parton say," which were:  Never influence your public on who to vote for because you will always disappoint somebody.

Nice sentiment.   (You might well wonder, "Who the fuck takes political advice from Dog the Bounty Hunter?" But then you might also ask, "Who the fuck seeks political advice from that oold fart off Duck Dynasty," whereupon you'd find yourself also answering, "Oh yes, Steve Bannon and behind him all the assembled Red States, infinite their sagacity!")

In a show of supreme naivety Dog said, "But hain't this been a great race, hey boy? Whoo! It's been the very best my bruh! America can still have a great election!" Like it had been the Bicentennial. He then raised his thumbs up and grinned, showing off the new dentures of which he is justly proud, even if they make him look strange and eerie and off-kilter and gone badly wrong in all his earthly works.

Dog might have been the first and only person to on record opine thuswise about the recent election "cycle". CNN is not calling his agent asking if he will sit on a panel across from David Brooks, Katty Kay or that especially attractive blonde. Duane has not been asked to "sit in for" Charlie Rose.

The uncynical moment, these few seconds without bile, this delicate and noble show of political magnanimity and bipartisanship by Dog, seemed to hang in the space/time continuum like a silver crystal raindrop for half a minute. For that trice, that mite of time, the world seemed youthful again. Then Big Beth Chapman came clomping back along the boardwalk to take Dog by the ear and holler hectoringly at the cameras, "Don't be a chump, vote for Trump!"

You could imagine "Dogger" stuttering, in his most henpecked way, "But dear I just told them what Dolly Parton said about––" and her cuffing his bald spot and booting him into the restaurant by the worn seat of his pants.

I do believe and recollect that was the last time I saw Duane Champman alive.

"How to Describe Trump's Hair."

"Mister Don Trump"

Trump's hair.

Like a bread roll constructed from mist.

Like a plainly bald man walked into an off-colour cobweb and this was what stuck to his cranium,

Like a crash helmet crafted from the finest filigree gossamer.

Trump's hair the ghost of real hair.

What hand were equal to draw it –– what poet can write of it?

Not me apparently.

"Trump A First."

                                   

 

Trump's Presidency.  In the lead-up to the election I had a joke I never made, which was, "Whoever wins this will be a historic first. If Hillary wins, we will have our first female President. If Trump wins, we will have our first orang-outang President."

I withheld this zinger from society, not out of consideration for Trump, but out of consideration for orang-outans, which I like those great apes a lot. Indeed it is bad libel on those good old men of the woods. I could have said, "Trump the first baboon," but even though I like baboons less than orang-outans, and the coloration of baboons is less apt than that of orang-outans besides, I still didn't want to say that about baboons. They get a bad rap already and some of them are nice.

Eventually, months later, when Trump had won the Election and we were into his farcical reign, I thought of a version of the joke that was acceptable to me. "If Trump wins, we have our first mentally ill President."

Then I thought, "Nixon."
In the voice of Seinfeld saying Newman.

"He is our first autistic President."

My final version: "When Trump won, it was a victory for orange people. He is our first orange President."

_______________________________________________________

Historical / literary precedent note:

Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novel Melincourt (1817) imagines an orang-outang being elected to the British Parliament. The joke was resumed by John Wagner and/or Allan Grant in 2000AD when they had an orang-outan named "Dave" elected the Mayor of Mega City One.

N.B. Dave was a good mayor. He was assassinated.